My avoidance in writing about George Lucas' Star Wars Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith thus far has been a matter of circumstance: until this afternoon, I have not had the opportunity, or more accurately, taken the opportunity to see the latest installment in the trilogy. Moreover, since most of you have seen or will see the film regardless of what any critic thinks, there seems little reason to expend too much energy composing a piece on Revenge of the Sith. In my opinion, at least, the job of the critic is not to discourage one from seeing any given film; it might be to temper excessive critical praise, but it shouldn't be to sabotage a film's box office. (Not that any critic on the planet has the power to do this with a film like Episode III.)
That was before I saw the latest Star Wars. Having belated seen 2005's biggest event movie, I feel the need to offer my impressions of the picture, for no other reason perhaps than to feel as though I am receiving some sort of justice for the nearly two-and-a-half hours and $10.75 that I spent seeing it. It goes without saying that I didn't enjoy the experience. However, I will concede that that reaction alone doesn't merit my writing and certainly doesn't justify your reading. So let me be more clear, and certainly more objective: Star Wars Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith is a failure. By this I don't mean that it is poorly made, written, or acted: these are all to varying degrees imprecise characterizations that are ultimately open for debate anyways. (Though yes, it is all three.) More to the point, Revenge of the Sith is internally incoherent and is therefore a failure, though not a complete one, given that it does set up the fourth episode in terms of plot.
To preface, it is important to note that Episode III does have a viewpoint, which is in itself a good thing, so long as we expect something more from our movies than visceral pleasure. That its viewpoint is undeniably anti-Bush (and critical of Iraq) is in this way a value neutral aspect of the narrative. The problem with Revenge of the Sith is not that it holds this position, but rather that it is inconsistent it its rhetoric. To make this assessment, all one really needs to do is recall pretty much anything that the Padme character professes. At one point Padme asks if it could be that they are on the "wrong side." She argues likewise that the war was a result of their failure to listen and similarly that they should have allowed diplomacy to run its course. Were this not enough, we are explicitly told that it is the Sith, and not the Jedi who believes that "if you are not with me, you are my enemy." Only they traffic in absolutes. I hope Laura has been able to console her undoubtedly devastated husband/the leader of the free world.
The irony in all this, of course, is that the Jedi too believe in absolutes. Shortly thereafter, Anakin says that it is the Jedi who are evil, "from my point of view," to which Obi-Wan snaps back, "then you are lost." This point seems so exceedingly obvious that one wonders how Lucas could have missed this massive contradiction in his discourse. The Siths in this film are evil, they are wrong. Full stop. That Star Wars operates according to moral absolutes -- the force and the dark side, for instance -- is one of the clearest dimensions of the films' collective perspective. In attempting to make the sixth installment more politically sexy by infusing the work with a certain moral relativism, Lucas has contradicted the moral laws of his fictional universe. The problem is not that he is skewering the Bush administration's Iraq policy; it is that his attempt to do so has rendered his text incoherent, and therefore a failure, as long as it is relatively clear that this is one of the purposes for his film.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. No one will remember this film a hundred years from now. Perhaps in some film textbook somewhere, someone will read that people spent weeks standing in line to see a film proffering a Buddhist viewpoint (that the source of suffering is desire) with an Old Testament inflection, evident in the Emperor's garden tempter and the insistence that evil be purged by the sword (or the light-saber). No, it will be enough to say that Revenge of the Sith made a lot of money, which is perhaps Lucas' greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker. In future, I hope he sticks to making cameo appearances on the O.C. If I offended you in my criticism of the film, there's your olive branch: I'm a regular viewer of the O.C. Now we're even.
If you are interested in viewing English-language science fiction that will be studied long after we're gone, then I would recommend the work of Canadian director David Cronenberg. Recently, I caught up with his 1983 masterpiece, Videodrome, which shares little with Lucas' work beyond their ostensible genre. Videodrome is basically everything that Revenge of the Sith isn't, which is to say that it is self-conscious, and possesses a coherent viewpoint.
