photo book review: Carmen Soth, The Brighton Bunny Boy

Photo courtesy of Little Brown Mushroom.

Here is this week's literally eleventh-hour (twenty-third hour if you keep military time) photo book review, brought to you by the pile of photo books I bought last month.

Last year Magnum photographer Alec Soth was commissioned to work for the Brighton Photo Biennial. But due to a last minute snaggle he was unable to get a work visa in time. At a loss to deliver what was asked of him, on the fly he enlisted his then seven-year old daughter Carmen to photograph what she saw in Brighton. This young woman has now produced two books based on that experience under the auspices of her father, and although in some ways less ambitious than Brighton Picture Hunt,  The Brighton Bunny Boy (Little Brown Mushroom), a collaboration among Carmen, Alec, and Gus Soth,  remarkably conveys both the innocence and anxiety of childhood.

Soth pere recently explained to the New York Times, for whom he occasionally blogs,  that there are wall photographers and there are book photographers, and he considered himself squarely in the company of the latter. I wouldn’t tell anybody not to see a Soth gallery show, but I would tell you to run and find one of his excellent books, from his landmark debut Sleeping by the Mississippi (of which I am fortunate to own the much-sought after first edition - and signed at that!) to the tabloid style newsprint edition The Last Days of W.

He has passed on his gift for the photography book to his daughter, who supplies the kind of openness and imagination that most of us unfortunately grow out of. The Brighton Bunny Boy incorporates Carmen Soth’s text and illustrations with her father's photos of an elusive boy (played by brother Gus) who mysteriously hides in a bunny costume. Such alienation is often seen in her father’s work but I all too well remember that childhood alienation, different from that of adulthood but no less acute, and Soth adresses one of the painful dilemmas of growing up: how to find and assert your identity in the greater society. In the span of eighteen zine-sized pages, a brief but not at all minor drama plays out with character development and resolution. The book is cute and unsettling, a winning combination. May the Soth family continue their monographic winning streak for generations to come.

Also recently reviewed: the new Criterion DVD editions of Sweet Smell of Success and Luchino Visconti's rarely seen Senso for Blogcritics. This post was brought to you by the letter S.

Update: The Seattle Post Intelligencer syndicates Blogcritics content, and Alec Soth just linked to the review from the Little Brown Mushroom blog with the clarification that Carmen took all the photos as well. Yay Carmen!

Patricio has been busy, Part 2: The Wonderful World of Kittens

The "Homewreckers." Courtesy Bright Red Rocket.

Article first published as DVD Review: The Wonderful World of Kittens on Blogcritics.

Microcinema International is best known for distributing video titles from outside the studio machine, and featuring, at minimum, upper-middlebrow aesthetics. Among their recent releases are Seven Easy Pieces, a survey of performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2005 Guggenheim residence; Tatsumi Hijikata: Summer Storm, a document of Japanese Butoh dancers; and the 2002 science fiction feature Teknolust, which stars art-house darling Tilda Swinton in a quadruple role as Rosetta Stone and three Self-Replicating Automatons cloned from her own DNA. (I didn’t believe it either. ) So it was with surprise and delight that I spied on Microcinema's docket of upcoming releases the title I present to you today: The Wonderful World of Kittens. Is this a lowbrow, if adorable and fuzzy, anomaly in their catalog? Is this kitten-porn elevated to the level of performance art? Perhaps the answer is a little of both.

Divided into chapter titles such as “Molly Kitten Plays with a Thing” and "Kittenball Championship," The Wonderful World of Kittens offers surface cuddliness as advertised. At the same time, it is not lacking in the depth one is accustomed to from purveyors of independent cinema.

The chapters are divided between interior and exterior set pieces. In the former, the kittens are frequently let loose on studio backdrop muslin, but there is no reining in the exuberance and messiness of reality, as the kittens wreak havoc on the varieties of man-made ball. The tour de force “Play Ball!” offers a rhythmic electronic score punctuated with electronic pan-flute sounds, signifying the kittens’ abandonment of high society for primeval nature a la The Blue Lagoon. As the program is rated C for Cute, these young explorers will not discover their sexuality. At nearly ten minutes, “Play Ball!” is a long chapter of this wonderful world, but will human civilization degenerate even more quickly? It ends with a kitten batting at the camera, which goes chillingly dead — just like The China Syndrome.

The music for The Wonderful World of Kittens was composed by artist Brian Dewan, whose original music and drawings have also appeared in a series of filmstrip programs. (In 2000 I saw the artist present these charming filmstrips at Brooklyn's Pierogi Gallery.) His score for Kittens is more interesting than you'd expect from your standard baby animals video, though not so interesting that the music overwhelms the kitten play. Still, Dewan pushes the envelope of pet sounds in such chapters as “Kittenball Rematch,” which introduces free jazz violin tones as a musical counterpoint to the feline chaos.

As the chapters unfold, Molly Kitten becomes a clear stand-in for the artist. Molly "Plays with a Thing," is "On the Prowl," "Is Curious." Are these not the concerns of the creative class? Is the reference to Ulyssees more than coincidence? Yes yes yes she said yes.

Kittens reaches its dramatic peak with the startling “Homewreckers.” It begins with the tranquil repose of a sleeping black kitten, but soon breaks down into a scenario of home invasion not unlike Michael Haneke’s brutal film Funny Games. Finally, the program ends with “Naptime.” One can only guess what adorable horrors will ensue upon awakening. The Wonderful World of Kittens was originally released by Bright Red Rocket in 2008. It will be available from Microcinema on October 26 — just in time for Halloween.

Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog of Tokyo

Article as  first published on Blogcritics.org.

Daido Moriyama, along with Nobuyoshi Araki, was part of a new wave of Japanese artists to break out of photographic traditions in the late '60s. For Moriyama, these traditions included things like focus and a level camera; his high-contrast, grainy black and white images are pure street photography, but he's just as likely to print images that are all blur and texture as he is to point his lens on disaffected youth and the banalities of everyday life. Whatever the subject, or lack thereof, his best work is full of energy, and pushes the limits of the form and what constitutes photography.

