Category: making movies

The Shekvetili Dendrological Park: Land Art For Oligarchs

Still from Salomé Jashi’s Taming The Garden, 2021, showing a giant tree on the Black Sea en route to Ivanishvili’s private tree zoo. images via a German-titled arte broadcast uploaded to YouTube

In 2021 Georgian filmmaker Salomé Jashi released Taming The Garden, a documentary about the creation of the Shekvetili Dendrological Park. Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian oligarch-turned-politician who minted his $6 billion fortune in Russia, spent five years collecting over 200 old-growth trees from around the country, which he had transplanted in a park of his own design next to his estate on the Black Sea. The park opened to the public in 2020.

Residents of a Georgian village follow their tree as it drives out of town in Taming The Garden, along a route with probably 90% fewer infrastructure hassles or regulatory hoops to jump through than that rock had to face on its way to LACMA

In her film, Jashi follows several trees as they are removed from the village s, farms, and forests where they’ve been for centuries. She records the resignation and loss of the locals, as well as the surreal transport of the uprooted trees along rural roads, and on barges. The filmmaking is quietly powerful, with dramatic images that only reveal the project’s traumas and absurdities and slowly.

NO SPOILERS but Jashi’s quiet revelations of the sheer artificiality of this ostensibly idyllic natural landscape are amazing

A 2022 dispatch from Ivan Nechepurenko in the New York Times, with striking photos by Daro Sulaukari, reports that around half the trees arrived by sea, and half by truck. The entire project cost Ivanishvili “tens of millions” of dollars, which seems like a pittance for what he did and what he got.

Robert Smithson’s Floating Island, 2005, image via NYT

Why, in 2005, when Nancy Holt authorized Floating Island, a previously unrealized project of her late husband, Robert Smithson, it cost $250,000 to drive a single barge around lower Manhattan for a week.

A miniature version of The Gates chasing a miniature version of Central Park, by, as it turned out, Bruce High Quality Foundation and Robert Smithson, respectively, as captured by Ian Adelman in 2005 in the NYT

I guess I should be more shocked, surprised, dismayed, whatever that Land Art, created in opposition to the collector-pandering commodification of the gallery system, has been so thoroughly subsumed by the billionaire class. But then again, Double Negative was produced and owned by a 3M heiress who donated the first version of Lightning Field, realized on her New Mexico ranch, to the foundation started by the oil heiress which built the permanent version. And which now manages Spiral Jetty. And of course, it was New York’s own oligarch-turned-politician Michael Bloomberg who made Christo & Jeanne Claude’s Gates happen. And the industrialist with the private museum has taken on the care and funding of City. Is Land Art actually about real estate and power? Always was.

“For me, a floating tree was a symbol of power, of desire, of wanting something at any cost,” Ms. Jashi told the NYT. If Land Art can accommodate the Department of Defense’s creations at Dugway Proving Grounds, the cost-be-damned symbolic gestures of a tree-obsessed oligarch should fit right in.

2001 x 007

Dan Hopewell turned up a 2017 thread on social media by Simone Odino about film writer Joe R. Frinzi, who noticed that the aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey decorated the astronaut’s hotel room with a painting from Roger Moore’s room at Max Zorin’s château in the 1985 Bond movie, A View To A Kill. The idea of A View To A Kill existing in the 2001 universe is a lot to process. But given Clarke’s premise that they gleaned details of Earth from TV broadcasts, I guess we should have at least been aware of the possibility.

Detail of Christophe Huet’s 18th century monkey business paintings in the Petite Singerie at Château de Chantilly, image: Marc Walter via CdeC

A View To A Kill was filmed at the Château de Chantilly, whose most famous decorative paintings, in the Grande and Petite Singeries, are Christophe Huet’s 18th century wall paintings of monkeys dressed and carrying on as French aristocrats. Perhaps someone paint a version of the opening scene of 2001 in the style of Huet.

If Frinzi mentions the painting in his new book, Kubrick’s Monolith: The Art and Mystery of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I couldn’t find it in his just-dropped interview on the Kubrick Universe Podcast. They were operating on a different level of fandom entirely, tbqh.

A few hours later update: following up to a comment on tumblr by @brocatus about whether this was an intentional quote, I looked on IMDb. The Art Director for A View To A Kill was John Fenner, who also worked with Stanley Kubrick. He worked as a draftsman on The Shining (1980) and 2001 (1968, uncredited), and would go on to work as art director on Eyes Wide Shut.

