Filmmaker Steven J. Ross will bring his just-completed feature-length documentary -- Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude -- to the Clark for a special advance screening in the auditorium at 7:30 pm on Friday, June 29th. Mr. Ross is previewing his film at select museums and colleges connected with the project, before general release and broadcast on television. He will be on hand to comment and answer questions after the showing.
The Clark’s marvelous collection of Winslow Homer work figures prominently in the film, as do a number of scholars associated with the Clark. But beyond any parochial interest, the film makes a case for Homer as an essential American master. While surveying a prodigious array of his work in illustration and painting, it tells the story of his life but also sketches the pivotal period of American life represented. Steve Ross has made a film that is visually, intellectually, and emotionally rich, and this is a remarkable opportunity to get an advance look.
The Winslow Homer biography will culminate a Clark film series called “Documenting Artists: Portraits in Film,” composed of documentary features on artists, all shown on Fridays at 7:30 in June. The Clark is trying an untraditional timeslot to make the films available to a wider audience, but except for the final filmmaker’s presentation each will also be shown at the regular Fridays at 4:00 slot. As usual, admission to films at the Clark is free.
June 8, 4:00 & 7:30: Michelangelo: Self-Portrait. (1989, 85 min.) Robert Snyder expands upon two earlier films (including his 1950 Oscar-winner The Titan) in which the camera swoons around the master’s work, adding a narration of Michelangelo’s own words and music by Monteverdi, for an enveloping and revelatory experience.
June 15, 4:00 & 7:30: Vincent: The Life & Death of Vincent Van Gogh. (1987, 99 min.) Paul Cox searches into Van Gogh’s paintings and the places he painted them, creating a canvas for his own intensely introspective portrait of the tortured artist, expressed in the words of Vincent’s letters to his brother Theo.
June 22, 4:00 & 7:30: The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo. (2004, 90 min.) Amy Stechler conveys both the life and the times, but moreover the art, of the iconic Mexican painter, in all her painful beauty and tempestuous emotion, through well-chosen archival footage, eyewitness testimony, expert commentary, and close examination of the paintings themselves.
June 29, 7:30 only: Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude. (2007, 105 min.) Steve Ross focuses on the sweep of Homer’s work to illuminate his life, and also essential aspects of an America in historic transition, from the lively early engravings for Harper’s Weekly, through the crucible of Civil War, to a nostalgia for a childlike rural America, a clear-eyed look at the ex-slave’s view of Reconstruction, and on to the natural beauty of the Adirondacks and other landscapes, to reach apotheosis in the seascapes of Homer’s late lonely eminence at Prout’s Neck in Maine, so well represented in the Clark’s own collection.
This series is intended to celebrate not only the lives and works of artists through film, but also the art of documentary filmmaking itself, with each film exemplary in a distinctive manner, capped by the actual presence of an artful director/producer to conclude the survey.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Unknown White Male
A meaningful meditation on memory, this film has been derided by some as a hoax, simply because it seems unbelievable. There is a certain convenience in this case of complete retrograde amnesia happening to Doug Bruce -- handsome, clever, and rich, with lots of beautiful friends in beautiful places -- who happens to have a buddy in filmmaker Rupert Murray. And I would certainly suspect a psychological etiology for the ailment, which is essentially a chance to start one’s life over, simply re-boot and begin again with an empty hard drive, but with all your programs and features in place. But it hardly matters if the anomaly is made up or discovered, since it still raises such interesting questions about memory and identity, mind and brain. Are we the product of our experiences, or is there something essentially us that would remain if our pasts were utterly erased? Despite a suspicious similarity to Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this film seems authentic enough to be ponderable. The testimony of neuroscientists is interesting nonetheless, mysterious in its own right. The breakdown of amnesia into anecdotal, semantic, and operational is instructive, even if it seems implausible in effect. So anyway, this guy emerges from a fugue state on the subway to Coney Island, with no idea of who he is or how he got there, with no ID and even less recollection than Alberto Gonzales. What follows is the highly mediated story of his starting over and trying to piece together his past. In contrast to Iraq in Fragments, here I thought the stylized camerawork and editing contributed to the documentary’s sense of authenticity, since it conveyed the disoriented state of the subject in an artful way. Who knows, maybe I was hoodwinked, but that hardly makes me think less of the film. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-65.)
