Have You Seen Me? Warhol’s Lost Videos

warhol_inner_outer.jpg
still from Inner and Outer Space, 1965

Fascinating. In 1965, months before pioneering video artist Nam Jun Paik got his hands on his own first video camera, Norelco loaned Andy Warhol its new, $3,950 slant scan video recording system for a month. [1] At the time, Sony, Ampex & others had just released the $1,000 VTR systems. Paik started using the Sony Video Rover Portapak almost as soon as it hit the market. Tape Recording magazine’s [!] interview with Warhol about the video system is included in Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2004 collection of Warhol interviews, I’ll Be Your Mirror.
While he had the camera, Warhol made Inner and Outer Space, an important, multiscreen portrait film of Edie Sedgwick where she sits in front of a video monitor that’s playing back a videotaped portrait of herself.
Here’s Callie Angell of the Warhol Film Project in a 2002 article for Millennium Film Journal:

During the month that Warhol had this video access, he shot approximately 11 half-hour tapes (at least, that’s how many Norelco videotapes have been found in the Warhol Video Collection). One of the interesting things about Outer and Inner Space is that it contains, in effect, the only retrievable footage from these 1965 videotapes. The Norelco system utilized an unusual video format, called “slant scan video,” which differed from the helical scan format [2] developed by Sony and other video companies, and which very quickly became obsolete. There are now no working slant scan tape players anywhere in the world, the other videotapes which Warhol shot in 1965 cannot be played back, and the only accessible footage from these early videos exists in this film, which Warhol, in effect, preserved by reshooting them in 16mm. [emphasis added]

What might be on the other nine Warhol tapes? From clues in the Tape Recording interview, they range from the Mel Gibsonian to the ur-video artistically Naumanian to the classically Warholian:

Warhol:…It’s the machine we’re going to use to do our 31-day movie.
TR: What?
Warhol: It’s the story of Christ.

TR: Have you recorded from a television set with the video recorder?
Warhol: Yes. This is so great. We’ve done it both direct and from the screen. Even the pictures from the screen are terrific. Soemone put his arm in front of the screen to change channels while we were taping and the effect was very dimensional…

TR:…Have you been trying to do things with tape that you can’t do with film?
Warhol: Yes. We like to take advantage of static. We sometimes stop the tape to get a second image coming through. As you turn off the tape it runs for several seconds and you get this static image. It’s weird. So fascinating.

TR: Is it that easy out-of-doors, too?
Warhol: Yes. We took the recorder onto our fire escape to shoot street scenes.
TR: What did you get?
Warhol: People looking at us.

warhol_elvises.jpg
image: via Andy Warhol Supernova, the Walker Center’s 2005 show of 1962-64 paintings

As it’s being restored and re-seen, Andy Warhol’s early films are turning out to be central to his explorations of serial imagery, mechanical reproduction, celebrity, and portraiture, not a diversion from his “real” or “important” painting work. [For more discussion of this, check out Angell’s text for a 2001 exhibit of Inner and Outer Space at ZKM in Germany.]
This is not exactly new news, of course. [As David Hudson said in 2002, “the paintings are everywhere the films are nowhere.”] But I would say it’s also not reflected in the popular, i.e., market view of Warhol, precisely because the film works like Screen Tests can’t be collected and thus don’t command attention-getting auction prices.

holly_solomon_warhol.jpg
image: Holly, 1966 via christies

Imagine the treasure hunt if it were nine 1965 Warhol paintings known to be missing, extant but unseen. When video arcade hardware went obsolete, emulation software emerged to preserve the important part–the gameplay. Maybe some video gearhead or codec master somewhere will undertake the quixotic but art historically important mission of decoding slant-scan videotape and recovering these lost Warhol tapes.
[1] Hmm, another account of the Norelco loan describes the VTR as a prototype. And LabGuy’s timeline of Extinct VTR Formats doesn’t even mention a Norelco product until 1970.
[2] Hmm, according to this UBuffalo history of the videocassette, slant-scan and helical scan are the same thing.