Somewhere on social media in response to the Frinzi mention, someone Odino wrote that when he asked about the identity of the painting in the Hotel Room, Christiane Kubrick said she recalled MGM making it themselves “[MGM] might as well have made it themselves,” and she had no idea.* If Fenner didn’t make it, he surely would have recognized it, and would have been in a position to place it. Someone else pointed out that the studios for the two productions were different. Perhaps Fenner not only made the painting, but has it?

*Corrected the quote and credited Odino after he chimed in and clarified on social media.

Sarah Sze Makes Large Projects of Small Things

Sarah Sze explaining Slice (2023), a site-specific work in the her Timelapse exhibition at the Guggenheim, in an Art21 documentary. image: art21.org

I still have to see Sarah Sze’s exhibition at the Guggenheim, Timelapse. Watching Ian Forster’s Art21 interview/documentary of Sze explaining her work as she makes it does not make it easy to wait.

A couple of weeks ago, Sze talked to Ben Luke for The Art Newspaper’s podcast about her Artangel commission, Metronome, which is installed in a South London railway station waiting room. Because of the pandemic, the timing for these two major shows slid on top of each other.

For both exhibitions Sze has created streams of video or audio content that slip and loop in a seemingly non-repeating way, creating seemingly random confluences and juxtapositions. In Forster’s footage, we see Sze’s images, but don’t hear about them. In Luke’s we hear her talking about her sources, but don’t see them.

The motherlode of Sze talking about her work, though, is still her 2008 conservation interview with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro for the Artist Documentation Project. As someone who’s been enthralled by Sze’s work since the tissue paper and Tic-Tac era, it’s great to see it continue to expand and resonate.

Sarah Sze Emotional Time, Art21, directed and produced by Ian Forster [art21.org]
18 May 2023: The Week In Art…Sarah Sze in London [theartnewspaper]

Artforum 1995: Yves Klein, Florine Stettheimer, Collier Schorr, Todd Haynes

I just read an excellent time capsule of an interview of director Todd Haynes by photographer Collier Schorr about his new movie Safe, which ran in the Summer 1995 issue of Artforum, almost midway between Safe’s debut at Sundance and its theatrical release in the fall.

Which turns out to be just one example of how time moved back then. The cover—for which there was no hook except art world vibes—was none other than Florine Stettheimer’s Studio Party (or Soirée). Don’t expect ME to demand an excuse to love Florine Stettheimer!

And then there were dueling reviews of a big Yves Klein retrospective, from Nan Rosenthal and Benjamin Buchloh, who—spoiler alert—may have disagreed on Klein, but they both disliked the show. And while neither of them answered the highly specific Yves Klein-related question that led me to this issue in the first place, I can’t complain.

Interview with Unrest’s Cyril Schäublin

Last September at RogerEbert.com, Soren Hough interviewed Swiss director Cyril Schäublin about his new film, Unrest, which was then in the New York Film Festival. Unrest is about a mountain community of anarchist watchmakers in the 19th century. It sounds fascinating, both for its content, but also for how it was developed and produced, in an exceptionally decentralized, collaborative, mutual aid-inspired mode inspired by its cast of predominately non-actors, but also by the ideas of one of its characters, the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin.

SH: It sounds like your natural aesthetic instinct tied well into this particular story where you, as you say, have this big name in “Unrest”—Peter Kropotkin. He’s not in a huge amount of the movie, he doesn’t have that many lines, he’s not a central character, and it’s certainly not a biopic.

CS: The guy who acts as Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) is a very avid Kropotkin guy. I mean, he’s really into him. And he said to me at the end, “I didn’t say that much!” But he told me the way we were doing the film, and how the film was organized, and how we talked to each other, he felt [it took a] mutual aid approach. That was really interesting for me.

Schäublin talks, too, about the desire to understand and depict the experiences of the women in his family, his ancestors, who worked in watch factories, but also the difficulties in doing so, especially for 19th century people:

it’s much easier to reconstruct male biographies [from the 19th century] than female biographies. I thought, “What can I show of women, like the women in my family who did that work?” The only thing we can reconstruct is their work. People today that go to watchmaking schools still learn how to build a watch from the 19th century—that’s the start of the school. So you can reconstruct the manual labor, but not the biographies—what we call biographies.

Fight the Power: Cyril Schäublin on Unrest [rogerebert via geraldine juarez]
Cyril Schäublin’s website [cyrilschaublin.com]

This Royal Thrown of Punks, Diss Sceptred Tee

Vivienne Westwood/Seditionaries, Jubilee rant shirt, recto, from the personal collection of Malcolm McLaren to the V&A

This the 81st anniversary of his birth is the perfect time to say Derek Jarman had Vivienne Westwood’s number, and she knew it.

