Miroslav Tichý

This past month, the first ever exhibition of seventy-nine year old Moravian recluse Miroslav Tichý commenced at the Kunsthaus Zurich, thrusting a major new voice (in terms of the collective consciousness, at least) into the international art spotlight. For anyone interested in this "dissident" and "hermit" -- he spent eight years in Communist prisons and clinics for his nonconformity before building a camera out of trash as per his epic poverty -- let me commend Modern Painters' characteristically informative piece. (Though to read the piece in its entirety it is unfortunately necessary to purchase the publication; then again it is the best arts journal going, so just buy it!) I will also use the opportunity of this introduction to post photos on Tativille for the first time, which is perhaps not the best idea given his nude female subjects. Still, with the physical deterioration that he allows his images to suffer, there is an undeniable sense of the transience of physical beauty included in these exceptionally elegiac works. Their subject matter thus is not the nude figure alone -- thereby portending something other than pornography -- but rather beauty's passage, consequently reminding us all of life's evanescence. This is dimly-recalled eroticism, somehow closer to memory (making it all the more wistful) than it is to photographic reality. Take a look and see if you agree:

The Limitations of Brilliance, Better than Perfection: The Conformist and Au hasard Balthazar

As with few other films, I envy the newcomer as I envy David Niven for having made love to Merle Oberon; that Bertolucci's masterpiece -- made when he was all of 29 -- will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year is a foregone conclusion.

-Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

Exactly. Then again, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970, Italy) may have something else in store for its more seasoned admirers: incipient indifference (albeit on the smallest of scales). Lucky for Bernardo, few spectators fall into this latter category. For reasons unknown, given especially the film's lyrical immediacy, The Conformist continues to be available only on an out-of-print, dubbed VHS format. Doing its best to rectify this grave want, the Film Forum will be screening Bertolucci's opus now through August 11th. And as Michael Atkinson notes, few films this year will be able to rival its potential impact.

From the flashing neon of the opening credits, The Conformist is awash in visual ideas. Or more precisely, so begins its rolodex of unforgettable images. Indeed, there is no final rule for Bertolucci and legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's visual strategy other than that will it lean heavily on the indelible -- be it a whitewashed roof-top asylum, Jean-Louis Trintignant walking alongside a vintage automobile in a canted composition, fallen leaves swept up by a sudden gust, the beautiful Stefania Sandrelli dancing with the even more gorgeous Dominique Sanda, or the latter pounding on Trintignant's automobile window as he looks on impassively, The Conformist is the sum of its visual highlights.

It is also, of course, a parable about fascism, as is confirmed first by its literal-minded title. Then again, The Conformist is a film where everything is made clear, abundantly, whether by a score that highlights significant moments with a bull-horn's subtlety, or in a narrative that never allows its viewer to escape from its Marxist cum Freudian interpretative framework -- right up to a final plot twist straight out of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. To be sure, The Conformist is a work of boundless talent, but it is also a film of limited mystery, born of the unrelenting certainty beget by Bertolucci's youthful brilliance. Even at its most formally unconventional -- i.e. its temporal leap-frogging -- Bertolucci psychologizes his character's actions (and inactions) so assiduously that there is no mistaking his intentions: a fascist is built according to the measure of his desire for an illusory normalcy corresponding to a supposed cultural normativity, full stop. Though The Conformist may resemble at first truly challenging film art, the clarity of this discourse as well as the directness of its pleasure argue otherwise. This is a work of simplicity, however ambitious, whose first taste will always be its sweetest. With that said, its sumptuousness is not to be missed.