On The Mixed Up Films Of Mr. Andy Warhola

Warhol_Empire.jpg

Wait, the Warhol Museum called the 1-hour excerpt of Empire released on DVD an unauthorized bootleg?
Yes they did, in 2004:

“It’s a bootleg!” says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Which is odd. The Italian company Raro Video has released several Warhol films on DVD over the last couple of years. Andy Warhol: 4 Silent Movies is listed as a 2005 release on Amazon, and there’s a Chelsea Girls DVD, too.
Last year, Raro compiled 11 films and 8 discs into a box set, Andy Warhol Anthology, which–like all the films–is issued in region-free PAL format. There are extensive bilingual notes, interviews, and bonus material accompanying the discs, but there are also odd errors in formatting:
At least two of the silent films, Kiss and Blow Job, are mastered at the wrong speed [25fps instead of 16fps], and the once-randomly silent or audible soundtracks on the split-screen Chelsea Girls are provided in a single, seemingly arbitrary configuration which omits much well-documented dialogue
Despite these apparent errors, Raro insists that its films are authorized versions, not bootlegs, and that the errors were present in the master versions provided by the Warhol Foundation [which is distinct from the Warhol Museum].
A film director, critic, historian, I-don’t-know-what named Mario Zonta is described as both the organizer of the Anthology and a “Member” of the Warhol Foundation. [Zonta, a longtime friend of Warhol entourage members/collaborators Joe Dallesandro and Paul Morrissey, also made a Morrissey documentary in 2002 which is included in Raro’s Dallesandro/Morrissey trilogy.]
According to an extensive discussion on Criterion Forum about public availability of Warhol’s films generally and the legal/definitive status of the Anthology specifically, Raro has long had VHS distribution rights to some Warhol titles and is merely updating the format.
After Warhol gave copies of all his film materials to MoMA in 1984, the Whitney Museum and MoMA have been jointly cataloging, restoring, and re-issuing Warhol films [for institutional use] under the Andy Warhol Film Project. From the Whitney description of the project, though, the existence of a traditional commercial “distribution” deal for Empire sounds very improbable:

In 1970, the artist withdrew his films from distribution; for the next twenty years, most critics and scholars could only reconstruct these works from reviews and other verbal accounts.

While it was screened soon after it was made in 1964, Empire was only shown in its restored entirety thirty years later, in 1994.
When asked in 2004 about the Raro DVD, Film Project director Callie Angell said Empire could not be cut. “It’s conceptually important that it’s eight hours long…Some people show it at the regular sound speed to make it go by faster, and I just think that’s not the film.”
And yet, in 2002, artist Donald Moffett put together a wonderful show called “Vapor” at Marianne Boesky Gallery, where he projected a 50-minute excerpt of Empire. I can’t remember now, but it feels like it was a single film reel of Empire on a loop, not a DVD. No one raised any objections to what seemed like excerpting for purely logistical, practical reasons.
And last spring, MoMA itself exhibited a 2h24m excerpt of Empire in the gallery of its theme show, “Out of Time: A Contemporary View” [the full 8:05 version was screened in the theater.] Here’s a description of what Empire‘s making and makeup:

Empire consists of one stationary shot of the Empire State Building taken from the forty-fourth floor of the Time-Life Building. Jonas Mekas served as cameraman. The shot was filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. on July 25-26, 1964. Empire consists of a number of one-hundred-foot rolls of film, each separated from the next by a flash of light. Each segment of film constitutes a piece of time. Warhol’s clear delineation of the individual segments of film can be likened to the serial repetition of images in his silkscreen paintings, which also acknowledge their process and materials.