Iraq in Fragments
This highly-personal documentary by James Longley comes with multiple Sundance awards plus an Oscar nomination, and is well worth seeing if you can take the pain of witnessing our misguided war from the other side. Working virtually by himself from start to finish, except for translators and other support staff, Longley creates a film that is brave and revelatory, but also aestheticized and, well, fragmentary. The arty compositions, editing gimmicks, and tricky sound design somehow work against the patent authenticity of the endeavor. Maybe the jump cuts, slo-mo, and MTV editing were required to make the on-the-fly shooting work, but they seem distracting. Longley achieved amazing access both before and after the war, something impossible to duplicate now in the spiraling chaos, and fashions three segments: about a Sunni boy in Baghdad who is essentially an indentured servant to a bullying mechanic, about Shia insurgency in “Sadr’s South”, and a relatively pastoral view of the Kurdish north. Though only an occasional tank or humvee appears in passing in this Iraqi eye view, what holds all three episodes together is resentment of the American occupier. There have been plenty of journalists embedded with American troops, but it take a James Longley to witness a self-flagellation ritual by Moqtada supporters or go on a Mahdi Army action against vendors of alcohol in a local bazaar. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-84.)
Year of the Dog
As a first-time director, Mike White does not have the courage of his weirdness to the extent he did as writer and actor in Chuck & Buck, and does not have the pizzaz of, say, a Richard Linklater directing his script for School of Rock. So this film winds up as neither funny enough nor strange enough, neither sweet or sour, hot or cold. It’s just not crazy or true enough, which makes for a surprisingly long 90 minutes. Which is not to say there aren’t good things in it. Molly Shannon is quite convincing as the 40ish singleton driven quietly mad by the death of her beloved beagle, and is well supported by the likes of Peter Sarsgaard and Laura Dern. But shtick undermines plausibility at some points, and the story begins to seem arbitrarily constructed, rather than discovered in all its quirks and eye-opening twists. (2007, Images, n.) *5+* (MC-71.)
TV docs
No, not that kind. I’m not talking about the long line running from Dr. Kildare to Dr. McDreamy, but rather nonfiction films on television. I’ve been watching a lot of them lately, and along with the new baseball season and basketball playoffs (both hopeful this year for a long-suffering Cleveland sport fan), they’ve been cutting into my film-watching. Here’s a brief report.
I’ve plugged it a few times already, but I have to insist: Planet Earth is must viewing, either as broadcast on the Discovery Channel with narration by Sigourney Weaver, or on DVD with BBC narration by David Attenborough. I prefer her to him, less plummy, more straightforward, but the nature photography is stunning either way, a real argument for High Definition TV. The dozen or so hour-long programs are highly miscellaneous, without much scientific coherence, but cumulatively a vivid picture emerges of the diversity and hunger of life, and how that diversity of hungers is fed by the diversity of our one planet -- the ingenuity of evolution, the marvelous, manifold ways living things have found to survive and reproduce.
Another documentary series with a far less exhilarating theme, and much wider variation in quality was the PBS series, “America at the Crossroads.” I couldn’t bear to watch more than a minute of Richard Perle’s feeble re-assertion of righteousness, and several other films sinned against the art of documentary in my view, but there were two worth looking for and at. The Men Behind Jihad was basically a visual recapitulation of the argument of Lawrence Wright’s essential book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and he appears prominently as a talking head, but the film puts together a lot of archival footage that illustrates the story well. And Operation Homecoming was a moving and informative view of the Iraq experience from the perspective of American soldiers.
A Crude Awakening, airing on Sundance channel, was an entertaining and eye-opening summary of America’s addiction to oil.
Putting together a continuing series at the Clark on “Documenting Artists,” I had occasion to look at two films that appeared on the PBS series, “American Masters.” From Ric Burns, in the familiar vein that he has worked with his brother Ken and independently, comes Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006), which at four hours is inflated both in rhetoric and running time, but still makes the case for Warhol’s importance as an artist, while showing how the shy, strange boy from Pittsburgh came to define fame and celebrity in late 20th century America. Norman Rockwell: Painting America (1999) is more modest in every respect, but also fills in the life story of another sort of American artistic icon, even while favoring us with the “expert” testimony of Steven Spielberg and the like.
Just to justify my dearth of film reviews lately, let me note that I also watched the new DVD release of the recent BBC miniseries of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, which was good of its kind, but if you want to immerse yourself in an adaptation of a Victorian novel, then I strongly reaffirm my suggestion of last year’s Bleak House, recently rebroadcast and now on DVD.
While enumerating my visual distractions, let me note that I am keeping up with the new HBO seasons of The Sopranos and Entourage, but will save comment till they conclude.
