Category: making movies

Is This Really A Print Of Derek Jarman’s Blue?

a vertical strip of 35 millimeter film stock is entirely blue, with two white waveforms of an optical audio track running in black down the left side. sprocket holes punctuate either side of the film strip. this is apparently a piece of a print of derek jarman's monochrome blue film, Blue, made in 1993, as he was losing his sight as a side effect of aids and related medications.

Is this really a 35mm print of Derek Jarman’s Blue, no frames or nothin’?

Thanks to art historian A.V. Marraccini, I saw this Doc Films at the University of Chicago using this image to promote a screening of Blue this week.

2013 was my last exercise to understand how Jarman made Blue blue. Early live performances used a filmed loop of an Yves Klein painting. That was replaced by a blue gel. Rowland Wymer’s 2006 book said the blue was “electronically produced,” which, if the image above is to be accepted, means it was not filmed in camera, but on the film stock itself.

Perhaps it is far past time to make some actual inquiries instead of just poking around in books.

[a little later update: In 2014, Mason Yeaver-Lap wrote about Blue, “a film without film,” and how the Walker Art Center exhibited it on a loop in a gallery. Though the museum has a 35mm print, for conservation reasons, they went with, “a flickering projector (aided by a piece of kit called T’he Flicker-O-Meter,’ whose manual can be found in the Walker archives) [which] would beam through a projection window coated with a blue gel. This filmless projector would thus throw a perfectly IKB shade, accompanied by a CD dub of the soundtrack. Again, Blue was a film without film.”

FWIW, this blog post will be the second mention on the internet of the “Flicker-O-Meter. We’re gonna need to see that manual.

This really is my Saturday night. DVDBeaver has technical information on the various DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Blue, and the greatest set of screencaps the medium has ever produced.]

Previously, very related: International Jarman Blue

OG Nam June Paik’s Fin de Siecle II

1989 ap photo of artist nam june paik standing in front of his sculpture fin de siecle ii at the whitney museum. it is a wall of over 300 television sets in various sizes and grid configurations showing seven different channels of programming, but the caption only says its david bowie. popped up on ebay, then disappeared oh well

I cannot believe I missed this 1989 publicity photo on ebay of Nam June Paik posing in front of the original installation of Fin de Siecle II.

Paik created it for a show at the Whitney, “Image World: Art and Media Culture.” According to the caption, “The art is made up of more than 300 television sets and controlled by a digital computer. The sculpture features music and synchronized images of rock star David Bowie.”

Which, well, yes, and,

What an amazingly clipped description.

The Whitney acquired it in 1993, but never showed it. When they decided to show it again in 2019, it turned out nearly a third of the hardware was inoperable and unusable. [The keyframe on the conservation video below shows the original configuration.]

It’s now listed as having “207 video monitors in scaffolding and seven video channels.” Also mentioned are the other video sources, including Rebecca Allen’s Kraftwerk animations; video by Paik’s assistant Paul Perrin accompanied by Philip Glass; Merce Cunningham; Joseph Beuys; and Gera. Most are Paik-related or Paik-adjacent, which makes the whole work feel, along with everything else, a little like a self-portrait.

Happy Kara Walker Video 10th Anniversary

In November 2014 Kara Walker opened a show at Sikkema Jenkins titled Afterword, that included works related to Walker’s summer masterpiece, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, the giant African sugar sphinx installed in the disused sugar factory on the Brooklyn waterfront.

In addition to watercolor studies and renderings of A Subtlety, Walker also showed An Audience, a 27-minute video of audience reactions to the sculpture. It was recorded by six cameras during the crowded final hours of the last hot, July day of the installation.

This show came to mind because the rich colors of Walker’s 2014 watercolors felt connected to the even more baroque colors of the watercolors in Walker’s current exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, whose abbreviated title is The High and Soft Laughter…

And I had never realized that any of An Audience was visible online.

OG Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea

still from Steve McQueen, Exodus, 1992-97, 1:05 super-8 loop, transferred to digital, ed. 4+1AP, image via Marian Goodman Gallery c.2011, on view through Summer 2025 at Dia Chelsea

As I’ve said here before, Exodus, a one-minute loop of Super 8 film that follows a pair of Black men through a crowded London street in 1992, is one of my favorite Steve McQueen works ever. And now everyone can see how it holds up, because it’s on view at Dia in Chelsea for a year.