At 40 frames/foot and 2:45 minutes/roll of shooting time over 7h36 minutes, that’d be at least 144 rolls of film. But according to the making of account on WarholStars.org, the Auricon camera they used was chosen because it had a 1200′ magazine, which cut way down on the number of changes required. Incidentally, Warhol almost never touched the camera during the entire 6.5-hour shoot. Instead, Gerard Malanga, Jonas Mekas, and John Palmer [who’s credited with the idea for Empire] ran the shoot while Warhol and several other folks watched.
raro_video_warhol.jpgWithout having seen any of the DVD versions of the films yet, I would suspect that as a member of the Warhol orbit, someone like Mario Zonta would own–or have access to–period prints that predate MoMA’s involvement and the Foundation’s and the Museum’s creation.
And while those institutions may assert control over the intellectual property rights of the films, their claim would be contingent on Warhol’s and the films’ compliance with the copyright laws in effect when they were made. If a studio film like Stanley Donen’s Charade can inadvertently slip into the public domain for failing to meet copyright filing standards, I’d bet that most of Warhol’s films could easily be in the public domain, too.
The Warhol Foundation’s apparent involvement in the “bootleg” versions is made more interesting by their extremely controversial actions in authenticating Warhol’s work. On the Criterion forum, several people commented on the Foundation’s approach to the films as art, not “films” as a way to explain their distribution questions.
If the Foundation actually released or authorized error-laden versions of the films, it would be an utter failure of their responsibility to the authenticity of Warhol’s work. Many Factory regulars talked to Anthony Haden-Guest about the importance of Warhol’s films and their own experiences posing for the seminal Screen Tests:

Irving Blum says Warhol did not take his films lightly. ‘At the beginning he was far more revealing than he was post the shooting,’ Blum says. ‘If you had him alone, if he wasn’t performing, he was incredibly interesting to talk to. What he was doing was, in his terms, recapitulating all of cinema. Doing it single-handedly, starting from the beginning, and working in a parallel way to real cinema. It was nothing less than the most heroic task. And, as frivolous as some of the movies were, he thought of them very seriously.’

I’ve never heard of Warhol considering his films to be works, at least in the sense of editioning and selling them.
Just the opposite, in fact. As he explained in a 1966 interview for Cavalier magazine, he saw the films as distinct from his paintings and treated them as traditional, commercial films:

Cavalier: Do you want a lot of people to see your films?
Warhol: I don’t know. If they’re paying to see them. By the way, they can be rented. There’s a catalog, and the cost is nominal: one dollar per minute. A 30-minute film rents for $30. Sleep rents for $100, at a special rate. And you can get all eight hours of Empire for $120.
Cavalier: A lot of people have said that these are pretty boring films.
Warhol: They might be. I think the more recent ones with sound are much better.

But what if their very nature makes them the ultimate expression of Warhol’s pop, serial ideas? Why shouldn’t a period print of a Warhol film turn out to be as valuable and collectible as a Factory-produced silkscreen–assuming the Foundation doesn’t arbitrarily declare it “inauthentic,” of course?
Whatever the case, there are excruciatingly few ways to see Warhol’s films at all, and with no indication that MoMA or the Warhol Museum is planning to make definitive, commercial versions available to the public, a $145 PAL box set is about as good as it’s gonna get for a while.
A Controversy Over ‘Empire’ [nymag via kottke]
Buy Raro Video’s Andy Warhol Anthology on eight Region-0 PAL DVD’s, EUR99 now EUR63! [rarovideo.com]
Andy Warhol [criterionforum.org]
Factory Fresh [guardian.co.uk]
Previously: The Fake Andy Warhol Lectures

Tomorrow Is Another Days of Heaven

For the upcoming release of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Criterion and Paramount have taken the rather extraordinary step of creating a new interpositive, the definitive, second-generation transfer from a film’s original negative. Lee Kline’s story of color-correcting a masterpiece of golden-hued cinema with Malick and cinematographer John Bailey [who’d been Nestor Almendro’s camera operator] is on Criterion’s blog:

Before he arrived, I wasn’t sure how hands-on he was going to be with the color. As soon as he sat down, though, Terry made it clear that the new transfer needed to feel natural and not too “postcardlike.” We weren’t allowed to use words like golden or warm. The natural beauty of the land needed to be represented, since that was what they were going for when shooting. When we first started to take out the gold and the warmth, it was heading toward a really different place from the previous transfer. Not bad, mind you, just different and definitely more natural. I would sometimes joke in the room that such and such a shot was pretty, and then I would say to Terry, “But not too pretty!” We’d all laugh. DVD producer Kim Hendrickson was also with us one afternoon, and when she started to say out loud how pretty it was, we all turned in our chairs to cut her off and simultaneously say, “Shhh!”After three days of Terry, Billy, and John’s expertise, we were finished. It looked beautiful, but boy, was it different. I told Terry that people were really going to be pretty surprised by this new transfer, since it was such a radical departure from before, but he said it was perfect.

Sounds like stripping centuries of varnish from a Rembrandt. Fascinating stuff.
Striking Gold [criterion blog via coudal]
the new Criterion Collection Days of Heaven comes out Oct. 23 [amazon]

Magic: Teller Like It Is

At a recent conference talk on magic given in Las Vegas, Teller [the quiet one] gave the most amazing definition of magic I wish I’d heard before writing about Scott Sforza for Cabinet Magazine’s magic issue:

[Magic is] the theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

I wish he’d have piped up sooner.
Sleights of Mind [NYT]
previously: Cabinet 26: “Perspective Correction

You Stay Classy, Bruce Ratner

In less than thirty seconds, I could rattle off a dozen people in the real estate business, and another easy dozen in the video and film business, and a dozen in the finance business, who have incredibly, admirably, even enviably sophisticated views of art and the art world.
And yet, in two short emailed paragraphs, a hapless Atlantic Yard minion resets the real estate and banking cultural clocks to zero:

Hi, I’m working on an in house promotional video for Frank Gehry and the Atlantic Yards Project. We will be taping in Williamsburg this Thursday or Friday and are interested in videoing an artist in his or her work space. The work should be large and colorful and the space should be interesting, windows or some nice architecture. It should also be at least 700 to 1000 square feet or bigger.
This video will be shown to investors and could be an opportunity to highlight the artists work. We will have a small crew of about 8 people and shouldn’t be there longer than an hour or two. We can give the artist a nominal fee of 250.00 as we have no location budget.

I don’t know what giant, controversial idea lurking beneath which blithely unaware comment is more entertaining to contemplate:

  • the real estate developer’s imperative for art that’s “large and colorful”
  • the artist as lifestyle purveyor in an actual investment banking video
  • the already gentrifying artist participating in his own out-gentrification
  • a multi-billion-dollar project’s broke-ass, indie film promise of “promotion” in lieu of “budget”
  • the idea that anyone who can afford a thousand square feet of “nice architecture” in Williamsburg these days actually makes art
  • the idea that this is all for a Frank Gehry project.
    You stay classy, too, Frank.
    Calling All ‘Burg Artists: Want to Sell Out for Atlantic Yards? [curbed]

  • Birth Of A Steadicam-on-Segway Nation

    camtransport_segway.jpg

    Historians of the moving image take note:
    The first commercial footage shot with the Handsfree-Transporter Cam Transport, wherein a Steadicam operator steers a modified Segway with his crotch, was a moving [sic] performance of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” by a Dutch marching band at the 2006 Nationale Taptoe in S’Hertogenbosch.
    For aspiring Cam Transport users, the bar has been set very high indeed.
    Meanwhile, I hope the second shoot will be at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center; those fellas need some help with their camerawork pronto.
    Handsfree-Transporter.com > Cam Transport > Videos [handsfree-transporter.com via coudal]

    Comrades, Join Me In A Relentless Exposure Of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Despicable Tricks!