James Woods stars as the programmer of a small-time, soft-core porn channel. When he discovers a program entitled Videodrome, his life begins to change relative to the violent content he witnesses on tape. Ultimately, Videodrome is an allegory for the effects that violent and sexual content have on their viewers -- the two are conflated in this Baudelaire-inspired narrative -- within a narrative that has each in equal measure. Yet, if the frankness of Videodrome is enough to offend its more conservative viewers, Cronenberg finally renounces sexual and violent pornography alike, arguing that it was their consumption that was the impetus for the destruction meted on a number of the film's characters. Its presentation is no contradiction as long as one assumes non-virginal audiences in both these respects. This is a film for adults, thoughtful adults.
The true strength of Videodrome, to be sure, lies in Cronenberg's successful integration of this thesis into the narrative structure of his sci-fi-horror film. If Revenge of the Sith tells us its message, Videodrome shows it to us through a form that has fully integrated the contents of its message This is the kind of art from our distant past which we still study, and will continue to do so long after there are no wookies left in our collective consciousness.
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Friday, May 27, 2005
Current Exhibitions: Monet, Basquiat, and "Little Boy"
Opening today at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames: 1859-1914 is what it promises: a multi-media survey of England's most famous waterway. Likewise, as the name intimates, it is Monet's work which is not only the centerpiece of the exhibit, but is also its most interesting feature. Given the artist's declaration that it was "instantaneity [and] above all the enveloping atmosphere" that most interested him, the Thames with its infamous fog perfectly suited his purpose. In his "Houses of Parliament..." cycle (1903-4) for instance, the titular structure is portrayed through various densities of fog, rendered by the relative sharpness of the structure and the intensity of the light, whose position likewise marks the specificity of the time depicted. In this way, Monet limns both a precise moment in time -- the program of the Impressionist -- and also the tactile presence of the fog. Put another way, Monet's Thames work seeks to transcends its sensory limitations, adding touch to its optical aspect. It does so not through physical reproduction of the tactile, but rather in a certain evocation, impelling the viewer to recall their former experience of precisely such a place. The strength of Monet's London paintings thus depends upon the imagination of the viewer; however for the viewer who actively engages with his work, the effect is an art that transcends the immediately contours of the medium's ontology.
Outside of the Monet's, perhaps the most interesting piece in the exhibit, at least for his aficionados, is James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne (circa 1870). This early work of a series with the same name, having the appearance of a single grayish, pale-dark blue color-field, with a barely visible horizon line, possesses the same quality as his decorative arts interior design or his portraiture wherein the subject's garment and the backdrop seem to be cut from the same material. In all these, attention is called to the unity of the work, and implicitly, in the case of the paintings, to the fact that the aesthetic object is in fact a painting. His is an inherently reflexive, and therefore, profoundly modern art.
Elsewhere in the Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat, a career survey of the notorious Brooklyn-born artist who died in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven, continues to draw well (the exhibit will close on the fifth of next month). If "Monet's London..." shows how painting can transcend its own material limitations, Basquiat is symptomatic of everything wrong with the plastic arts of the not-to-distant past. Sure, his is an ouevre that builds upon the iconography of his ancestral Caribbean, the graphic forms of his lower-class rearing, and taps into the anger of his zeitgeist, but then again, the lack of lucidity on display in Basquiat's work sorely limits its rhetorical strength. In an untitled piece (1981), said to have been mistakenly referred to as "Skull," the limits of Basquiat's art finds its pictorial analogy: a cluttered skull, filled to overflowing with violent forms that add up to little more than the uncertainty that it initially announces. Lest Basquiat's irrationality is taken as insight, however, it should be added that a chaos of this sort is often under-girded by rhetoric which is clearly imparted to the observer, as with the best of surrealist art. Indeed, the ultimate problem with Basquiat's art is that it argues through emotion without making sufficient recourse to the intellect. It is angry art that fails to make the case for its rage.