While trying to find images of McQueen’s new photos, also on view, I came across old photos of his I’d forgotten. At Marian Goodman in November 2001, McQueen showed a video of himself, partly visible, sitting on a hotel bed, bathed in the light of a French TV news report of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Titled Illuminer, it was one of the first works by a contemporary artist to contend with the world taking shape after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Steve McQueen, More, 2001, c-print, each 33 1/4 x 50 in., ed 1/4+1AP, sold in 2021 at Phillips

But in that show was also a pair of large photographs that looked like the Milky Way but were actually of asphalt and steam. That kind of instant zoom in and out of perspective, or perception, makes sense in that show. Anyway, turns out the ed. 1 of those photos were sold in 2021 at Phillips. Can you even get 50-inch C-prints made anymore?

Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea, 20 Sept 2024-Summer 2025 [diaart.org via mgg]
Previously, related, from 2011: Exodus, 1997, Steve McQueen

They Have Not Found The Magic Prism

Fig. 2 from Petro Vlahos’ 1964 patent [US3095304A] for making the beam splitting prism used in the sodium vapor process of image compositing

Before there was bluescreen or greenscreen, there was yellowscreen, and it was better.

beam splitter prism graphic, screenshot from Collision Crew

In the 1950s Petro Vlahos created an in-camera, sodium vapor process which filmed actors lit frontally with white light, against a monochrome backdrop, backlit by yellow sodium vapor lamps, using a beam splitting prism that recorded the color image and its monochromatic mask simultaneously on two reels of film. It is basically a dichroic version of Technicolor, invented by Wadsworth E. Pohl, which used prisms to split an image into three color-separated frames.

Continue reading “They Have Not Found The Magic Prism”

Glenn Ligon: Music And The Stenciled Word

Glenn Ligon, A Small Band (Primary Title), 2015, neon, with a text related to Steve Reich’s Come Out, installed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

I thought he might be talking about the new collection of writings and interviews that just dropped, and which I’m about a third of the way through, but no. Glenn Ligon’s conversation with Francesca Gavin on NTS.Live was mostly about music. And it turns out to be an unexpectedly interesting vector for his work.

The three pieces they discuss and play, by Steve Reich, Julius Eastman, and Jason Moran, are all bangers of their kind. No spoilers, but Ligon’s made work related to a Reich text piece [above]; Moran scored a Ligon film, and it turns out Ligon and Eastman will be in a two-person show at 52 Walker in January.

Rough Version w/Glenn Ligon, 27.08.2024 [nts.live]
Buy Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss From Rain; Writings and Interviews [hauserwirth, here’s the book trailer, btw]
Previously, related: NTS is also where Mark Leckey has a monthly show, new episode Sept. 3rd!

Cremaster Custom Commissions

screencap of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2 (1996)

When it came out in 1996, everyone who didn’t get an actual laserdisc edition wanted a bootleg copy of Cremaster 2. I wanted a belt buckle even more.

My queries at Gladstone amounted to nothing except the offer to buy an unrecognizable photo edition. So I plotted how to get a bootleg buckle made.

Would Mortenson Silver & Saddles of Santa Fe, who were credited with the extensive silver engraving in the film, make an extra one on the side? I ultimately decided not to ask.

But watching Cremaster 2 again last night—someone has uploaded the entire Cremaster Cycle to the Internet Archive, along with Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018)—I was struck again by the film’s particular beauty. And I wanted a buckle all over again.

“So a cremaster is a muscle?” Prince Harry probably did not say. image: Mortenson’s Silver & Saddles

Maybe it is too far back, but Mortenson’s doesn’t mention Barney or Cremaster props on their custom commissions page. But they do note the custom buckles the CEO of Outback Steakhouse commissioned as gifts for Princes Charles, William and Harry at a charity polo tournament he organized, probably in 2002 or 2003.

Rick Ruled

The streets were scouted. The fashion schools were emptied. The gazar was unfurled. The skaters were evicted. And Rick Owens’ Spring/Summer ’25 men’s collection processed momentously around the courtyard of the 1937 Palais de Tokyo— twice—to a very extended remix of the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th.