    antonioni_china_cover.jpg

    I only discovered the Chinese government’s published evisceration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary Chung Kuo – Cina after I thought I’d finished my Cabinet article on Scott Sforza. Jonathan wondered if Susan Sontag’s On Photography might have a relevant idea or two in it, so I broke out the old copy–and found Sontag’s discussion of Antonioni’s “extremely reactionary and despicable”…camera angles [!]. It made for a sweet, surprisingly symmetrical ending to the piece.
    Intrigued, I searched around for the full text of the 1974 Renmin Ribao Commentator pamphlet she quoted from, but it wasn’t online. So I ended up buying a copy, and scanning it in. It’s a fascinating read, and it should have been online long ago.
    While the North Korean government is known for bombastic turns of phrase, the Chinese under Madame Mao had a really rousing, articulate, no-holds-barred style of denouncing its enemies and whipping up its populace. Not that the internal political motives of the pamphlet are at all unclear; but it’s entertaining. Antonioni’s criminal techniques weren’t limited to camera placement; his cinematography, use of color and light, editing, and sound editing were all reactionary imperalist tools as well. I don’t know if this is where the Dogme folks got it, but the Gang of Four’s condemnation of non-diagetic sound is easily as vicious as anything Lars von Trier could come up with, and twice as funny.
    Anyway, the entire text is after the jump. The numbers in brackets are the page number/page breaks. If there are any typos or formatting errors, please let me know. Enjoy, comrades!

    Continue reading “Comrades, Join Me In A Relentless Exposure Of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Despicable Tricks!”

    On Seven Days In May

    I cannot get me enough of John Frankenheimer. Last week, I stayed up way too late when Ronin came on at 1AM. While reading an interview with David Talbot, who just published a disturbing book about Robert Kennedy and the internal battles the Kennedy Administration fought against the right-wing Military Industrial Complex crowd, he mentioned the novel, Seven Days In May. Talbot says that Kennedy wanted the novel–a bestseller about a military plot to overthrow the President–made into a movie “not only as a shot across the bow to the generals but also as a warning to the American people.”
    Frankenheimer shot Seven Days with Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in 1963, just a year after The Manchurian Candidate came out. What’s most amazing to me–well, where to start?–is the way certain parts of the film were shot over the military’s obvious opposition.
    Kennedy aide Pierre Salinger wrote that the President “conveniently arranged” to be out of the White House for a weekend when Frankenheimer needed to shoot, as if the only objection to be raised was one of logistics. Meanwhile, for at least two shots, Frankenheimer shot around the Pentagon’s non-cooperation by surreptitiously filming his actors boarding an aircraft carrier and entering the Pentagon itself. It just blows my mind to imagine this happening today. Never mind that the US military was fully onboard with helping make The Transformers for some reason.
    imdb data, also Seven Days In May production stories [wikipedia]
    David Talbot Interview: Don’t Call It A Conspiracy – The Kennedy Brothers [10zenmonkeys.com]

    Wachowski Siblings, Can I See You Over Here A Minute?

    I’m not going to go into detail about my dismally bored disappointment with Michael Bay’s Transformers. [Did snap-together transforming sound effects fetishists get enough to work with? Because us ID4-meets-Godzilla-scale, screen-filling apocalyptic battle porn dudes were totally cheated. Even The Clone Wars was better than this.]
    But as I was reading up on the AllSpark this morning, I learn that in the TV series, it was the receptacle of all the consciousnesses and fuelled the machines’ existence. And it was originally called The Oracle–and also The Matrix.

    Antonioni Hears New York

    Walter Murch writing on BLDGBLOG:

    Sometime after the success of his film Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni visited Manhattan, thinking of setting his next project in New York. Confused and overwhelmed by the city’s visual foreignness, he decided to listen rather than to look: to eavesdrop on the city’s mutterings as it emerged into consciousness from the previous night’s sleep. Sitting in his room on the 34th floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Antonioni kept a journal of everything he heard from six to nine in the morning… Perhaps some inadvertent sound might provide the key to unlock the mysteries of this foreign world.