Moriyama has largely avoided the media, but that changes with the feature-length documentary Stray Dog of Tokyo (a reference to the title of one of his books), which includes extensive interviews with Moriyama as well as with the often hilarious Araki, and Japanese magazine editor and photography critic Kazuo Nishii. More intriguing for photographers, like myself, a single camcorder follows Moriyama on a photo shoot wandering around the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo, not unlike the titular stray. The camera also follows Moriyama to the darkroom, though he shares none of his developing formulas, perhaps not even to himself. Nishii recalls an exhibit which required an enlargement of one of Moriyama's prints, but after a photo lab was unable to replicate Moriyama's print, a consultation with the artist revealed that he himself couldn't remember how he printed that one.

Photographers like me will also be curious to know what equipment he uses. Araki explains that his friend almost always ends up borrowing a camera, which then becomes his. Moriyama's first was a toy camera made of Bakelite (the rugged substance that makes up any number of Brownies and other plastic cameras), and has always felt that you can make a good picture with anything. Then again, the 35mm point-and-shoot he uses on screen appears to be a Ricoh GR1s — no Leica, but not exactly a cheap camera either. But the small, wide-angle compact is perfect for his "no-finder" aesthetic; instead of looking through the viewfinder, he looks in one direction while pointing his camera in the other - from his chest, from his side, even from below his waist. In this manner, the wide-angle lens is likely to pick up whatever it was in that direction caught his eye, be it a businessman out on the town or a group of schoolgirls.

Stray Dog of Toyko also shows Moriyama shooting his very first digital still and video footage - the documentary was shot around 2000-2001, when digital was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. The results are funny, and, despite high-resolution color, recognizably Moriyama. But don't think that he's abandoned the analog. In addition to a steady stream of monographs, Moriyama has lent his brand name to a pocket-sized toy camera that uses 110mm film and is packaged with a small print of his signature stray dog.

In a perfect world, a documentary about Moriyama would be shot in grainy, hi-con 35mm film - something along the lines of Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's now classic documentary of the defeated and soon to be dead Chet Baker. Stray Dog was shot on video, but is edited well enough to rise well above the usual level of documentary as DVD extra. Students of photography and observers of modern Japan alike will learn a lot from 84 minutes with Daido Moriyama.

Seven Uneasy Pieces

Marina Abramovic, "Entering the other side." Courtesty of Microcinema.

This post first appeared in a slightly different form on Blogcritics.org.

Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic, the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, is the first performance artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. To coincide with "The Artist is Present," Microcinema has released Seven Easy Pieces, a document of Abramovic's week-long residence at the Guggenheim in 2005, in which the artist spent seven hours a day performing one of five landmark performance art pieces by other artists and two of her own.

Performance art is by nature ephemeral - documentation may exist only in photographs or perhaps no more than the memory of an audience. Abramovic seeks to remedy this institutional loss - but is anything lost in translation? Seven Easy Pieces, directed by Babette Mangolte, condenses forty-nine hours of performance into a ninety minute video. Abbreviated as it is, the time given to each work conveys a sense of the passage of time: a summary of gestures is introduced and cycled through and repeated, and the gestures are cumulative. So for Bruce Nauman's "Body pressure," as the artist presses herself repeatedly against a Plexiglas divider, you see the traces of skin grease accrue over time, obscuring the view of the artist as she steps back from the wall.

The pieces run from the sublime to the ridiculous, the funny to the self-indulgent, the simply uncomfortable to the frankly disturbing. A re-interpretation of Vito Acconci's infamous "Seedboard" is a case in point for any number of these. In 1972, Acconci spent nine days masturbating for eight hours in the crawlspace under a ramp in Sonnabend Gallery in New York, fantasizing about those walking over him and murmuring explicit thoughts through an amplifier. Ambramovic, despite a repertoire that includes generous amounts of self-flagellation and other varieties of pain, seems in this piece less self-contemptuous than Acconci. She invites her audience, sitting in an intimate circle above her, to interact and tell her their fantasies; in one shot an excited male spectator is seen lying face down, caressing the plywood and gently humping it.

In 1969, a black-leather jacketed Valie Export cut the crotch out of her trousers and trained a machine gun on a movie theater audience. [Ed. - it was a pron theater, and she addressed the men in the audience to "deal with a real woman."] "Action Pants, Genital Panic" dripped Punk Rock at the time, but lost some balls, as it were, in the institutional confines of the Guggenheim. A heckler can he heard telling Abramovic, "Put down that gun or use it!" This may be fodder for those who believe that a work of performance art belongs to its own time: an event that once subverted expectations of passivity has become, if not passive, inert.

Gina Pane's "The Conditioning" is tailor-made for the ascetic element in Ambramovic's work (for her current show, she asked the young performers participating with her to adhere to a strict program of fasting). A jump-suited Abramovic lays on a steel bed atop an array of lit candles, which she switches out as they melt down.

Joseph Beuys, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" may be the strangest of the pieces, and this is coming from someone with a very high bar for the strange indeed. The artist's face is sloppily plastered with gold leaf, fragments of which dangle from her face and fall to the stage (she sweeps up the detritus during the piece). She's accompanied by a taxidermied hare, which she alternately cradles in her arms, walks along the stage with and holds with its floppy ears dangling from her mouth.

"Lips of Thomas" is one of Ambramovic's own pieces, from 1975. Originally performed over the course of two hours, this piece was expanded for the Guggenheim. It is uncomfortable watching at any length. The artist sits naked at a tale, eating honey from a jar and drinking wine as a metronome slowly keeps time. She gets up from the table to stand fully naked before the audience, revealing a five-pointed star drawn on her stomach. She takes a razor blade and cuts along one line of the star, then proceeds to lie on a cross made of ice (underneath a space heater aimed at her stomach), and then sits up to flagellate herself. She puts on boots and a military cap, and waves a flag, lined with the blotted stains from her razored belly, while a Russian folk song plays. Repeat, for an excruciating seven hours.