The same spectatorial arc does not apply to another of this year's resurfaced masterpieces, Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar (1966, France), released last month in the U.S. for the first time ever on home video. If The Conformist orchestrates the making of a fascist in its precise detailing of psychological causes, Au hasard Balthazar seems to encounter its protagonists' unawares, articulating the effects prior to and apart from their causes. In other words, Bresson's film showcases life as we witness life, uninformed of the immediate causes of events. However, it is not simply events or actions that Bresson is portraying in Au hasard Balthazar but rather sin; and consistent with the Christian notion of iniquity, it is not something to judge situationally. There are no causes, no justifications for the transgressions represented on-screen. Moreover, the concept is expressed in purely carnal terms -- sin is a matter of flesh; spirit is absent. (It is also of note that in spite of its coldness, Bresson's is a profoundly sensual film in the most literal of senses.)

Of course, absence is the key to Bresson's aesthetic, whether it is his denial of surface expression which calls attention to interiority through referential absence or in his mise-en-scene with its notoriously shallow focus -- rigorously depicted with a 50mm lens -- and tight, medium close-up framing. Similarly, this same austerity figures in his audio track which is as significant for its silences as it is for its amplified ambient sounds. Each unit of sound and image is a precisely modulated expression of what the director wishes to relay (less any superfluous detail). In this way, Bresson's past as a painter is drawn into particular focus inasmuch as his cinema manifests the same total control over his subject matter, even if there is not a single frame in Au hasard Balthazar that can rival the scores of unforgettable images in The Conformist. Then again, Bresson's film seeks nothing more than the representation of the ethereal in a medium beholden to the material. His is a reproduction of a life unseen. Even so, Bresson's cinema stands above all other's in its equitable presentation of sound and image. Au hasard Balthazar, along with works as A Man Escaped (1956) and the perfect Pickpocket (1959) -- which it nevertheless exceeds by virtue of the concreteness of its metaphor -- represent a cinema that has finally become fully itself (as Marguerite Duras once said), bringing into harmony its audio and visual components for the very first time.

But of course, Au hasard Balthazar is not form alone, but is instead the director's most carefully constructed Christian allegory. To begin with, the film's title character is a donkey -- a creature with its own special relationship to both the nativity and also the crucifixion narrative, named after one of the three wise men. After an idyllic youth spent with children in the French countryside, Balthazar becomes a beast of burden, used and abused by a series of owners. He is both a silent witness to their sin and a carrier of its weight, as when he is used to smuggle goods at night. Yet it is truly the former that best describes the animal's narrative agency: this is a film about the mankind for whose sins Christ died. When finally the animal's life comes to an end, Bresson makes the analogy precise surrounding the creature with sheep. Above all, Au hasard Balthazar is the great Christian allegory of the twentieth century.

Then again, given the director's refusal to explicate psychology in keeping with his programmatic realism, Au hasard Balthazar remains open to those who would deny this reference. By a subtle shift in emphasis, Bresson's film becomes a Marxist critique of capital or proof of God's death provided the picture's unending bleakness. Either way, it is for the audience to interpret, not the artist. Surely, Au hasard Balthazar is not so much reality itself as it is a mirror, calling all spectators to an act of spiritual evaluation -- with a Christ-figure at its core. The truth may be on-screen, as it is in life, but it is no easier to decipher. The depths and mysteries of Au hasard Balthazar are as deep as life itself.

Google Earth

For anyone out there as fascinated by maps as I am, check out Google Earth, a free download that recommends a broadband connection. Basically it is satellite imagery of every corner of the planet, which if you are from the right place -- curse my parents and their enormous maple trees -- will actually allow you to see your home from an overhead vantage. The detail is so precise, in fact, that I think you can even see a hobo on my stoop holding a Cobra -- or is it Colt 45? No, it's definitely Cobra.

Hat tip to the great Dr. X on pointing out this potentially consuming time-waster.

Modernism vs. Postmodernism

"Everybody, you've got to get serious. Think about abstract values. These are what art is about. Modernism is the clue. Try and rethink the whole abandonment of it - abandon less of it. The jokes in Modernism - Surrealism, Pop - surely we've had enough of that now?