Whereas Basquiat fails to adequately articulate the crisis of his moment, there is no similar deficiency on display at the Japan Society's Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (which runs through July 24th). In this multi-artist, multi-media survey, the vitality of Japan's youngest generation of artists is drawn into sharp focus. From the monumental works of Chiho Aoshima (born 1974) that first greet visitors to the exhibition, it is clear that Japan's current crop of visual artists is reinventing traditional and newer idioms alike in order to parse a particular anxiety evidently shared by a number of its artists. In Aoshima's Magma Spirit Explodes -- Tsunami is Dreadful (2004), manga (comic book) art and the horrors wrought by the subject matter are mixed with traditional understandings of a universe animated by spirits (Shintoism) and the traditional form of a scroll to create a work that is at once of its moment and deeply indebted to Japanese tradition. Aya Takano (b. 1976), who claims the influence of 14th century Italian religious art, mysterious crop circles, and the music of Bjork, shows an ouevre that is far less opaque than these cursory influences would suggest. Takano's sketches and paintings, often depicting teenage and tween girls, manifest a disquiet that is everywhere in "Little Boy." They seem to be the new girls of the Folies Bergere, imbued with the same ennui (in all aspects of life, including sexually), though again they are much younger than Manet's woman -- in keeping with Japanese society's ubiquitous fetishizing of very young women. Like its cinema from the previous two-plus decades, Japanese visual arts has transformed a European vernacular into one that is very particular to its own cultural variances. Perhaps much of the recent hand-wringing that has occurred over the sorry state of painting may be due in part to Western commentator's failure to look in the right places? As with the cinema, the epicenter of the visual arts may have shifted east.
More evidence of this exists elsewhere in the exhibit. Beyond Aoshima and Takano, there is also Chinatsu Ban's (b. 1973) pixilated canvas, Digital Elephant Underpants (2005), which thusly reconfigures cubism in light of primitive computer graphics, and Izumi Kato's (b. 1969) untitled sculptural cycle (all three from 2004), which feature painted neon green inflections that seem to speak to a dread that continues to infect society. Indeed this creep is also picked up in Takashi Murakami's (b. 1962) Time Broken-Black, which references a Japanese cartoon from the 1970s that ended with the same mushroom cloud animation signifying the animae's happy ending. In fact, it is this subject that would seem to hover over so much of this work, which is no great surprise provided that the title of the exhibit, coincidentally curated by Murakami himself, is code for the nuclear bomb. Thus, Murakami offers an interpretative thread that ties together these collected works, and more profoundly the artists of his shared time. Little Boy is without question a major event in contemporary art, not to be missed by anybody within a commutable distance to the Japan Society.
Outside of the Monet's, perhaps the most interesting piece in the exhibit, at least for his aficionados, is James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne (circa 1870). This early work of a series with the same name, having the appearance of a single grayish, pale-dark blue color-field, with a barely visible horizon line, possesses the same quality as his decorative arts interior design or his portraiture wherein the subject's garment and the backdrop seem to be cut from the same material. In all these, attention is called to the unity of the work, and implicitly, in the case of the paintings, to the fact that the aesthetic object is in fact a painting. His is an inherently reflexive, and therefore, profoundly modern art.
Elsewhere in the Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat, a career survey of the notorious Brooklyn-born artist who died in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven, continues to draw well (the exhibit will close on the fifth of next month). If "Monet's London..." shows how painting can transcend its own material limitations, Basquiat is symptomatic of everything wrong with the plastic arts of the not-to-distant past. Sure, his is an ouevre that builds upon the iconography of his ancestral Caribbean, the graphic forms of his lower-class rearing, and taps into the anger of his zeitgeist, but then again, the lack of lucidity on display in Basquiat's work sorely limits its rhetorical strength. In an untitled piece (1981), said to have been mistakenly referred to as "Skull," the limits of Basquiat's art finds its pictorial analogy: a cluttered skull, filled to overflowing with violent forms that add up to little more than the uncertainty that it initially announces. Lest Basquiat's irrationality is taken as insight, however, it should be added that a chaos of this sort is often under-girded by rhetoric which is clearly imparted to the observer, as with the best of surrealist art. Indeed, the ultimate problem with Basquiat's art is that it argues through emotion without making sufficient recourse to the intellect. It is angry art that fails to make the case for its rage.