The seventh day must have come as a relief to both audience and artist. In "Entering the Other Side," Abramovic simply stands in a giant blue dress in the center of the Guggenheim rotunda.

Abramovic said, "I do not want the public to feel that they are spending time with the performances, I simply want them to forget about time." For ninety minutes of at times taxing performance - albeit not nearly as taxing as the seven-hour iterations - I was largely compelled, if not entirely convinced. Seven Easy Pieces is a frequently uneasy time, and may not win the artist any converts. Nor will it answer the questions of purists who may argue whether performance art should be recreated at all. But as a well-produced document, fans of the artist will find it essential viewing.

No thumbs for A Behanding

This post first appeared, in a slightly different form, on Blogcritics.org.

What do you get when you blend violence-as-humor, ironic use of racial and other epithets, casual misogyny, and the kind of relentless profanity that's the sure sign of a lazy writer who can't be bothered to come up with original verbal shock tactics? A Behanding in Spokane is what you get, and, in the case of this critic, eyes rolled all the way into the back of my fucking head.

Irish playwright Martin McDonagh followed his acclaimed Aran Islands Trilogy with a foray into Hollywood. He wrote the the screenplay for In Bruges, one of my favorite films of 2008. But, back on Broadway for the first time in four years, he has taken a major misstep with A Behanding in Spokane, his first work set in America. And what did the celebrated playwright pick up in the New World? A bad case of the affliction that saddles too many writers these days: actue Tarantino-itis.

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Tarantino's writing and directing, but his example has begat so many wannabees who believe that Attitude is all you need for success.

Christopher Walken stars as the behanded Carmichael (affected much?), a man who lost his left hand forty-seven years ago to a gang of cruel hillbillies in a railroad yard. He has been seeking his missing digits ever since, and meets with a pair who claim to have in their possession that long lost hand. If you're eyes aren't rolling already I can't help you. In Bruges worked so well because despite the seeming leading with what appear to be the standard-issue assassins-on-the-run type, there's a lot of heart and emotion behind the characters' motives. It was more than just a po-mo gangster black comedy: it was a moving character study. But Walken plays Christopher Walken, and the self-consciousness of the writing is met by Walken's own self-consciousness - his delivery is forced, his timing mannered, as if instead of putting his signature voice and timing into a well-drawn character, he's competing with the writer's own notion of what a Christopher Walken character ought to be like. Sam Rockwell does somewhat better as the hotel clerk/receptionist; he seems to have walked off the set of a particularly violent episode of the Andy Griffith Show, and that's as good as angle as any to take with this material, but the material really favors for no one - least of all the would-be hand dealing couple, an African American (Toby, played by Anthony Mackie, who gets some laughs mostly at his expense) and a blonde (Marilyn, natch, played by Zoe Kazan) who are subject to nearly all of the aforementioned ironic epithets.

Admittedly I saw the play in previews, but barely a week before it opens in earnest, I can't see the producers coming in to make any major changes. And why should they - the audience I saw it with, despite skewing heavily to the Golden Girl set, laughed at all the right places. There's no accounting for taste, but if you do like A Behanding in Spokane, maybe we shouldn't get the early-bird special together.

how to stave off cabin fever and not become a cannibal

This post first appeared, in slightly different form, on blogcritics.org

From episodes of Gimmie a Break and Perfect Strangers, to the real-life tweeting of reporter Ann Curry, the dramedy of being trapped in an elevator is a staple of entertainment in this age of Otis. Striking the hearts of both the claustrophobic and the Luddite who should have just taken the stairs, these tales of strange bedfellows are especially chilling to those caught in the middle of the snowpocalypse that has left the Mid-Atlantic states without cupcakes for days on end. So what better way to battle cabin fever than with Hallmark Channel's Valentine's Day offering, Elevator Girl? Would you want to be trapped with these people? Come closer - let's take a look.

Under the opening credits we are introduced with keen efficiency to a typical morning for each of our predestined characters: Liberty (Lacey Chalbert, the one on Party of Five who looked like Jennifer Love-Hewitt but wasn't; this is to her great credit, as the career track of her former co-star has led to one of the most misguided and disturbing examples of celebrity too-much-informationitis: Love-Hewitt's public announcement that she had a bejewelled vajayjay ) hits the snooze button and pulls the sheets back over her head, stumbles into a kitchen past a refrigerator encrusted with post-it notes and brews herself a pot of Mr. Coffee. Jonathan (Ryan Merriman, Final Destination 3) - and note that this is by contrast, walks into an immaculate kitchen with granite counters and chrome fittings to make a perfect single-serve espresso.

Jonathan was just made partner at a prestigious law firm, and is on the way to a dinner thrown in his honor. She's on the way to cater said dinner, and runs to catch the fated elevator. I've seen a lot of forced dialogue in rom-coms in my time and I know we'll never see the verbal or charismatic ilk of Bringing up Baby again, but while their banter was not especially interesting (contrary to Libby's small-talk remarks to Jonathan how "interesting" that is), they have a kind of awkward chemistry that was surprisingly believable. It is certainly more believable than the chemistry that's supposed to make us coo at such Hollywood rom-coms as PS I Love You and Crazy Heart. Trapped for just a few minutes, Jonathan and Libby share a little bit of their lives and go their own ways ... to meet again?

"Maybe you were put on that elevator with that guy on that night to learn a little something about yourself." That's Tessa, Liberty's stock funny-looking friend, and alas it is around here that the rom-com formula starts to go bad - not as bad as a box of brownie mix that expired in 2005, but no chocolate chip cookies made from scratch, either.

