THE CYNEPHILE

I want to talk about a particular instance (perhaps a small, striking moment) in Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat’s provocative take on the classic fairytale by Charles Perrault. i As she has done in previous films (most notably Anatomy of Hell), Breillat makes use of a framing device to set off the dominant narrative, punctuating the Bluebeard story with interludes of two young sisters reading the tale aloud to each other. As Micheal Koresky writes in his excellent Reverse Shot review:

The device becomes a way for Breillat to both make a greater dramatic point—about how rules of male courtship are imbued into girls at an early age—and to simultaneously deflate her own drama by acknowledging it as child’s play. The younger girl, Catherine, played by five-and-a-half-year-old Marilou Lopes-Benites, is more curious, and in ways more sexually sophisticated than her older sister, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti), even if she mixes up and misinterprets some of the information she’s gleaned from the adult world—when speaking of marriage between a man and a woman, she insists that after the wedding, “they want to become homosexuals.” Her older sister corrects her, saying, “Marriage is when two people love each other.” With a glint of sly self-confidence, little Catherine retorts, “No, homosexuality is when they’re in love.”

This little exchange provokes a genuine burst of laughter — and Breillat in general is not known for inducing giggles. While the joke is funny on a contemporary level (petite Catherine should be enlisted as the cutest Prop. 8 activist ever) it is also a Lacanian jeu d’espirit that reveals an anxiety over heteronormative coupling (which reaches its apogee with marriage). Specifically, it reminds me of an anecdote in L’Instance du La Lettre in which a little boy and a little girl (Lacan informs us they are brother and sister) are seated across from each other in the train compartment. There is a window that affords them a view of the platform where two doors are situated. The little boy speaks first upon the train coming to a stop. “Look,” he says, “We’re at Ladies!” His sister insults him: “Imbecile!” she says, “Don’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”

But–attendez!–both children are equally mistaken, because they confuse the plaques above the bathroom doors that bear the signifiers “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” with their current location, the name of the train station. Lacan, ever the raconteur, can’t resist a bit of hyperbole when he ostensibly gets around to the point of this story: “To these children, Gentlemen and Ladies will henceforth be two homelands toward which each of their souls will take flight on divergent wings.” This is evidently a joke with not-so-funny moral: Heterosexual orientation (which is by no means biologically necessary) is an association that is gradually learned: it is an ideological position that is taken up through normative conditioning, through repeated re-marking.

The sisters’s dialogue in Bluebeard also emphasizes the role of signifiers as they are inducted (in part through fairytales) into the École des Femmes, and petite Catherine’s playful attitude towards words reveals a suggests an whimsical attitude towards language in which words are not tools but toys, and words can mean whatever the child wants them to mean. (Alice in Wonderland: “At least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”) However, what is amusing and curious in children is pathological in adults; evidently, once a child reaches a certain age, he or she cannot play with the materiality of the signifier in quite the same unconscious way.

From a textual standpoint, the framing device reveals Lacanian frame of mind — something I think often gets overlooked when considering Breillat’s approach to cinema. It is the equivalent of a parallax view, providing a vantage point from which to “look awry” at the Bluebeard story. The framing device de-sutures us from the Bluebeard narrative and its accompanying circuit of male/female desire. It also provides an obstacle to identifying too closely with any one character — and that’s exactly what makes Breillat’s films so much more interesting than that particular genre of European art porn (or something like The Girlfriend Experience). Her films constantly question our perceptions of intimacy, which is precisely a question of where we end and others begin.

On that note, here is an extraordinary interview with the provocatrice herself on that very subject. Her view on art: “Everything can be expressed by 24 images per second and 26 letters.”

Big Art Group, which has a show now at Abrons Arts Center, is one of the most interesting art collectives working today. Going to a B.A.G. performance is not for the faint-of-heart — they’re loud, fast, in-your-face multimedia extravaganzas. The group’s work is something like a combination of a theater performance, concert, and several film projections, all at once. What I love about the group is the way in which they hyperbolize our consumerist, technophilic and simulacrum-laden existence, transforming it into camp spectacle. (Sontag: Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.) The group’s founder, Caden Manson, describes it as such in an interview: “In the U.S. we are working from within the Image Spectacle; subverting the message and scrambling the codes.” Their invention of what they call “real-time cinema” is the equivalent of strapping an Errol Morris Interrotron to the performers’ chests, allowing the performer to be projected onto one of many screens. This is incredibly striking visually and provides viewers with an interesting choice: do I look at the body of the performer right in front of me, or the enormous close-up across the room? Which feels more dramatic, more immediate, more real?