Whereas Basquiat fails to adequately articulate the crisis of his moment, there is no similar deficiency on display at the Japan Society's Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (which runs through July 24th). In this multi-artist, multi-media survey, the vitality of Japan's youngest generation of artists is drawn into sharp focus. From the monumental works of Chiho Aoshima (born 1974) that first greet visitors to the exhibition, it is clear that Japan's current crop of visual artists is reinventing traditional and newer idioms alike in order to parse a particular anxiety evidently shared by a number of its artists. In Aoshima's Magma Spirit Explodes -- Tsunami is Dreadful (2004), manga (comic book) art and the horrors wrought by the subject matter are mixed with traditional understandings of a universe animated by spirits (Shintoism) and the traditional form of a scroll to create a work that is at once of its moment and deeply indebted to Japanese tradition. Aya Takano (b. 1976), who claims the influence of 14th century Italian religious art, mysterious crop circles, and the music of Bjork, shows an ouevre that is far less opaque than these cursory influences would suggest. Takano's sketches and paintings, often depicting teenage and tween girls, manifest a disquiet that is everywhere in "Little Boy." They seem to be the new girls of the Folies Bergere, imbued with the same ennui (in all aspects of life, including sexually), though again they are much younger than Manet's woman -- in keeping with Japanese society's ubiquitous fetishizing of very young women. Like its cinema from the previous two-plus decades, Japanese visual arts has transformed a European vernacular into one that is very particular to its own cultural variances. Perhaps much of the recent hand-wringing that has occurred over the sorry state of painting may be due in part to Western commentator's failure to look in the right places? As with the cinema, the epicenter of the visual arts may have shifted east.
More evidence of this exists elsewhere in the exhibit. Beyond Aoshima and Takano, there is also Chinatsu Ban's (b. 1973) pixilated canvas, Digital Elephant Underpants (2005), which thusly reconfigures cubism in light of primitive computer graphics, and Izumi Kato's (b. 1969) untitled sculptural cycle (all three from 2004), which feature painted neon green inflections that seem to speak to a dread that continues to infect society. Indeed this creep is also picked up in Takashi Murakami's (b. 1962) Time Broken-Black, which references a Japanese cartoon from the 1970s that ended with the same mushroom cloud animation signifying the animae's happy ending. In fact, it is this subject that would seem to hover over so much of this work, which is no great surprise provided that the title of the exhibit, coincidentally curated by Murakami himself, is code for the nuclear bomb. Thus, Murakami offers an interpretative thread that ties together these collected works, and more profoundly the artists of his shared time. Little Boy is without question a major event in contemporary art, not to be missed by anybody within a commutable distance to the Japan Society.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Cannes critics' poll
Below, I have copied a piece on the results of a critics' poll at this year's Cannes film festival. The good news is that the first and one of the second place films have North American distribution, while the other second place finisher will most likely join their ranks soon. The bad news is that the fourth place picture, directed by one of my favorite living directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien, is unlikely to be released theatrically in this country, according to an industry insider with whom I spoke earlier today. More on that later. For now, here is the piece:
Hidden triumphs in Screen critics' poll
Tim Dams in London 24 May 2005
It may not have won the Palme d'Or, but Michael Haneke's Hidden has emerged as the most popular Cannes competition title according to Screen's annual poll of international critics.
The Screen Cannes jury was made up of 12 key critics from around the world who voted on every film in competition, awarding four points for an 'excellent' film down to zero points for a 'bad' film.
Hidden averaged an impressive 3.3 points among Screen's jury, just ahead of Palme d'Or winner The Child by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmusch. Both films came in joint second place with an average score of 3.2 points. Hou Hsiao Hsien's Three Times ranked fourth, with an average score of 3.1.
Overall, this year's average score per film was 2.2. This is an improvement on 2004 (2.1 points) and 2003's poorly received competition (2.0 points). But it falls short of the vintage year of 2002 (2.4 points), when Roman Polanski's The Pianist won the Palme d'Or.
Critics voting for the Screen jury include Derek Malcolm of the London Evening Standard, Michel Ciment of France's Positif and Glenn Kenny of Premiere in the US.
Hidden triumphs in Screen critics' poll
Tim Dams in London 24 May 2005
It may not have won the Palme d'Or, but Michael Haneke's Hidden has emerged as the most popular Cannes competition title according to Screen's annual poll of international critics.
The Screen Cannes jury was made up of 12 key critics from around the world who voted on every film in competition, awarding four points for an 'excellent' film down to zero points for a 'bad' film.
Hidden averaged an impressive 3.3 points among Screen's jury, just ahead of Palme d'Or winner The Child by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmusch. Both films came in joint second place with an average score of 3.2 points. Hou Hsiao Hsien's Three Times ranked fourth, with an average score of 3.1.