    The only way this could be cooler is if Soderbergh showed up with footage he shot of a Scott Sforza-produced photo-op at the Spiral Jetty.
    “Manhattan Symphony” by Walter Murch
    “New York from the 34th floor overlooking Central Park/ The soundtrack for a film set in New York – circa 1970” by Michelangelo Antonioni
    New York City In Sound [bldgblog]

    My So-Called Audience

    When I heard that Christopher DeLaurenti used body mics and a mini-disc-equipped vest to make his surreptitious recordings of orchestral intermissions, I was like, “Half the recording is probably the squeaks of his leather vest. What he’s actually capturing isn’t just music; it’s his experience of listening.”
    As I read on in the NY Times article about his new CD, I was pleased to learn the “Seattle-based ‘sound artist’ [quotes? please, this isn’t Seattle -ed.] and composer” agreed:

    The recording itself became a performance, he said, because every movement of his body would alter the way the sound was captured. “I became entranced in doing it,” he said.

    The illicit nature of the project not only informed the recording process, it provides the aural rhythm, a 6bpm directional bassline:

    He honed a technique of often shifting his posture and moving around. “Most people are not observant and rarely look at one thing for longer than 10 seconds,” he said.

    Any John Cage reference or influence is always welcome around these parts, of course, and the transformation of ambient sound into music is one of my personal favorites.
    But Cage also had an interest in the transformed roles of peformer, composer, and audience. In a 1972 interview, he said:

    …more and more in my performances, I try to bring about a situation in which there is no difference between the audience and the performers. And I’m not speaking of audience participation in something designed by the composer, but rather am I speaking of the music which arises through the activity of both performers and so-called audience. . .

    When a piece like 4’33” is ultimately peformed/composed/experienced in each listener’s ears and head, does it still make sense to keep using an implicitly passive term like “audience”? Does it matter that DeLaurenti declares himself an artist, not just an audience member? Does it matter that he published his work? Or that he released a commercial recording?
    DeLaurenti’s project also reminds me of another artist of the experiential whose practice is also technically illegal: the videocam-wielding moviegoer Jon Routson.

    routson_chicago.jpg

    Routson used to shoot video while he was in the movies, not to create a bootleg of the feature film–justifiably afraid of getting caught, Routson usually didn’t even look through the viewfinder of his camera, which turned the secreen into a skewampus trapezoid–but to document the experience of watching a movie. Ambient, quotidian life became art; art was what the artist did–including sitting through three screenings of Mel Gibson’s The Passion .
    Looking back on how he developed his early studio practice, Bruce Nauman told an interviewer [pdf] that he wondered, “… what an artist does when left alone in the studio. My conclusion was that I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.” And in the cases like DeLaurenti and Routson the studio is expendable.
    guy_ben-ner_elia.jpgBut artists like Vito Acconci, who made video art from his daily doings, and at-home dad/artist Guy Ben Ner, who transforms primary caregiving into production by enlisting his kids as characters and crew in his video works, have it easy.
    The two bootleg guys face a unique challenge because their experience involves consuming–and recording–someone else’s intellectual property. The most remarkable thing about the Times’ intermission article is how laid back almost all the orchestra spokesmen are about DeLaurenti’s recording. Granted, no one’s going to go ballistic to the Times in a culture feature, but it’s like winning the Turner Prize compared to the draconian treatment that Routson faced.
    Maryland criminalized videotaping in a movie theater while the Baltimore artist was still making his works. He moved production to New York for a while, but the film industry’s aggressive campaign against ‘piracy’ and the subsequent changes to federal law ultimately forced him to abandon his series.
    So all the world’s a stage, and we are merely gloriously players. And playwrights. And composers. And artists. Except that large swaths of our production–our lives–are declared the exclusive property of the expensively counselled copyright and trademark industrial complex. All the world’s a store, and we are merely consumers. Meanwhile the cameravans prowling our city streets are from Google. All the buildings on the Sunset Strip seems really quaint right about now.