I’ve seen three performances of the group so far: S.O.S., The Imitation, and Cinema Fury. Above is an excerpt from Cinema Fury to give you an idea of what they do. This show was perhaps the most raw of the three, and it did include that cliché inulgence of performance art, covering oneself with chocolate sauce (B.A.G. added glitter to the mix). But while I wasn’t always impressed, I was never, ever bored. Unlike most contemporary art, Big Art Group’s theater of cinematic attractions actually can compete with mainstream entertainment. Like so-bad-it’s-good television, you just can’t look away.

A film company in Lagos controls 200 subsidiaries that make popular films which never make it to the movie theaters but are instead distributed across Africa on DVD. 600 new productions every week. Is this a new flowering of cinema? The subject matter is certainly tough enough.
–What sort of things do they tackle?
–One film, for example, is about three women who go to Europe as sex workers. Before setting off, they go to their tribal medicine man to acquire some “good luck.” But they don’t have any good luck in Europe. The medicine man who sold them the charms has moved to New York. It turns out that a new baby needs to be sacrificed for the promised miraculous luck to become a reality.
–The women travel to New York
–Yes, that’s exactly what happens in the movie. They force the magician to marry one of them and to sacrifice the child who is born soon afterward. And from then on they expect their second expedition into the heart of Europe to bring them the required good luck.
–Is there any censorship?
–The DVDs are beyond the reach of censorship.
–Do critics help disseminate the products?
–There are no critics.
–Is there any feedback to suggest how the products are received by the customers?
–The feedback of cash.
–Which suggests that this type of product is satisfying a real demand.
–Exactly.

(From Cinema Stories by Alexander Kluge, trans. by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, 2007)

A few months ago a friend sent me this fascinating article about Eva Tanguay, an outrageous but nearly-forgotten vaudeville actress who may have been the inspiration for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Whether or not this is the case, and whether or not she deserves the title of “first” rock star does nothing to diminish her star quality: Ms. Tanguay understood the essential ingredients of celebrity. What she wasn’t cognizant of was the need to record herself for posterity, and this is perhaps why she fell victim to history. Only one 78 rpm recording exists of her voice, that of her signature song “I Don’t Care.”

Tanguay also only made one feature which I would give my eyeteeth to see: the 1916 silent film The Wild Girl.

Performance excerpts, along with clips from the The Wild Girl (And yes, that’s Judy Garland singing ‘I Don’t Care.”)

The author points out in the article that press and popular literature mention Tanguay all the time. I came across this delicious anecdote in a book that I just ordered and I can’t get enough of: Show Biz, from Vaude to Video, by Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr. Luc Sante describes it in his source notes as “a history of prewar American popular culture derived from the files of Variety and narrated in that paper’s side-of-the-mouth style.”

The book is treasure trove of colorful details, and this Tanguay entry is one of many. Behold:

Heywoud Broun, as drama critic for the New York Tribune, reviewed her act under headline:
SOMETHING ABOUT WHICH EVA TANGUAY SHOULD BE MADE TO CARE

Wrote the acidulous Broun:

“Ours is a democracy, so probably nothing much can be done about the singing of Eva Tanguay. But even in a free country, there should be some moral force, or physical if need be, to keep her away from the ‘Marseillaise.’ She should not be allowed to sing it even on her knees, and it is monstrous that the great hymn of human liberty should be shrilled as a climax to a vulgar act by a bouncing singer in a grotesque costume begirt with little flags.

Miss Tanguay sings in French, and I have no idea whether she is trying to be funny. I never know what she is trying to be except noisy. I think she is the parsnip of performers. The only cheerful song in her repertory yesterday was one in which she hinted that some day she would retire. Miss Tanguay is billed as ‘bombshell.’ Would be to Heaven she were, for a bomb is something which is carried to a great height and then dropped.”