Overall, this year's average score per film was 2.2. This is an improvement on 2004 (2.1 points) and 2003's poorly received competition (2.0 points). But it falls short of the vintage year of 2002 (2.4 points), when Roman Polanski's The Pianist won the Palme d'Or.
Critics voting for the Screen jury include Derek Malcolm of the London Evening Standard, Michel Ciment of France's Positif and Glenn Kenny of Premiere in the US.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Lured
When most people think of Douglas Sirk, they think of his 1950s melodrama, replete with mannerist cum ironic performances and garish coloration. One important addendum to these overtly stylized works -- such as Written on the Wind (1957) and the Buddhist Magnificent Obsession (1954) -- is that they derive their visual panache and melodramatic excess from the art of John M. Stahl. Likewise, Lured (1947) is a profoundly derivative work, though in this case Alfred Hitchcock is the model. Here, Sirk borrows many of the master's narrative tropes, including the wrong man and the effeminate killer. Indeed, Sirk's is a very literate imitation of Hitchcock, mining with psychological acuteness the implications of the convergence of sex and death: the killer kills because he cannot make love to his victims. Like the master, Sirk is follower of Georges Bataille.
Beyond the rhetorical strength and historical curiosity of Lured, there is also the simple fact that it stars George Stevens, Boris Karloff, and Lucille Ball as bait for a serial killer. If this alone doesn't impel you to search out Lured, then nothing I could say would.
Beyond the rhetorical strength and historical curiosity of Lured, there is also the simple fact that it stars George Stevens, Boris Karloff, and Lucille Ball as bait for a serial killer. If this alone doesn't impel you to search out Lured, then nothing I could say would.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Inaugural Post
Welcome to Tativille! In this, the inaugural post, I hope to give you a better sense of what I wish to accomplish with this new weblog. Once I have succeeded in this, you will undoubtedly never read Tativille again... which is especially deflating given that if you are a reader at this point, you probably know me anyways. Having said that, my purpose in authoring this weblog is to express my never-to-be-humbled opinions on a range of topics, which I have neatly divided into three categories: cinema, culture, and current events. The first, cinema, is the subject of which I believe I have the widest knowledge: not only have I spent the better part of the past seven or so years watching hundreds and hundreds of films from every corner of the globe, but I have also recently completed a M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. If this means (as I hope) that I am no dilettante when it comes to the topic of film, then I proudly wear the title when it comes to the other subject matter which will be discussed on Tativille. First, there is the purposefully ambiguous 'culture,' which is intended to cover not only my interests in the fine arts -- and especially painting -- but also a range of topics from theology to television to pop music. And then there is current events, which is more or less self-explanatory with the following caveat: my political views are right-of-center, which will undoubtedly influence the issues to which I will devote my attention in the days and weeks ahead. In my opinion, transparency is of the utmost importance, hence this ugly revelation. It's my guess that this will keep many a reader away, no more how insightful my commentary is on Taiwanese cinema or the sculpture of Donald Judd, though I hope in this case to be proved wrong.
So there you have it, a right-wing blog that treats film as a serious art form, when it is not dabbling in urban planning or extolling the many virtues of TV's Blind Date. In other words, Tativille is a site committed to whatever catches my interest, which I assure you will be compelling given that I am certainly the most interesting person I know. Oh, there is one other thing you should probably know about me: I am incorrigibly narcissistic. That's why it kills me that I have yet to figure out how to post a picture of myself... and for those of you who don't know me, it would kill you too if only you knew the man-beauty that you were missing out on because of my technological ineptitude. See, I told you that you would never want to read me again.
So there you have it, a right-wing blog that treats film as a serious art form, when it is not dabbling in urban planning or extolling the many virtues of TV's Blind Date. In other words, Tativille is a site committed to whatever catches my interest, which I assure you will be compelling given that I am certainly the most interesting person I know. Oh, there is one other thing you should probably know about me: I am incorrigibly narcissistic. That's why it kills me that I have yet to figure out how to post a picture of myself... and for those of you who don't know me, it would kill you too if only you knew the man-beauty that you were missing out on because of my technological ineptitude. See, I told you that you would never want to read me again.
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