I’ve plugged it a few times already, but I have to insist: Planet Earth is must viewing, either as broadcast on the Discovery Channel with narration by Sigourney Weaver, or on DVD with BBC narration by David Attenborough. I prefer her to him, less plummy, more straightforward, but the nature photography is stunning either way, a real argument for High Definition TV. The dozen or so hour-long programs are highly miscellaneous, without much scientific coherence, but cumulatively a vivid picture emerges of the diversity and hunger of life, and how that diversity of hungers is fed by the diversity of our one planet -- the ingenuity of evolution, the marvelous, manifold ways living things have found to survive and reproduce.
Another documentary series with a far less exhilarating theme, and much wider variation in quality was the PBS series, “America at the Crossroads.” I couldn’t bear to watch more than a minute of Richard Perle’s feeble re-assertion of righteousness, and several other films sinned against the art of documentary in my view, but there were two worth looking for and at. The Men Behind Jihad was basically a visual recapitulation of the argument of Lawrence Wright’s essential book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and he appears prominently as a talking head, but the film puts together a lot of archival footage that illustrates the story well. And Operation Homecoming was a moving and informative view of the Iraq experience from the perspective of American soldiers.
A Crude Awakening, airing on Sundance channel, was an entertaining and eye-opening summary of America’s addiction to oil.
Putting together a continuing series at the Clark on “Documenting Artists,” I had occasion to look at two films that appeared on the PBS series, “American Masters.” From Ric Burns, in the familiar vein that he has worked with his brother Ken and independently, comes Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006), which at four hours is inflated both in rhetoric and running time, but still makes the case for Warhol’s importance as an artist, while showing how the shy, strange boy from Pittsburgh came to define fame and celebrity in late 20th century America. Norman Rockwell: Painting America (1999) is more modest in every respect, but also fills in the life story of another sort of American artistic icon, even while favoring us with the “expert” testimony of Steven Spielberg and the like.
Just to justify my dearth of film reviews lately, let me note that I also watched the new DVD release of the recent BBC miniseries of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, which was good of its kind, but if you want to immerse yourself in an adaptation of a Victorian novel, then I strongly reaffirm my suggestion of last year’s Bleak House, recently rebroadcast and now on DVD.
While enumerating my visual distractions, let me note that I am keeping up with the new HBO seasons of The Sopranos and Entourage, but will save comment till they conclude.
Valmont
Though wobbly in tone and language, Milos Forman’s adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons makes it into my Fragonard-related film series at the Clark next Fall simply on the basis of costume and set design. This is a lovely film to look at, and will look great projected widescreen on the museum wall. Made at the same time as Stephen Frears’ version of the 1782 Laclos novel, Valmont ceded priority and esteem to the bravura ensemble of Glenn Close-John Malkovich-Michelle Pfieffer-Uma Thurman. Here the characters are embodied by Annette Bening-Colin Firth-Meg Tilly-Fairuza Balk -- not bad but no match -- their lines have little flavor of period or place, and there’s more bedroom farce than revelation of malevolence and decadence. But oh those locations, dresses, decor! (1989, dvd, n.) *6*
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Reader advisory
I’ve been hither and yon lately, but I assure you I have no intention of abandoning Cinema Salon. On the contrary, I am planning new features. So please bookmark the site and please come back.
And please contact me with comments and/or suggestions (or even heckling) at: ssatullo@clarkart.edu. I am eager to make the site more useful and appealing. Now that Google has improved the Blogger search function, I urge you to use the search box at the top of the page, for ready access to my commentary on a given film or director or actor, to compare opinions or seek recommendations.
I am curious whether other features would make Cinema Salon more attractive. The name was supposed to betoken a discussion website, but I turned the comment feature off when it filled with spam. Now I have seen a number of sites where threaded commentary works well, and I wonder whether a moderated discussion by registered users would be worthwhile? Technical simpleton that I am, I am also contemplating late adoption of another common blog feature, in making a live link from the Metacritic rating I append to most reviews.
As for my own rating system, I will restate my rationale. My 10-point ranking compares neatly with Metacritic’s 100-point scale, though arrived at quite differently. Without pretense to collective objectivity, my ratings are unabashedly subjective, though I like to think they are offered with an informed subjectivity. But I don’t imagine that I am assigning some objective value to a film, but rather my particular response to a particular screening in a particular situation. It might alter considerably upon re-viewing. I wish only to share my enthusiasms and offer my caveats. So here’s what my scale implies:
*5* = B-. Anything less should be taken as a warning, since life is too short to spend on the less than good.
*6* = B. Definitely worth seeing, if you have the time and interest and opportunity.