Still, there are slight charms and textures to come. Patty McCormack's long career began with The Bad Seed, and television credentials that go back to Route 66 with stops at Fantasy Island and The Sopranos. Here she plays the small but crucial role of Rosemary, Jonathan's secretary. Rosemary plays matchmaker and hires Libby to cook for a dinner at Jonathan's decadent condo.This leads us to the first of a recurring variation on get-downism, but instead of the magical ethnic character teaching the stuffy Protestant to get down, Libby teaches Jonathan how to cook hummus. Earthy! The kitchen plays a role in a subsequent scene of get-downism, punctiuated by a funk soundtrack that asks us to "swing it on down and shake it up sister." Is there a clause in the contract for Hallmark Channel scripts that requires this scene? It reminds me very much of a scene in Ladies of the house, previously reviewed in this space. Hmm. Elevator Girl may be formulaic rom-com with standard-issue notions of dropping the soul-sucking nine-to-five job to answer your artistic calling, but the principals do their best to make this a pleasant diversion, and it is a good message for the kids. This Hallmark Channel Original Movie premieres Saturday, February 13th (9p.m. ET/PT, 8C).

TV Review: The Jazz Baroness

first published on blogcritics.org

If I told you I'd just seen a documentary made by the descendant of a beautiful English heiress, you might wonder if it was some kind of vanity project about fine china and silverware and the upper clahsses. The Jazz Baroness indeed depicts sundry accoutrements of the landed gentry, but it is more than that: it tells the story of an unlikely friendship between the titular baronesss and one of the great figures in jazz music, Thelonious Monk.

Hannah Rotshchild produced, wrote and directed The Jazz Baroness, which premieres on HBO on November 25th. Like the Jackie Paris documentary I reviewed earlier this year, the picture is framed as a quest, but in this case it is not the quest of a record collector; Rothschild is the great-niece of Pannonica de Koenigswarter (nee Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild), which makes hers no less than a quest for family and identity. She follows the breadcrumbs left behind by her aunt, who she met for the first time only a few years before few times before the Baroness's death in 1988. These breadcrumbs happen to lead her to Thelonious Monk, who met the Baroness in 1954.

Their backgrounds could not have been more different: he grew up in rural North Carolina, she was raised on banquets hosting the great leaders of Europe. But from their first meeting grew an intimate friendship that lasted till Monk's death 28 years later (Monk penned one of his most lovely ballads, "Pannonica," for her). The documentary is very much about class and race; and, although it may be a cliche, about how music can profoundly bridge the gap between the differences that society builds between people - differences which in the end are arbitrary. Rothschild (whose words are read by Hellen Mirren) left behind a life of English manorial comfort in order to live a life among the be-bop elite in New York City. If the director'send result of the director's quest for identity is only hinted at, it is clear that her great-aunt, though very far from home, found herself indeed.

Hannah Rotshchild admits at the start that she did not enter this project a jazz expert; and at the end, she admits she still isn't. But the sensitive use of the music, and respect for the musicians she speaks with (Sonny Rollins, Curtis Fuller, and Quincy Jones among them) belies her modesty. Her film is no replacement for Charlotte Zwerin's documentary Straight, no Chaser, but it is a fine companion piece.

I was in a Starbucks recently and heard Monk's solo version of "Ruby, My Dear," one of the great jazz ballads. That I was not surprised to hear it in a Starbucks says something about how far jazz music has come, since it's perception as a forbidding art music to what someone searching for a venti soy caramelmachiatto might consider merely pleasant background music. But if some pilgrim on their caffeinated quest might pause long enough to listen, and find something in the music that resonates with them; then it would seem that THeolnious Monk hasn't lost his touch with the gentry. Sweet.

That's no Dialectical Materialism, That's My Wife!

Dušan Makavejev's most famous avant-garde film was inspired by a book called Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis. If that doesn't sound like a fun night out, you've never seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Criterion scored a hit with their release last year of Makaveyev's two best and most notorious films, WR and Sweet Movie. Now they've done us all a service by releasing his first three films in Eclipse Series 18:Dušan Makavejev, Free Radical.

Fellow iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard similarly pushed the celluloid envelope, but while Godard's narrative-busting seemed like so much calculated exercise, Makaveyev's approach was genuinely omnivorous, hungry for ideas and excited about the possibilities of going beyond narrative. "But don't you see how this is connected too?" you can imagine him waving his arms and throwing his shot glass down, drunk on filmmaking.

Dr. Zivojin Aleksic as Criminologist in LOVE AFFAIR, OR THE CASE OF THE MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.
Makaveyev's films came out of and celebrated the sexual revolution with an equal accent on both words of the phrase. Within the first five minutes of Man is Not a Bird (1965) Makaveyev has set up his two major themes: Marxism and sex. After a credit sequence typeset in stark Gill Sans, "Opening remarks on negative aspects of love" offers a Marxist hypnotist itemizing and railing against the local superstitions. This leads into a sequence with a burlesque singer entertaining a rowdy bunch of factory workers. The film is one of his more straightforward but is peppered with striking imagery, as in a car wash that sounds like a roaring tiger.

Love Affair or: the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) is based on a true story, though again Makaveyev's technique is leagues beyond that of Unsolved Mysteries. Part procedural, part collage, this is one of Makaveyev's more conventional works, though where this director is concerned that's a relative statement.

With Innocence Unprotected (1968), Makaveyev lights the fuse that would explode with WR. It is here that he hits his stride with his unclassifiable collage form - not quite fiction, not quite documentary. He wasn't the only one breaking free of narrative structures - Godard, Chris Marker - but nobody did it with this much fun (pace the preciousness of the Czech New Wave) - and this much sex. Here, he takes as his starting point copious amounts of footage from the first Yugoslavian talking picture, the 1942 film Innocence Unprotected. With just stock footage and a series of interviews, Makaveyev made something remarkable — and he was just getting started. He selectively tints and hand-colors sequences of a stiffly photographed, over-acted melodrama and frames it with interviews of surviving cast and crew members, and intercuts these with scenes of bombed-out occupied Belgrade. The effect is something like juxtaposing a Fred and Ginger movie with shots of bread lines. A work of brilliance and passion, sex and politics - and it's hilarious.