    disney-store_gmap.jpg

    The Concerts Found Onstage While Everyone Else Takes a Break [nyt]

    Get My Doctor-Turned-Lawyer On The Phone!

    canterburys_law_cast.jpg

    From executive producers Denis Leary and Jim Serpico (“Rescue Me,” “The Job”) [and Mike Figgis] and writer Dave Erickson (“The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story”, “Murder in Greenwich”) comes “Canterbury’s Law,”

    a courtroom drama about a rebellious female defense attorney who’s willing to bend the law in order to protect the wrongfully accused. Elizabeth Canterbury (Julianna Margulies, “ER”) is a force of nature on “Canterbury’s Law.” An attorney on the rise, she puts her career on the line to take on risky and unpopular cases on “Canterbury’s Law,” even when they take a toll on her personal life.

    Dave Erickson wrote the pilot for “Canterbury’s Law,” and Mike Figgis directed.

    “Canterbury’s Law” was just picked up for mid-season by Fox.
    Figgis was [update: NOT] just picked up at LAX for telling security officials he was here “to shoot a pilot.”
    update: Figgis told PRI that the story is bogus, that he told a reporter he thought about saying “shoot a pilot” in Toronto customs, but didn’t. The Observer’s Jason Solomon reported the anecdote in April:

    Director Mike Figgis spent longer at LAX airport than intended. He’d arrived in Los Angeles, along with half the acting and directing world, for what is known as ‘pilot season’, when the big studios try out new scripts, directors and actors in a two-week frenzy of auditions and career make-or-breaks. When Figgis was being grilled by airport immigration, he was asked the purpose of his visit. Unthinking and tired after a long flight, Mike replied: ‘I’m here to shoot a pilot.’ After five hours in an interrogation cell (yes, really), he finally made it into town.

    Uh, no, not really. I’m sure Canterbury is still a force of nature, though. You can’t make that up. [via boingboing]

    This Japanese-American Internment Camp Life

    We finally made it to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last weekend. I’ll see a Sheeler show any time, any place, but except for a nice population of Diebenkorns and the well-stocked Oceanic galleries–oh, and Gerhard Richter’s disorienting photomural commissioned for the atrium, and a few other little pieces I photographed and may post later–I’m afraid the de Young’s Herzog & de Meuron building left more of an impression on me than their collection.
    With two notable exceptions: there was a painting that looked like a charcoal drawing and dated 1944, which appears to have been done in the Japanese American internment camps. I’ve been armchair-fascinated–and since 2002, increasingly outraged–by the camps and how my country managed to incarcerate its own citizens–over half of them children–in the name of defending freedom.
    But except for Ansel Adams’ photos of Manzanar and portraits of its internees, I hadn’t seen art that had been created in the camps. And I’ve been stalling for two paragraphs because I can’t remember the artist’s name… Danny…
    Anyway, the permanent installation of sculptor Ruth Asawa‘s ethereally minimalist work was great, too, but I wish we’d been able to see the full Asawa retrospective [which left the de Young in January, and is at the Japanese American National Museum in LA until May 27.] I didn’t know but should have that Asawa was interned as a girl; at Santa Anita, the horsetrack-turned-prison camp, Asawa began taking drawing lessons from older artists who had worked at Disney before Pearl Harbor. Black Mountain was a far greater influence on her aesthetic, perhaps, but the experience in the camp is a piece of her puzzle as well. Getting up to speed on her work and career is on my shortlist.
    And for another, more surreally quotidian look at life in internment, there’s Densho, the primary source/oral history initiative which has just put online a massive collection of newspapers published within the camps. The LA Times has an article about it today.