The outraged Eva promptly took an ad in Variety. With more courage than prudence, she reprinted the withering Broun review under the scornful headline: EVA TANGUAY–THE PARSNIP OF PERFORMERS. And then Eva let loose her blast of indignation, in some very free and fiery verse:

“Have you ever noticed when a woman succeeds how they attack her until her character bleeds? They snap at her heels like mongrels unfed, just because she has escaped being dropped into FAILURE’S big web. They don’t give her credit for talent or art. They don’t discount a very hard start. They don’t give her credit for heartaches or pains; how she grimly held tight to the reins when the road ahead was rocky and drear; how smiling she met every discouraging sneer. AND…

Now to you who have slandered, YOU are dirt ‘neath my feet, for I have beaten your game and it’s a hard game to beat!”

Apologies for the light posting as of late; I’ve been doing some under-the-hood work on the site which will hopefully will allow me to communicate with more of you more effectively. See where Anna is pointing? She is directing your attention to — ta-da! — my new mailing list!

If you’re generally not a blog reader but you make an exception for mine (um, hi mom) sign up to get a special version of THE CYNEPHILE delivered directly to your inbox. Problems, tips, suggestions? Email cynthia@cynephile.com.

Forgive me for beginning with beginning with an insidious Kantian claim: good performance art is marked by an air of imponderability. Its most salient feature is its presence — its aliveness and unpredictability in the here and now. Its power is not conceptual but visceral, and though it can be parsed, talked about and chewed over after the fact, if it’s any good, what you will remember will not be abstractions of thought and meaning but the unforeseen sensations and emotions that made that-thing-there-that-you-see-and-hear stand apart from everyday life.

Imponderabilia is a 1977 performance in which Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay stood on opposite sides of a doorway, forcing visitors to squeeze between them in order to pass through. I first saw a video of this piece at ShContemporary and while I appreciated that it was projected near the entrance, it felt a bit dated to me, stuck in the Body Art Moment. The “choice” forced by those who transverse the narrow passageway — to face the man or woman — felt disingenuous. On another level, I feel dissatisfied with just footage of performances: drained of the aura that emanates from live bodies, the initial provocation becomes an object of historical interest — nothing more, nothing less. In other words, watching videos of 1970’s performance art takes me straight back to endless discussions of gender at Bryn Mawr [cue Indigo Girls soundtrack here] which — let’s face it — gets old pretty quickly.

WHAT!? (Shut up, Bryn Mawr.)

Marina Abramović’s retrospective and performance at MoMA doesn’t resemble so much school, but rather boot camp for performance artists. Scattered throughout the exhibition are “re-performances” (Abramović’s term) of her most famous pieces. Some of these are rather tame, such as a man and a woman joined together by their hair. Others look downright excruciating: for the piece entitled Luminosity, a woman balances precariously on bicycle seat mounted high upon a wall. The oft-talked-about re-performance of Imponderabilia is participatory, and you too can brush up against the unclothed body of your choosing, albeit under the eye of an exceedingly nervous guard who stands an arm’s length away.

What I was surprised to discover was that Abramović’s performances still retain a bit of their sensory violence, even thirty years later. By violence I mean not merely the potential to shock but a latent or prospective violence, the violence of a potential reaction or expression. I have to admit my heart raced a bit faster passing through the two naked strangers (and since you asked, I faced the woman). And Luminosity snatched my breath away when I realized that it was a real nude outstretched on the wall and not a projected image.

But the most chilling performer is of course Marina Abramović herself. John Perreault is right in that none of these performance art rookies can match her level of charisma, and in person, she struck me as a peculiar synthesis of a Buddhist monk and a witch. For her performance at MoMA, she will sit in silence at a table for the length of the exhibition — more than three months. You can sit in the empty chair across from her, but she won’t speak to anyone during the entire duration of the piece. The performance is called “The Artist is Present” and it as simple as it is profound.

Marina Abramović sitting across from Tehching Hsieh, another master of endurance.

Except when she isn’t present. In this edition of Marina Abramović 2.0, the performance is webcast via a live feed from MoMA’s website. You can check in with Marina when the museum is open, and check out whoever is sitting opposite the diva at that very moment. Part JenniCam, part Andy-Warhol’s Empire, the webcast hangs onto the liveness but subtracts the presence. One hopes that people will not forgo seeing Abramović in person.

In addition to the webcast, Abramović’s (and perhap’s MoMA’s) obsession with documenting her work is more than evident here, with three cameras, light reflectors, and a photographer that will snap the picture of every person who sits across from her. This is nothing if not a movie set, with Marina as its star.