The original Innocence was made under German occupation in 1942. It was written, direct by, and stars Aleksic Dragoljub, a stunt man and love interest. Contemporary footage of the grey-haired acrobat show him still unafraid to test the limits of physical endurance. At one point he takes a steel bar and bends it using his teeth as a fulcrum. He spits out the tooth or two that succumb to the show of strength. Cameraman and sound recordist Stevan Miskovic boasts "Our modern cinema today came out of my belly button." Makavejev's most famous films are joyously sexual; Innocence may be less so, though it is no less a celebration of the human body.

Movie Review: People *LOVE* Photos - Blogcritics Video

Movie Review: People *LOVE* Photos - Blogcritics Video

As a photographer, I'm always curious how other photographers work with models, whether they be friends or strangers. The tritely titled documentary People *LOVE* Photos (couldn't they have come up with anything else? The Naked Eye? A Thousand Words? Look At Me? ), directed by Christian Klinger, looks at three very different women photographers, and what struck me most are the very different ways they interact with their human subjects.

Tanyth Berkeley works in the Diane Arbus tradition of street photography. A street photographer has a number of choices to make in her quest for subjects: do you shoot inconspicuously, as Robert Frank and Walker Evans often did? Or do you interact with your subject, as Arbus did? Berkeley is not a gregarious speaker but her unassuming personality helps her interact with strangers, as we see in sequences that follow her on a photowalk in the streets of Manhattan. She dresses in a kind of New York photographer's camo, in dark hues and with only a single camera, but the spare arsenal is a way not to hide but to approach strangers with all her cards out.

Ashley MacLean and Traci Matlock (aka Rose and Olive) were discovered on the photo sharing/social networking site Flickr, of which I am a member. They are extroverts with a capital E, as also suits one of their specialties — erotica. I don't know if it's just coincidence or if it's a result of their personalities, but their interview segments are the best sounding parts of this documentary. No attempt was made to mix down ambient noise in other segments, and in some scenes, particularly those on the streets of Manhattan, this is very distracting.

The sub-heading of this segment is "Sexuality," and at one point I started to get the feeling that the director was exploiting models in a way that the photographers didn't. It's one thing to photograph the female form in the nude; it's another to show the photographers spraying down a model's breasts with a water bottle. But when the artists start feeding each other raw eggs while topless, you realize that letting it all hang out is just part of the their work. Sexuality is not always portrayed in comforting ways — bloody and bruised bodies are not unexpected sights in their work.

Elinor Carucci is probably the best known of the photographers shown here; her monographs have been published by Steidl and Chronicle, two of the major art-book imprints, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Her work seems to be the most personal of these artists, and the most intimate: Carucci's subject is her family. She examines her relationships with herself and her blood kin in a way that combines the family surveys of Sally Mann with the diaristic and sometimes sensationalistic work of Nan Goldin. Throughout the simple nudes, even those of her C-section scars after giving birth to twins, are about her relationships. A photo of her crying, snot-nosed child has apparently upset some viewers but Carucci feels it's simply an ordinary shot of childhood.

The original score to the documentary is a circular piano figure that sounds unresolved. The music lends a dramatic tension that does not at all suit the proceedings. The music reminds me of the tinkling Ligeti piece featured in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and that alone should tell you how inappropriate it is for a documentary about photographers who go about their work with eyes wide open.

One of the marks of a good photographer is the ability to edit. Robert Frank shots hundreds of rolls of film for the project that became his iconic book The Americans. People *Love* Photos is only 97 minutes but, though no fault of the subjects, seems much longer.

Photo of Tanyth Berkeley courtesy Amadelio Film.

this year in Marienbad

DVD Review: Last Year at Marienbad - Video - Blogcritics
by Pat Padua

Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad is one of the most infamous works of avant-garde cinema. It polarized audiences in its day, when audiences still cared enough to be polarized about an art film. Pauline Kael lamented the "creeping marienbadism" of modern cinema, and given subsequent art-film indulgences you can't really blame her. But is the movie any good? Mariendbad has been unavailable on DVD for years, but thanks to a stunning new transfer from Criterion, a new generation can make up their minds about what did or did not happen last year.

The plot, such as it is, may be little more than high-class melodrama: X (Albertazzi), meets A (Seyrig), at a party and insists he's met her before. The dialogue appears vague and impenetrable: the opening narration is nothing more than a catalogue of a decadent hotel's super-baroque details. But pure cinema takes you through it, literally, as the camera dollies along baroque corridors and follows a shot that may consist of nothing more than two nattily dressed Frenchmen spouting some kind of avant-garde boilerplate ("it was '28 ... or '29"). This subverts conventional narrative, of course, but it's also a celebration of cinema — Resnais and his crew demonstrate that you (if you are a genius surrounded by beautiful people and impeccable craftsmen) Resnais and his crew demonstrate that you can take any old dialogue - say, Alain Robbe-Grillet's - dress and light it and come up with something compelling. Like The Sound and the Fury, you may not know what's happening, but the confident style carries you along - and you will follow that aesthetic anywhere. What is often lost in the controversy about Marienbad and what it means or doesn't mean is that this is simply one of the most beautiful examples of filmmaking ever struck to celluloid. Sacha Vierney's lush black-and-white photography; the handsome pair of Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi; even the man who can't be beat at matchsticks, Sacha Pitoeff, has an otherworldly creepiness that's beautiful; he's no less than the French Timothy Carey. If the film can be taken as an scathing indictment of haut-bourgeoisie values, then it certainly does not eschew beauty, but revels and dreams in it.