In Artforum, punk obituarist Derek McCormack tells The Story of The T-Shirt:

Continue reading “This Royal Thrown of Punks, Diss Sceptred Tee”

The Exceptional Sale of A Print of Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys

frames from the first of six 35mm reels of a vintage print of Andy Warhol’s 1968-69 film, Lonesome Cowboys, being sold at Christie’s Jan. 27, 2023, est. $20-30,000

As if everything in Christie’s The Exceptional Sale weren’t already exceptional enough, the sale ends with the greatest gilt dessert stands France ever made, part of the greatest table centerpiece and dinner service France ever made, commissioned by the duc d’Orleans; the original cover art for a Led Zeppelin album; and a rare, vintage 35mm exhibition print of Andy Warhol’s 1968-69 pseudo-feature film, Lonesome Cowboys.

The lot description for this Lonesome Cowboys print is extraordinary. Maybe like the texts about the Arizona Spike, and for this sale as a whole, the exceptional is the norm. Lonesome Cowboys was not just an anti-narrative, queer, softcore, experimental anti-Western filmed over a cold week in a Tuscon cowboy theme park; investigated by the FBI; and slowly edited while Warhol recovered from being shot. It was the first brick thrown in the “Stonewall of the South,” a powerful document in the fight for equality.

Continue reading “The Exceptional Sale of A Print of Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys”

26 Years In The Wilderness With Steve McQueen

I was driving the kid to a babysitting gig, and as we pulled into the street, I saw a Black man carrying a large-leafed houseplant in front of him. I immediately had to explain who Steve McQueen was, and how the first show of his work in New York in 1997 had in one room this amazing, silent, one-minute film he’d made on the street, in 1992, when he was a student, and saw two African men in trilbys, each carrying a potted palm plant, weaving their way through London traffic, and he just found the scene and instantly decided to film it, and it was transfixing and beautiful.

Steve McQueen, still from Exodus, 1992/97, 1:05, 8mm film, collection: Art Institute of Chicago

Goncharov (1973): The Making Of

I started this blog in 2001 as a side project for my filmmaking. It was the place to share my inspiration, development, behind-the-scenes, making-of, marketing, reception, and commentary.

screenshot of @zootycoon’s tumblr post with the bootleg platform sneakers with a label based on a movie poster that unlocked the Goncharovissance

Now Tumblr has, in one day, generated an entire metacontent universe around a film that doesn’t exist: Goncharov (1973), produced and/or, disputedly, directed by Martin Scorsese. It is spectacular, and exactly the kind of thing I got into blogging about movies for.

[update: I am told that Goncharov (1973) is, in fact, an absolutely real film. If it wasn’t, would it have an elaborate and exhaustive Google Doc mapping its history, production, plot, music, versions, and analysis? And there’s a poster? And then there’s all the fanfic. My apologies to Messrs JWHJ0715 and Scorsese.]

Previously: Goncharov

Godard Street View

I am kind of deep in an assignment, and so cannot really give the space right now to process the news of Jean-Luc Godard’s death and the impact of his work.

But as an absolute fan of Agnes Varda who has not seen Faces Places because I detest JR’s work, Manohla Dargis’s interpretation here of Godard’s refusal to even come to the door makes sense to me.

The beautiful, melancholic and now portentous video by Robert Luxemburg of Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville captured on Google Street View in 2013, set to music from Le Mepris, is the kind of cinematic world we all inhabit now. Of course, he is in it forever.

Why These Aspect Ratios, Blanket?

Aspect Ratio Blanket, jacquard cotton, $120 from A24 Films

In late 2020 A24 Films dropped this aspect ratio blanket. It is part of the film studio’s unusually extensive swag collection, and was designed by Actual Work, of Provo, Utah. It is great, and not only to the extent it makes me think of Liz Deschenes’ photos and Derek Jarman prints.

Liz Deschenes, Black and White, 2003, as shown at Campoli Presti in 2007

In 2003 Deschenes made a series of monochrome photographs in the dimensions of various screens, analog and (emergent) digital, which helped to forefront the usually unseen technological systems used to produce the images we consume. They don’t get as much attention as the saturated awesomeness of her green screen photos of the same era. I saw them first at Andrew Kreps, and she showed them again in London at Campoli Presti.

Just turn it sideways, he says: Study for Derek Jarman Blue Screen Print, 2020, gahhh, the aspect ratio

Derek Jarman is my own damn fault, a rabbit hole I jumped into and kept on digging as I tried to figure out the correct [sic] aspect ratio of a monochrome silkscreen of Jarman’s Blue, rather than just buy an example from the unfinished deluxe letterpress edition of the screenplay when it appeared on eBay.