In the description on his YouTube channel, Owens cites as inspiration his own youthful flight to Hollywood Boulevard, Jack Smith & Kenneth Anger, and “THE LOST HOLLYWOOD OF PRE-CODE BLACK AND WHITE BIBLICAL EPICS, MIXING ART DECO, LURID SIN AND REDEEMING MORALITY.”

Which sounds and looks like Cecil B. DeMille’s original 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, with better costumes.

screenshot from The Ten Commandments (1923), dir. Cecil B. DeMille, via internet archive

And, ngl, it also sounds and looks a lot like Intolerance (1916), D.W. Griffith’s unwieldy and obsequious sequel to his breakout klanfic hit, The Birth of A Nation (1915), with much better costumes.

screenshot of Intolerance (1916), dir. D.W. Griffith, showing the lost Babylonian set [which has been recreated in tiny part as a mall at Hollywood & Highland], via youtube

The creation of Griffith’s spectacle, from the cast of thousands to the mammoth set built on Hollywood & Sunset, was a centerpiece of Anger’s book, Hollywood Babylon.

“EXPRESSING OUR INDIVIDUALITY IS GREAT BUT SOMETIMES EXPRESSING OUR UNITY AND RELIANCE ON EACH OTHER IS A GOOD THING TO REMEMBER TOO… ESPECIALLY IN THE FACE OF THE PEAK INTOLERANCE WE ARE EXPERIENCING IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW…” also wrote Owens.

I am not really sure how the master’s spectacularly propagandistic tools are going to dismantle his ideological house. But maybe it’s the show’s second lap, where each model walks again solo. I do want one of those jackets, though.

Be Kind, Rewind: Mark Leckey Throwback Fiorucci VHS Edition

The image for the edition being a screenshot-timestamped.png makes it feel like we’re right there in the studio, dubbing via gladstonegallery

This is the 25th anniversary of Mark Leckey’s epic video work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), and to celebrate, he released a throwback “final version” as a VHS edition of 100. I am always too slow to get his limited edition album drops, and I figured I’d already missed this, too. But I just saw an edition in the White Columns Benefit Auction, and I wondered…

Sure enough, Gladstone still has some, and practically at 1999 prices. Now I just have to pull a VCR out of storage, and figure out how to connect it to my digital TV, to relive the hollowed out cultural promise of that haunted ghost-space.

[Until then, though, I’ll just keep watching it on Ubu.]

Buy Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore: Ghosted on VHS, 25 Years Later, 2024 [gladstonegallery]

Specific Funerary Objects

If I had a nickel for every artist documentary made from well within the circle of subjectivity that caught me off guard with the nuances of the artist’s funerary arrangements, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s wild that it’s happened twice.

In 2007 Rainer Judd and Karen Bernstein co-directed Marfa Voices, a documentary about Donald Judd’s life and work in west Texas that emerged from the Judd Foundation’s Oral History Project. Among those who shared their stories were friends and colleagues who attended Judd’s funeral up Pinto Canyon in 1994, including the bagpiper, Joe Brady, Jr.

It probably could go without saying that Judd was buried in the most pristine of pine boxes, but it is remarkable to actually see it nonetheless.

On Making A Galliano Documentary

Josh Slater-Williams has an interview for Mubi with a very thoughtful Kevin Macdonald about the implications of making High & Low — John Galliano, a documentary that about the designer’s career, his conviction for his vile anti-semitic outburst in Paris, and his not-uncontroversial return to fashion afterward.

Coming from outside of the fashion industry and its norms is probably Macdonald’s greatest superpower here; he’s able to recognize the self-delusions that haunt the field and its most intense and talented figures, and to put them on view. What I didn’t expect was to hear how Galliano handled his own role in a situation where he ceded all editorial and creative control:

He wanted to achieve various conscious things, but I think also this is part of his therapy, I suppose. It’s part of his trying to figure things out for himself. That was really apparent to me when I went to the Margiela show that we filmed, that begins and ends the film. I realized as we were watching it: my God, this show is about having a documentary made about your life. It’s about his life filtered through film, because he made a fashion show that is a film at the same time.