Resnais previous and subsequent films were often directly engaged in politics: the Night and Fog of concentration camps, a love affair tinged with politics in Hiroshima mon Amour. But in Marienbad, Resnais puts the real world aside to build something that only seldom is achieved in art: a perfectly imagined, self-contained world. It's a world that's best experienced in full immersion, in a dark theater on a huge screen; but in the absence of that, Criterion's release is essential viewing.

The bonus disc includes two early Resnais documentaries, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), whose tracking shots through vast libraries prefigure Marienbad's camera gymnastics; and Le chant du styrène (1958). Also on board is a half-hour documentary featuring interviews with surviving members of the production team. They were Young Turks working on this production, Resnais included, but their dedication to the project - even though the script mystified many of the participants - were crucial to this masterpiece. In fact, it is through the meticulous craftsmanship that the film is actually less convoluted than it's making. To take one example, a scene where X and A are followed down a long corridor turns out to be assembled from shots of three different corridors. The script girl (Sylvette Baudrot, who still works with Resnais today) helped bring scenes shot months apart into a seamless flow, taking a gesture that Delphine Seyrig makes to turn away in one shot, continue into the second shot, filmed a month later.

the revolution is still boring

DVD Review: A Grin Without a Cat and Inquiring Nuns
by Pat Padua

Director Chris Marker is best known for his masterpiece La Jetee, a 22-minute film consisting almost entirely of still images. This meditation on time and memory, which inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, is one of the very few fiction films in Marker's vast oeuvre. (Less known is the music video he directed for Electronic's "Getting Away With It," which pays homage to La Jetee in its brooding remembrance of things past).

Marker's primary work has been in the documentary genre - but not the documentary as practiced by Ken Burns or even Errol Morris. Rather, Marker is a film essayist. Where La Jetee masterfully edited and juxtaposed the elements of still photographs to fashion a chilling science fiction, his documentary work, at its best, works such magic on the historical and cultural detritus of celluloid. His Sans Soleil (available on an essential Criterion DVD with La Jetee) is the pinnacle of this form, with layers of image and narrative that transcend the ordinary documentary to create a multi-faceted dreamscape of fact.

There may not be a more thorough document of the international student uprisings of 1968 than Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (aka Le Fond de L'air est Rouge). The director/essayist weaves a celluloid tapestry juxtaposing footage of explosives instruction with a television ad where an elderly couple boasts, "Now we're a TWO-set family." Copious tinted stock footage of army training films, pilot's-eye footage of a napalm attack on a village in Vietnam, and of course Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin battle for semiotic significance. But the talking heads (which include the likes of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, natch) and onslaught of revolutionaries fail to incite the fervor of this non-student of the revolution. For the large part (Grin originally ran at what Marker himself admits was a megalomaniacal four hours) the released print is merely three hours) the film lacks the cross-disciplinary layering that makes Sans Soleil so fascinating. While essential classroom viewing, A Grin Without A Cat probably won't interest many outside the academy. But for those who were there in 1968, there's probably plenty of fodder for both sides of the political spectrum.

Inquiring Nuns sounds like a good concept for a half-hour television special: set two young nuns loose on the streets of Chicago asking passersby, "Are you happy?" The problem is that despite the seeming cross-section of the 1968 Chicago zeitgeist - both the hippies and the straight-laced, the religious and the non-believers - there's something about two young nuns asking "Are you happy" that prevents the interviewee from saying anything truly interesting. The respondents who the sisters speak to outside church - fresh after Sunday mass, even - are particularly polite and predictable. Which is too bad, because most of the people they speak to look interesting—you wonder what did the blue-collar worker, the businessman, the African-American grandmother, really think about what was going on in 1968? Many responded that they would be happier if America pulled out of Vietnam but that is all they have to say on the matter.

An occasional score by Philip Glass lends some minor chords to the proceedings but that's the extent of the tension onscreen. More interesting is the bonus material. Interviews with the nuns today reveal that both of them left the order, inspired by the times and each other to question authority (but not their faith) and pave a path that certainly contained more drama than the two television episodes on this DVD.

Art Review (NYC): Jonny Fenix at Leo Kesting Gallery - Blogcritics Culture

Art Review (NYC): Jonny Fenix at Leo Kesting Gallery - Blogcritics Culture

[I promise not to blog about Michael Jackson this week anymore. - ed.]

The art and design world's response to Michael Jackson's passing has been fast and furious – and in some cases prescient. Within days, sidewalk vendors in major cities were peddling King of Pop memorial t-shirts, some of them festooned with variations on Shepard Fairey's ubiquitous red, white, and blue Obama design, the caption HOPE sadly replaced with POP but not yet, as far as this reporter has seen, the plainly accurate DEAD.

As for the prescience, the Leo Kesting Gallery in the Meatpacking District was hosting an exhibition of paintings by artist Jonny Fenix when the King of Pop suddenly shuffled off. The gallery quickly erected an impromptu memorial, showcasing Fenix's work, "Michael's Jacksons", priced to sell at only $3,000. I shot a photograph of this display on fast, grainy film that had expired in the 1990's, imagining that the color cast would reveal something about the fickle finger of fame and the half-life of celebrity. As it turns out, the colors were fairly accurate. Chalk one up to enduring legends or, rather, to refrigeration as metaphor and preservation technique.

Gallery director David Kesting, who opened his space in 2003 as a showcase for "cutting-edge" artists, writes that "Fenix's visual library references the characteristics Americans love while subtly pushing us towards resolution of the negligent hypocrisy we are now becoming aware of." Among the other subtle canvasses decking these Meatpacking District walls are a hairy disembodied penis and a black Jesus flipping the viewer double-barreled fingers. Fenix knows how to get your attention, and his at times tabloid subject matter is presented with a keen design sense.

The exhibit closed on July 5th but its memory may linger in the hearts of pop-culture students and jaded gallery crawlers, while the rest of us will revel in the harder-earned but still morbid laughter evoked by the James Ensor show at MOMA.

meta-grief and the celebrity mourner

, originally uploaded by a nameless yeast.