But maybe it’s exactly those too-close encounters with aspect ratios that made me wonder what’s going on in A24’s blanket? Why does it have the seven aspect ratios it does? 1.33:1 and 2.39:1 are pretty standard (standard TV and anamorphic/widescreen theater, respectively), but 1.66:1? That’s a European theatrical format. 2:1 was originally launched in the ’50s as SuperScope, but it’s more likely that its promotion by Red, the digital camera company, as an optimal format for phone & flatscreen display is a more likely explanation. 2.76:1 is Panavision, and an auteur-y choice only a Tarantino would make (or, apparently Gareth Edwards, who used it for Rogue One. Neither film was an A24 joint.) 1:1 is…Instagram? Josef Albers? I have no idea.

1.19:1, though, is an ancient ratio that does have a direct A24 connection. Originally used in the 1920s during the transition to sound, Robert Eggers used it on his 2019 film, The Lighthouse, which was an A24 joint. The ratio was a deliberately, constricted, archaic choice that evoked imagery of the 19th century of Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished story that inspired the film. So in a way, it makes the most sense of all.

But I think the blanket is not meant for overthinking, and these ratios were chosen to look good when stacked. Which, I guess it’s good that they do look good. If they also connected to something about the self-consciously quirky studio that made them, that’d be even better.

Untitled (CBGB Buffalo Wings), 2021

Debbie Harry trying to wake Anthony Kiedis and Sofia Coppola up in their loft crash pad across the street from CBGB, in a 1993 short film Paul Morrissey made for Details Magazine

When @MattHaber first tweeted this short film directed by Paul Morrissey for Details Magazine, it blew my mind right back to 1993. I was ready to hype it as an underground gem, a time capsule of a truer, rawer, cooler, lost New York. But honestly, maybe the reason it only has 840 views on YouTube after almost ten years, is because it’s pretty dumb.

The 16-minute, silent-style film was created in early April 1993 as/for/alongside a fashion photoshoot for Details’ Music Issue, which dropped in July. Debbie Harry is a downtown promoter chasing Anthony Kiedis and his mopey girlfriend Sofia Coppola around the East Village, trying to wrangle him for a gig at the fictitious Wig & Pizza Boutique. Sonic Youth and a dozen drag queens, including Joey Arias and Lady Bunny fill out the cast of extras who stand around CBGB while Kiedis changes outfits and runs away. The only explanation for the acting and directing is, it’s for a photoshoot. Literally everyone involved seems dumber by the end, including me, for watching it twice. It really should be added to everyone’s IMDb, if only for karmic reasons.

study for Untitled (CBGB Buffalo Wings), 2021, enamel on wood, est. 18 x 30 in., image: youtube

By the time I decided not to rummage around and unearth the lost history of this short, I realized the only good thing is the sign at CBGB offering free, all you can eat Buffalo wings & chips, which I could totally see as a painting. Unless John Varvatos already did it.

The Gaze (dir., Barry Jenkins)

I just started watching Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, and it is gorgeous and terrible and intense. One extraordinary thing about it is that in the midst of making this 10-hour series, Jenkins also made an hour-long, non-narrative work titled, The Gaze, and it is almost supernaturally moving. He wrote at length about it on Vimeo:

Early in production, there was a moment where I looked across the set and what I saw settled me: our background actors, in working with folks like Ms. Wendy and Mr. and Mrs. King – styled and dressed and made up by Caroline, by Lawrence and Donnie – I looked across the set and realized I was looking at my ancestors, a group of people whose images have been largely lost to the historical record. Without thinking, we paused production on the The Underground Railroad and instead harnessed our tools to capture portraits of… them.

What flows here is non-narrative. There is no story told. Throughout production, we halted our filming many times for moments like these. Moments where… standing in the spaces our ancestors stood, we had the feeling of seeing them, truly seeing them and thus, we sought to capture and share that seeing with you…

None of these shots are planned. Occasionally, when the spirit moved us, we stopped making the planned thing and focused on making THIS thing.

…we have sought to give embodiment to the souls of our ancestors frozen in the tactful but inadequate descriptor “enslaved,” a phrase that speaks only to what was done to them, not to who they were nor what they did. My ancestors – midwives and blacksmiths, agrarians and healers; builders and spiritualists, yearn’ers and doers – seen here as embodied by this wonderful cast of principal and background actors, did so very much.

Standing in for ancestors to see and remember them, and to experience being seen by them is as extraordinary as the insight to make this in the first place.

The Gaze, on Barry Jenkins’ Vimeo [vimeo via kottke]