Lately I’ve been preoccupied with Clark film programs, past present & future. I was tremendously pleased with the “Toil of the Soil” series that ran through August in conjunction with the “Pissarro’s People” exhibition. It was a rare combination of films perfectly matched to the themes of the exhibition and all of superior quality.
Besides Cinema Salon screenings starting this month, I am planning two series for winter and spring. In January I will present a series called “Escapist Entertainment,” offering the Berkshire audience an escape from ice and snow into sun and sand, but with a catch, paradise not always turning out to be what it looks like. I’ll kick it off with Cast Away, featuring Tom Hanks and Blu-Ray projection, but get more serious with Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach and Laurent Cantet’s Heading South. F. W. Murnau’s silent era black & white semi-documentary Tabu seemed too big a reach for the average audience, despite location footage in Tahiti.
Also alienating to some of the audience would be Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away (1975), but I was glad for the occasion to re-watch this mid-Seventies artifact. It’s definitely cartoonish in style and substance, with the rich blond bitch Mariangela Melato and the swarthy bearded Sicilian Giancarlo Giannini as the deckhand on her yacht, but the battering of women by men now seems even less acceptable than it seemed at the time, even allowing for cultural and temporal differences. Nonetheless this feminist flashpoint retains some amusement, and the Mediterranean island setting would make it perfect for my series, if the film were not so shallow and objectionable.
I also checked out Rene Clement’s Purple Noon (1959), but it lacked the tropical beach scenes I was looking for and registered on me no more than The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), a subsequent adaptation of the same Patricia Highsmith novel. You can see how it made of star of Alain Delon, however. Stay tuned to find out how I fill the last two spots in the series.
In March I will start a series called “Artists Now: Documenting Creative Process.” Waste Land is a definite candidate, and Marwencol likely, as is In a Dream, but I am in the process of seeing every documentary of a living artist at work that I can lay my hands on.
Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (1992) is not in the running, since the artist is long dead, and Marion Cajori’s film is notable mainly for the access she had to the crotchety reclusive artist in old age. She’s a character all right, but what really makes the film is simple head-on, full-frame recording of her amazingly beautiful and evocative paintings, which certainly deserve mention alongside Pollock, DeKooning, and the other macho giants of Abstract Expressionism. I would definitely take a trip to see a retrospective exhibition of her work.
Before her early death, however, Marion Cajori made the feature-length Chuck Close (2007), and that is a must for my series. The film follows a two-month process of Chuck Close painting one of his mammoth self-portraits, interspersed with interviews not just with Close himself but with all the fellow-artists who are the typical subjects of his giant photo-based portraits, which started out seeming figurative and hyper-realist, but have now revealed themselves as gloriously abstract, which in truth they have been since the beginning. So it all adds up to a collective portrait of a community of artists.
Another definite candidate for my series is David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2009), which shows Hockney late in life returning from Southern California to his native Yorkshire, and reverting to plein air landscapes. We get to see the subject of his gaze, and then the painting as it takes shape, in a very instructive manner. Bruno Wollheim’s film is only an hour, so I will pair it with an earlier film of Hockney at work.
Guest of Cindy Sherman (2009, MC-64) does not fit into my series, being more about the art scene than artists at work, and frankly it’s a mess of mixed motives, but I certainly enjoyed watching it. Subject of the title and co-director of the film is Paul H-O, who as a struggling artist in the late Eighties turned to video interventions, and ran a flaky program called Gallery Beat on public access tv in NYC. We see some amusing footage from that program, of him accosting art folk at gallery openings, but when the generally very private Cindy Sherman opens up to him, they hit it off and become a couple, a relationship doomed by her art stardom and his hanger-on status, unnamed on banquet placecards except as indicated in the title. Despite being a post-break-up dissection, the film is good-spirited and Sherman comes across quite well, though the artworld as a whole is skewered.
Again, stay tuned for further reports on documentaries of contemporary artists at work.