Except when she isn’t. When I visited the museum, a performance artist named Anya Liftig came dressed as Marina in a royal blue dress, her hair braided over her shoulder. On that day, I would say Marina and Anya shared equal billing, as everyone was entranced by this spectacle of look-alikes looking at each other. Here’s what Anya wrote on Jerry Saltz’s facebook page about her experience:

I went through so many transformations as I sat there. Initially, I wanted some rise out of her, some acknowledgement of my gesture. Then I wanted to confess, as if I had been a bad child. Then, I felt myself get so angry that I almost started to cry. Why was she so special and why was I so small and weak? The glory of the venue wore off rather quickly. At a certain point, I felt like we were locking horns. She leaned forward and so did I. I started aping her every little movement and I kept hearing myself say, “move over bacon, here comes sausage.” Then I would crack again. She’s so strong. I was intimidated. She is like a mountain. She is my hero. But I knew I could make it through the day. I was hallucinating all over the place. She looked like a baby to me at one point. I thought about how hard it is to let myself be loved, I wondered if she felt that way too. I asked her with my mind. I wondered what I wanted out of her, why approval from anyone was so important. I wondered if I really just wanted all of the people in the atrium to loathe me so I sat there and let them loathe me. I thought about my parents and that one day they will die and I will be devastated. I thought I was hallucinating the whole thing. I thought that performance art is a more wonderful experience than any drug ever. I wanted to pee really badly. I wanted a way in. I wanted my contacts to stop falling out of my eyes. Every time I thought about leaving the chair, I got pissed at myself. I got pissed at her. I got pissed at the museum. I just got pissed. And damn it felt GOOD.

Getting pissed is pretty imponderable, if you ask me. And though some have criticized “The Artist is Present” for being highly scripted, Anya’s performance proves that there’s space for unforeseen and unpredictable circumstances to arouse viewers (and potential performers) alike.

John Perreault’s Artopia review

A post-performance interview with Anya Liftig from No Smarties

Watch this film immediately if you are partial to any of the following: elevated trains, jazz, vintage views of New York City, sunrises, or sunsets. It ranks up there as one of the most sublime train films ever made, and the combination of the Duke Ellington’s soundtrack, upside-down-all-around angles, and lightning fast cuts make this commuter train feel more like a ride on the Coney Island Cyclone!

The train featured is none other than the Third Avenue El, which suspended Manhattan service in 1955, two years after this film was made. Pennebaker writes, “I wanted to make a film about this filthy, noisy train and it’s packed-in passengers that would look beautiful, like the New York City paintings of John Sloan.” The Ashcan artist Sloan was also fascinated by the El, and his impressionistic paintings capture the lively ambiance — if not the movement — of the train. His painting Pigeons in particular could almost be an outtake from the film.

John Sloan, Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street [1928]

John Sloan, Pigeons [1910]

But I wonder if Pennebaker was also inspired by the short film Third Avenue El, which was also made in the 1950’s and contains many avant-garde views of the city along with a diverse (and often funny) portrait of the passengers that took the train on a daily basis.

New York City’s elevated trains have made their mark on popular culture, often as a menacing symbol of an overcrowded urban landscape. But on the eve of its destruction, Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express proved that the new vantage points afforded by the towering El could also be glorious.

More on Ashcan artist John Sloan: “The fun of being a New York painter… is that landmarks are torn down so rapidly that your canvases become historical records almost before the paint on them is dry.”

More on the New York City El in photography and film, from the ICP blog Fans in a Flashbulb

Vincere means victory, and Bellochio’s latest is a win from start to finish. I saw this film last year at the New York Film Festival and was blown away — almost literally by the Italian Futurist supertitles that whoosh in from above and nosedive their way onto the screen. The film paints a thrilling historical portrait of Ida Dalser, Il Duce’s first wife and suppressed love interest who bore him a child. Aside from its stunning visuals, the film is enlivened by an absolutely bravura performance by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who is widely known in Italy, and should be more well-known here. An opening shot/reverse shot sequence reveals her attraction for Mussolini as she watches him denounce God in his characteristically overbearing oratory.

A young Mussolini [Filippo Timi] addresses the crowd.

Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalser is aroused by his singular vision.

She is among the many who fall under his rhetorical spell.