"I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us. Not a public event."
--Dame Elizabeth Taylor to her 80,000 followers on Twitter, explaining why she turned down a request to speak at the Staples Center memorial.

I don't think there's a *wrong* way to express personal grief. I've seen my share of hospital waiting rooms and funeral homes, and people deal with things the best they can, whether they gnash their teeth or find distraction or simply withdraw. The death of Michael Jackson is a huge media event, but it has also provided an outlet, and for many people a public outlet, for all the ways we grieve. Missing the music and lamenting its decline, missing the child-man and denouncing the man-child, remembering where you were when you first heard "Ben" or "Billie Jean." Whatever you thought of him as a musician or a human being, his work and life is a nearly universal cultural reference, and everyone has an opinion about it - none more so than the celebrity griever.

I come here not to praise the common man but to bury the celebrity. Celebrity remembrances of Jackson or of any dead star can be as much a celebration of the person talking about it as of the deceased - often more so. When Kurt Cobain died in 1994, "Voice of a generation" Douglas Coupland pulled off on the side of the road near Candlestick Park in San Francisco to figure out how he felt about it - and made sure to tell that that to a major newspaper:

"I felt that I had never asked you to make me care about you," Coupland wrote. "But it happened - against the hype, against the odds - and now you are in my imagination forever. And I figure you're in heaven, too. But how, exactly, does it help you now , to know that you . . . were once adored?"

That hand-wringing tenor could just as easily have been texted or twittered on June 25th, 2009, when the level of teeth-gnashing was directly proportionate to the publicity machine of the mourner. A sample from Salon.com's roundup:

• Celine Dion: “I am shocked. I am overwhelmed by this tragedy. Michael Jackson has been an idol for me all my life.”
• Madonna: "I can't stop crying over the sad news. . . I have always admired Michael Jackson…The world has lost one of the greats, but his music will live on forever! My heart goes out to his three children and other members of his family. . . God bless."
• Mariah Carey: "I am heartbroken. My prayers go out to the Jackson family, and my heart goes out to his children. Let us remember him for his unparalleled contribution to the world of music, his generosity of spirit in his quest to heal the world, and the joy he brought to his millions of devoted fans throughout the world. I feel blessed to have performed with him several times and to call him my friend. No artist will ever take his place. His star will shine forever."

But the winner of the celebrity mourner's Highest Achievement in Lack of Self-awareness Award goes to the embattled widow and shoe collector Imelda Marcos. If you know anything about her rise and fall, it's hilarious:

• Imelda Marcos: “Michael Jackson enriched our lives, made us happy...The accusations, the persecution caused him so much financial and mental anguish. He was vindicated in court, but the battle took his life. There is probably a lesson here for all of us.”

A rat done bit my sister Nell and Space Buddies on the moon!

Slave dogs take on the traits of their owners. A Cosmonaut is doomed to cossack-dance alone in orbit with his Budweiser mascot. The security of American space stations is in terrible disarray. Haunted by the deaths of five puppies during the making of the previous Buds installment, Space Buddies, the latest entry in Disney’s storied talking-dog franchise, offers a cruel vision of contemporary dystopia.

The history of canine space travel begins with the tragedy of Laika, who survied a mere hours into launch. Standing on her long lamed shoulders is Spudnick (the voice of Jason Earles), who begins our tale with a melancollie monologue: "I used to dream of being the first dogmonaut to walk on the moon; and now I dream of going home to my boy Sacha." Russian anomie is quickly dispersed by the gathering of American buds, who leave their owners to unite in a quest to go where no pup has gone before.



A note on methodology. The viewer may observe, Well, dogs can't talk - not in America! The evolution of cinema has fostered increasingly efficient means of anthropomorphism. In this instance, to render the mouths and eyes of children agape in awe and wonder, mouth-shapes were superimposed with a computer on previously non-verbal snouts, and Actors were hired to voice words written by a dues-paying member of the Screenwriter's Guild of America. It is a collaborative effort not unlike that which the pups undertake in their adventure - or folly, as one would have it.

The nearly indistinguishable voice talent (remember, the puppies are not really talking! Otherwise they would be scientific wunderpups and even more exploitable) requires visual and verbal clues to bolster canine individuality. Thus, Buddah (Pushing Daisies' Field Cate) spouts quasi-wisdom along the lines of "You never know how deep a puddle is until you jump in it". Rosebud (Liliana Mumy) is one of them "bitches" you hear about in song and is decked in pink ribbon. She doesn't want to go out in the rain and who could blame her? Budderball (Josh Flitter)'s master is a rich kid who has passed his insatiable appetite down to his furry familiar, whose urges lead him to an accident with a space-food vending machine. B-Dawg (Skyler Gisondo), whose homie is a hip-hop moon-walking white kid, cold lamps the spaceride and he goes, yo, "I would have blinged it out a little." Cultural appropriation gives way to painful introspection as B-Dawg muses during liftoff: "Dad always said I should be a little more down to earth. Why didn't I listen?" Mudbud's (Henry Hodges) owner naturally owns a lily-white couch upon which to splatter his namesake, which may be taken as a metaphor for the onset of menstruation despite the fact that Mudbud's owner is a boy.

These are ingredients for a recipe of delight - or are they? Serve your six-year old niece a single serving of this jimmied cupcake and she will be transfixed and entertained for the duration. But unlike recent examples of class-conscious canine cinema like Wendy and Lucy and Hotel for Dogs, this picture fails to address the current economic crisis. Sure, laugh at how the dog's personalities mirror our own human frailties! Go ahead, sigh a little when the kids come home to find their puppies all gone to the moon! By all means cry when B-Dawg greets Spudnick with a culture-crossing, "fo' shizzle!" Remember that blood bought you those tears, you chief executive bastards.

That's No Ladies of the House, That's My Wife!