A Psychological Detective Story: Kevin Macdonald on “High & Low – John Galliano” [mubi]
Previously, related: Margiela Artisanal Cardboard, Rover, Bunny, Beanie

“How To Make Films The Ken Loach Way”

I don’t think Matt Zoller Seitz even knows how to do a bad interview, but his discussion with Ken Loach on the occasion of the release of The Old Oak, which Loach, 87, has decided will be his last film, is really excellent. Part of that is their discussion of the experience of filmmaking, Loach’s process, and style, something the famously naturalistic, un-stylish [sic] filmmaker apparently never gets to talk about:

If you were to distill “How to make films the Ken Loach way,” what would be the most important rules?
Camera at eye level. Natural light. Lens like a human eye. No great wide-angle lens and no extreme telephoto effects. Don’t intervene in an actor’s space, you know? Respect their space. Within those parameters, light is critical because it can tell viewers whether you’re gonna treat somebody like a suspect in a hostile interview or whether you’re gonna engage with someone sympathetically. I’ve learned a lot just looking at old paintings. First thing when you look for a location is “Where’s the light?” It isn’t about the place. If the light doesn’t work, we needn’t see any more of the scene. It’s not only useful for lighting performers, it’s just immensely beautiful for shots. And then you consider the balance of people in the frame, the balance of architecture, the rhythm of cutting. Bad cutting can destroy a sense of reality.

What is bad cutting?

I wish him a long and healthy life, but can we get more interviews on process with him quick, please?

Ken Loach on his last film, ‘The Old Oak,’ Power and Hope [vulture]

Jonah Freeman Décor Slip at 56 Henry (Actually 105 Henry)

I am so fascinated and pumped for this show. Jonah Freeman just opened Décor Slip at 56 Henry—actually at their annex across the street, 105 Henry—and it looks incredible. The multi-process abstract paintings and storyboard/timeline images remind me a bit of Jeremy Blake’s last show, in concept, but not at all in the realization. I don’t know what the moving image piece is.

But the colors on the walls behind the works are just perfectly off, a reminder that Freeman has spent years since his last gallery show in NYC producing meticulously realized spatial experiences. There’s a mention of Albers in the show’s announcement, but these feel like the colors of that one Mary Pinchot Meyer painting we have visuals on.

Mary Pinchot Meyer, Half Light, 1964, 60 in. dia. (it’s round, btw, not black in the corners), collection: The Smithsonian American Art Museum

Between this and the Christopher Wool show, the white cube may be ready for a theoretical renovation.

Jonah Freeman’s Décor Slip is at 56 Henry through May 24, 2024 [56henry]

Hirokazu Kore-eda on Working With Ryuichi Sakamoto

At Little White Lies, Lillian Crawford has a Q&A with Hirokazu Kore-eda about working with Ryuichi Sakamoto on what would be the composer’s final film project, Monster [Kaibutsu]. Sakamoto ended up composing a couple of pieces for the soundtrack, and Kore-eda used some existing compositions, which are all so integral to the film, perhaps because he edited to them. The sonic experience of Monster is subtle and compelling, a mix of piano, diagetic musical instruments, and ambient/natural sounds. It really works as part of the whole.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Monster, which is an exquisite, precise, and wrenching film. When early reviews compared its multiple narrative views to Rashomon, I went back to rewatch, and it absolutely is not that.

As Kore-eda explains to Crawford, “One thing that’s consistent throughout this film is how hard it is to understand other people.” And that is in there. But I think Monster lays out the roots of that problem, by showing how trapped everyone is by their own subjective circumstances. Rashomon reveals the contradictions and lies people weave to suit their own selfish interest.

Monster shows how even a slightly different perspective, slightly different timing, can totally change the story. Some people have compared Monster to Kore-eda’s 2018 film, Shoplifters, for its emotional tenor—and overlaps in casting. It has made me think back to After Life (1998), in that both are enacted metaphors of filmmaking. Monster‘s events unfold unchanged each time, except for the position of the camera, or the timing of the cut, which changes the emotional impact and insight.

And the sonic texture of the film ends up being both an anchor and an amplifier as we—and the characters— try to piece things together.

Hirokazu Koreeda: ‘Ryuichi Sakamoto and I were a good match’ [lwlies]

Barbara Visser, Fountain (2023)

Still from Barbara Visser, Alreadymade (2023). © Barbara Visser / Tomtit Film & VPRO.

I haven’t even scrolled down to read the article, but this caption alone is already my favorite thing of the week. I hope Barbara Visser does a documentary on Richard Prince’s Instagram portraits next.

A Dutch Artist is delving into the murky [sic obv] attribution of Duchamp’s Fountain [artnet]