*7* = B+. Recommended viewing, worth looking for.
*8* = A-. Among the best films of any given year, worth seeking out.
*9* = A. Among the best films of all time, must viewing.
*10* = A+. Go and see this, then come and talk to me about the art of film.
And please contact me with comments and/or suggestions (or even heckling) at: ssatullo@clarkart.edu. I am eager to make the site more useful and appealing. Now that Google has improved the Blogger search function, I urge you to use the search box at the top of the page, for ready access to my commentary on a given film or director or actor, to compare opinions or seek recommendations.
I am curious whether other features would make Cinema Salon more attractive. The name was supposed to betoken a discussion website, but I turned the comment feature off when it filled with spam. Now I have seen a number of sites where threaded commentary works well, and I wonder whether a moderated discussion by registered users would be worthwhile? Technical simpleton that I am, I am also contemplating late adoption of another common blog feature, in making a live link from the Metacritic rating I append to most reviews.
As for my own rating system, I will restate my rationale. My 10-point ranking compares neatly with Metacritic’s 100-point scale, though arrived at quite differently. Without pretense to collective objectivity, my ratings are unabashedly subjective, though I like to think they are offered with an informed subjectivity. But I don’t imagine that I am assigning some objective value to a film, but rather my particular response to a particular screening in a particular situation. It might alter considerably upon re-viewing. I wish only to share my enthusiasms and offer my caveats. So here’s what my scale implies:
*5* = B-. Anything less should be taken as a warning, since life is too short to spend on the less than good.
*6* = B. Definitely worth seeing, if you have the time and interest and opportunity.
*7* = B+. Recommended viewing, worth looking for.
*8* = A-. Among the best films of any given year, worth seeking out.
*9* = A. Among the best films of all time, must viewing.
*10* = A+. Go and see this, then come and talk to me about the art of film.
Clean
Maggie Cheung plays a cross between Yoko Ono and Courtney Love, in this film by her ex-husband Olivier Assayas. It says something about her appeal and skill as an actress that she makes such a grating personality into a sympathetic character -- she has presence and conveys feeling. Nick Nolte contributes a mannered but effective performance, as the father of Maggie’s OD’ed rock star husband, and guardian of the son she is too strung out to take care of. She struggles to get off drugs and put her life together, maybe for the first time, and he offers a message of forgiveness and redemption, played out in small steps and tiny gestures. Assayas’ style is intimate but visually exciting, and he’s got a subtle but sure touch with writing and direction. Can people change for the better? This film holds out a modest hope. Will be interesting to compare to Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-75.)
One Bright Shining Moment
“The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern” is the subtitle of Stephen Vittoria’s documentary. Though the man himself may be forgotten, the term “McGovernite” remains a term of abuse and ridicule in general political discourse, but I remember him with great fondness and regret, so I was happy for this film to resurrect memories and buff up the image of the “prairie populist,” the “right from the start” preacher man “too decent to be President.” The time is still too vivid for me to be in need of much recall, but it was good to hear from McGovern himself both then and now. The film is unabashedly partisan, to its own detriment, but the Vietnam-Iraq parallel does not have to be heavily underlined for the contemporary relevance of this documentary to be painfully obvious. If only we’d listened to George then, we wouldn’t be afflicted by W. now. Sigh. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-64.)
Overlord
This semi-documentary about D-Day won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, but wasn’t released in the U.S. till 2006, probably just as a promo for the now-released Criterion Collection DVD. With a small sample of reviews, it ranked absurdly high on Metacritic’s averaged ranking of the best films of the year. Maybe if I were able to read the liner notes by my old acquaintance (and now ubiquitous film critic) Kent Jones, I might have been more convinced of the importance of this film, but having only the dvd from Netflix, I have to say my response was lukewarm. As a use of Imperial War Museum film archives, it did not satisfy as much as the World At War tv series, which I watched religiously way back when, and can still summon the memory of the music and Laurence Olivier’s narration, behind the footage brought back by some amazingly brave and composed combat cameramen. Here, a slender story of one British soldier from conscription to just the moment before hitting the beach at Normandy is interwoven almost seamlessly by director Stuart Cooper with vintage documentary footage. The rigors of training and then of waiting, without any knowledge or control over your own fate, are most effectively portrayed. The contemporaneous horrors of war come almost as nightmare to the young soldier awaiting deployment, along with premonitions of his own death. It’s an honorable effort but the staged scenes are a little skimpy; what stands out is the documentary footage, and that makes me want (but dread) to watch World At War all over again. (1975, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-88.)
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