This sequence makes it pretty clear that the qualities that make her lust after Mussolini are the same that compel the Italian people to fall for fascism, and that we are to read Dalser’s seduction and subsequent betrayal by Mussolini as allegorical. While it’s entirely possible to read this movie as *only* a historical portrait, you’d be missing half the fun, because Vincere is among the most biting satire that Bellochio has ever produced. The sheer pompousness of some the newsreel footage, the grandiose media gestures and spectacles — Bellochio ushers them in like gangbusters in this condemnation of the state. And yes, Il Duce is an easy target (perhaps too easy) but that doesn’t mean Vincere isn’t worth applauding. Bellochio’s arrows never lack sting, especially in light of contemporary media fascists like Berlusconi.

And for those who love the aesthetics (er, not the politics!) of Italian Futurism, the film offers of a visual feast of fashion, fonts (including the aforementioned supertitles above), and historical footage.

An Italian Futurist Study Guide (To brush up before you go).

Or you can just take a cue from F.T. Marinetti:

“We will glorify war — the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” –The Futurist Manifesto

For me, the loveliest discovery of Armory Week (which is not, by and large, the time to chance upon new art) were the kinetic sculptures of Robert Breer. The avant-garde animator / rotoscoper par excellence also makes motorized, tongue-in-cheek specimens that made me smile, especially in the midst of an abundance of morbid assemblage art and limp attempts at appearing revolutionary. Most of these pieces trembled just so, making me doubt the source of their movement and forcing me to take a second look. The genius of these sculptures, I think, is the way that Breer bestows everyday items with a slight animism, turning household objects into these kooky/creepy minimalist robots. It’s almost as if Breer was inspired by my favorite childhood movie, (which is an unparalleled surrealist MASTERPIECE which has yet to be recognized as such):

Here are some exhibition views kindly sent to me by gb agency, the Parisian gallery that represents Breer. Still images obviously can’t do these sculptures justice, but I will try to describe their movement below.

Untitled (flower pot), 1962. Painted metal, flower pot, motor. The stem of this gothic flower slowly twitched and turned.

Zig, 1965. Painted styrofoam, wheels and motor. Imagine a staircase turning into a Roomba.

Porcupine, 1967-2006. Cut foam, wooden sticks, motor and wheels. This thorny lil’ guy shivered and scurried about.

Rug, 1968. Motorized sculpture with aluminum blanket, two motors and wheels.

My favorite piece was a simple nugget of gold foil, motorized to slowly crinkle and uncrinkle itself. It was shown next to Breer’s virtuosic Recreation, which also features a dynamic square of paper.

I feel like Breer is overdue for a mini-retrospective, perhaps at a smaller venue like The Drawing Center or a place where hand-drawn animation is still practiced in earnest. In this era of Illustrator, Pixar and sophisticated CGI modeling, the imaginative potential of a sketch drawn with an oh-so-human hand should not be overlooked.

A portrait I took of Jonas Mekas last March. A toast to cinema!

This makes me so happy that I had to share it right away: Jonas Mekas has a new website:
http://jonasmekasfilms.com/

The introduction alone left me grinning from ear to ear.

The video section is an incredible treasure trove, and an important archive in its own right. The list of those featured reads like a who’s who of the avant-garde: Carl Gustav Jung, Salvador Dali, the Velvet Underground, Frank O’Hara, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Patti Smith, Nam June Paik, Robert Frank, Philip Glass, Carl Dreyer, Ken Jacobs, Stevie Wonder, Jackie Onassis (!), Timothy Leary, Stan Brakhage and more.

There’s also a section of Jonas’s poetry, in Lithuanian and in English. People often forget that Jonas is also a poet, but after reading some of his work it’s clear that poetry is essential part of his DNA as an artist.

But what I love most about this website is that you get a sense of Jonas’s approach to art and life, which is joyful and boisterous and spontaneous and sensual and rife with childlike wonder. Never infected by a deadening professionalism, he looks at the world generously (and hard) and is able to communicate the fragile beauty that is cinema (and life) to those willing to see it. Whenever I see a film by Jonas, I am always struck with the desire to drink up that beauty with my entire being.

Jonas’s new website was designed by Andy Doro, who aside from being a good friend, also helped me with the coding for this website. Congrats Andy! I raise my glass of Å vyturys to you.