    “MRS. Arikawa received a wire from Washington saying her son had been killed in action in Italy, but no one in the block knew of it for the whole day. She and Mr. Arikawa ate their meals unobtrusively and as usual at their table in the mess hall, he with his omnipresent cane laid against the bench and she quietly leaning over her plate…. Made homeless and their security jeopardized by the very agency to which they have given their sons, they must wonder what their reward will be.” — Manzanar Free Press, July 29, 1944

    A movie about daily life in the camps has been brewing in my head for years now, and I’d always been seduced by the rich tones and contrasts of Ansel Adams’ photos, relying on his outsider’s eye to capture the insidiously banal contradictions of loyal Americans stripped of their rights and property and rounded up into prison camps. But obviously now, that’s because I haven’t read enough of the Manzanar Free Press. Which, despite its title, was one of the more rigorously censored camp papers around.
    Previously: I Mean, Just Look At How Happy They Were!

    Filmmaking In Reverse: Tobias Rehberger’s On Otto

    rehberger_on_otto_still.jpg

    Tobias Rehberger was interested in how viewers construct a film as they watch it, particularly as they pass through alone what’s nominally intended to be a communal experience.
    So he decided to make a film in reverse, starting with the poster, and ending with the screenplay. By handing backwards the “end product”, each specialist collaborator interpolated his or her own element of the production. As April Elizabeth Lamm reported on Artforum’s blog:

    Ennio Morricone’s score was based on the film’s credits alone, a sweet series of comiclike bones arranged in a tic-tac-toe grid by French design duo Kuntzel & Deygas [who did Colette’s mascots, Cap & Pep, btw -ed.] This apparently suited him: Morricone had told Rehberger that he never needed to see a film before deploying his trademark, universally lauded sound.

    It seems ironic that, given the nature of the production and the process, the finished product sounds best suited to an exhibition, not a theater. But then again, Rehberger is an artist…
    On Otto by Tobias Rehberger is on view at the Fondazione Prada through June 6 [fondazioneprada.com]
    Read about the On Otto premiere party on Artforum [artforum]
    See On Otto stills and installation shots like the one above on Designboom [designboom]

    Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles

    reyner_banham_car.jpg

    First off, what is up with the Seventies? Those folks was funny. This 1972 documentary about what a lovable failure of a city Los Angeles is stars pioneering urban planning theorist Reyner Banham, who fairly bumbles through hippie dippy, go-go dancing California as if he were Lytton Strachey. It’s like Mondo LA, but produced by the BBC.

    banham_eames_house.jpg

    As a time capsule, the film’s almost quaint. Banham plays everything with bemused befuddlement, eating a pineapple sundae while he interviews “painter and photographer of the local scene” Ed Ruscha in a giant convertible at the drive-in, or innocently engaging the security guard about why he can’t cut through the ur-gated community of Rolling Hills.
    It can boggle, too, though. When ruminating on the city’s preference for stand-alone homes to larger multi-story housing estates, Banham actually says about Watts, “even the ghetto people have nice, little houses.”
    Some things hold up, some don’t, and in a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry way. There’s a hint of irony that LA’s great sunsets are caused by all that car pollution, but otherwise, the freeways and the car-centric culture are still only amusing.
    Banham offhandedly compares the partitioned-off Rolling Hills to “the Balkans before 1914,” not knowing, of course, what would happen to the Balkans of the late 1990’s [or what would happen in the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict, for that matter].
    And Banham Loves Los Angeles dovetails very unexpectedly with another outsider’s look at an inscrutable place, Antonioni’s Chung Kuo. The punchline to this narration by Banham’s imaginary 8-track freeway tour guide writes itself:

    Coming up now on your right is the world’s biggest toy and game factory.
    From here, Matt Mason space toys, Hot Wheels cars, and Barbie dolls go to all parts of the free world.

    Antonioni’s film focuses on people, with the city as a backdrop, and ends up revealing a stunning, fascinating country that’s now been utterly transformed, including in its architecture and urban fabric. Banham’s looks at the city down–there are dozens of long helicopter shots–but most of the people we see are the passengers on the star homes bus tour.

    Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
    [google video via landliving]