The Hallmark Channel takes pride in providing “quality family programming,” a welcome antidote to the age of irony. But if you scratch the belly of their latest feel-good movie, you’ll find a barely disguised contempt for the very audience they want to reach.

Ladies of the House is an ensemble piece of no small complexity. In a cinematic tradition that reaches from Stagecoach to The Jane Austen Book Club, characters from diverse backgrounds - in this case, from middle to upper class - come together to meet a common goal, and learn something about themselves in the process. The ladies, Rose (Florence Henderson), Elizabeth (Donna Mills), and Birdie (Pam Grier), are led house-ward by their pastor, who calls a meeting of his best donors and asks them to give not their money but their time - and their hearts. Their charge: to fix up a run-down house to raise funds for the church’s day care center.


Florence Henderson has long been an icon of family entertainment, but her activities outside the Bunch have frequently revealed a sensuous side. Who can forget the sultry chanteuse-in-black whose “That Old Black Magic” brought sexy back to The Paul Lynde Halloween Special? What Brady Bunch-admiring pre-teen did not blush when she took off her blouse for Robert Reed in a very very special episode of The Love Boat? Now in her golden years, Henderson still keeps a touch of vixen underneath layers of pancake makeup, and lets it shine straight through her characterization of Rose. She takes a line like “I think an older body is more interesting than a younger one” and embraces not only the words but herself, literally, caressing her torso as she coos, perhaps at the memory of a very special cruise. Rose’s marriage to Frank (Lance Henriksen) is the most nurturing of the ladies of the house, and the best relationship for a Baskin Robbins product placement — which makes their ultimate fate that much more bittersweet.

Pam Grier has come a long way since Coffy and Jackie Brown, and her Birdie fully laments the salad days - “I used to have tone and muscle!” As the movie opens, she celebrates the retirement of her husband Stan (Richard Roundtree). He worked long and hard towards days which he thought he’d be spending with his wife, but now that he’s retired he finds Birdie thoroughly absorbed in a new project. Birdie also happens to be a textbook example of what I call “get-downism”, as she not only teaches her white sisters to get down with the rap “buy it fix it sell it!” but goes so far as to coax out of a boom box the rousing sheet-rock-laying groove “Get on down.”

With Elizabeth, Donna Mills plays to her prime time strength: the spoiled rich girl. But this time she’s got a heart of gold. Her wealthy husband Richard (Gordon Thomson) gives her everything but love and respect. Elizabeth has the farthest to go to find herself, and designer dresses soon give way to flannel shirts and jeans - she even trims down her manicure! Alone among the ladies’ husbands, Richard does not encourage or support Elizabeth’s efforts. In fact he treats her like an idiot who doesn’t know a hammer from a handsaw.

Therein lies the problem with the film. Richard’s estimation of his wife is exactly the filmmakers’s estimation of the Ladies — they’re not called Women, they’re called Ladies. As the women struggle with their assignment, we’re treated to scenes of infantilized women who can barely take care of themselves. Sure they learn and grow into their roles and find a kindly Latino hardware store salesman who treats them with respect, unlike the burly white permit office clerk who laughs them off when they ask for help. But when it comes time for the final exam, Birdie enlists the help of a strong (but soft-spoken) African-American to softly browbeat the burly permit clerk into scheduling the inspection. Sisters doing it for themselves? Not if the filmmakers can help it. Ladies of the House promises empowerment, but if the inner strength of the lead actresses finally evokes great pride in their accomplishment, it’s no thanks to the script. See the Hallmark Channel Original Movie Ladies of the House, premiering Saturday, October 18 (9/8c).

you're just a sensuous bigfoot

With ol' sasquatch back in the news, it behooves me to give the info-hungry community a brief run-down of my recent cryptozoological-themed viewing.

BIGFOOT TERROR collects four count-em four motion picture features on Sasquatchian themes on a single two-sided DVD. At least half of it is worth the time of the connossieur of bad film.

The title THE CAPTURE OF BIGFOOT (dir. Bill Rebane, 1979) is a bit of a misnomer, since the arctic-furred protagonist seen here is more often known as a Yeti or Abominable Snowman. Sex-craze skiiers and fuzzy-browed bounty hunters are caught in a blanket of snowy acting and writhing with a beast - or two! - on the loose. CAPTURE's is the best-dressed beast on the marquee, but really, what makes this picture worth saving for me can be summed up right here:


In SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED (dir. Michael Findlay, 1974), a pair of fey professors lures a team of coeds to the woods for a weekend of expanded consciousness and exposed cartilage. This motion picture unleashed Hot Butter's smash disco hit "Popcorn" on the world, except that the company that released this DVD couldn't get the rights for it so they subsituted some other generic electronic disco of the time for the unforgettable party before the storm. Redeeming qualities? Probably not, but it made for compelling bad cinema for reasons which I don't recall at the moment.



Lacking both redeeming and compelling qualities is THE SEARCH FOR THE BEAST (dir. R. G. Arledge, 1997) a straight-to-VHS mediocrity unworthy to wash the big feet of even the mediocrities that accompany it. Of some note are a Bigfoot sex scene and what is perhaps the least sexy shower scene ever photographed. Bad Bigfoot!


Last but not least is THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (dir. Harry Winer, 1976) ... which I admit I didn't finish after being warned of a tremendously manipulative and off-topic love story concerning two squirrels. 300 minutes is a lot of Bigfoot, and I had some Bresson next in queue. Still: two mangy thumbs up for the A-side of this quadruple bill; you can send it back with the other side unwatched.


Tangentially related - and alas, the extent of its tangentiality was unknown to me until the program's teleevangelegraphed ending: THE LEGEND OF DESERT BIGFOOT (Dir. Robert Vernon, 1995) an episode of LAST CHANCE DETECTIVES, a series which follows the adventures of pre-teen Christian seekers of truth. High production and family values aside, this was not about Bigfoot at all, but about doing the right thing.