-Matthew Collings

Writing in his "Diary" column in the July/August issue of Modern Painters, Matthew Collings challenges a contemporary art scene that he calls more "flawed" than a reality which is deeply so with a strategy whereby all ideas are expunged, save those that are visual in nature. His cocktail napkin manifesto seeks to reclaim aesthetic meaning from the postmodern morass. As he puts it, "the whole idea of ideas in art is useless," thereby attacking the conceptual core of postmodernism. While my instinct is to oppose this sentiment on the basis of Cezanne and Picasso, among hundreds of others, in practical terms, I think he's on to something. There's a reality we must face -- especially those of us who love art and particularly painting -- most artists are no more insightful than your average Joe on Average Joe. The desire to make art in our time stems as much from the will to be short-tracked to celebrity as it does from the need to say something. Indeed, even when it does follow from the latter, the instances of genuine insight are so vanishingly rare that it would behoove us not to make this profession into a priesthood.

So an art that seeks first aesthetic values -- well at least that might lead us back to a situation where we have aesthetic values again. Whatever excesses it may have encouraged, modernism, as Collings recognizes, was a continuation of art history. Looking backwards, we can see that Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Goya were all asking the same questions as the moderns -- what is art, how does art convey its meaning, etc. And as we can see in their answers -- Vermeer's interest in producing work solely fixed on the representation of a particular quality of light, Rembrandt's removal of all extraneous information until his canvases are little more than his sitter's eyes -- they prized abstraction no less than a Kandinsky or a Mondrian.

But where do we find ourselves today? Telling the same worn-out joke that Duchamp first made when he proudly displayed his Fountain. Is it time for art to return to the values that provided it with an intrinsic meaning for centuries, or are we already too far down the road to an all-encompassing nihilism to bother ourselves with worrying about what art can be? Our age tells us that value judgments are ridiculous and then creates only a dearth of meaningful cultural product. Who among you believes we will spend even a moment agonizing over Joseph Beuys centuries from now? Septic systems of the 21st century have a better chance of gripping latter-day scholars than Beuys or Paul McCarthy does. At least they have an inherent value. While our culture has allowed itself to be duped by charlatans posing as artists, chances are future generations won't be similarly fooled by these cultural wolves in sheep's clothing. The fact that they claim to be artists will no longer demand the same respect that our sycophantic celebrity culture gives them.

Indeed, a return to the eternal questions presented in modernism -- both aesthetic and ethereal -- is the one thing needful for the contemporary art world to escape from its self-destructive intellectual narcissism. And where better to start than where Collings advocates: visual ideas.

Senses of Cinema: "James Benning's Art of Landscape: Ontological, Pedagogical, Sacrilegious"

The latest issue of Senses of Cinema is now available on-line. Among the featured articles is my own piece on James Benning's non-narrative 13 Lakes, "James Benning's Art of Landscape: Ontological, Pedagogical, Sacrilegious," which I have linked here. To summarize, I examine the theoretical implications of the work's form before contextualizing it in opposition to the environmentalist movement. It's lengthy, but worth the effort, I hope.

Also featured are two articles by friends of mine: Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega's "Snuffing" Hollywood: Transmedia Horror in Tesis" and R. Emmett Sweeney's "The Hither Side of Solutions: Bodies and Landscape in L'intrus. Both Vicente and Rob are very talented writers, whose work is well worth the time. Check their pieces out as well.

New Film: Last Days, Bad News Bears & Wedding Crashers

Prior to his most recent renaissance -- culminating with the Palme d'Or-winner Elephant (2003) -- audiences could have been forgiven for assuming that Gus Van Sant's best work was behind him. After all, it was Van Sant who was responsible for the middle brow irrelevancy of Good Will Hunting (1997), exactly the sort of work that is mistaken for good by people who don't know anything about movies. What's worse, of course, is that this same film made the career of the pestilent Ben Affleck -- a sin for which no amount of good deeds can atone. If that leaves grace as Van Sant's only option, he got close with Elephant, which demonstrated a love of its adolescent character's otherwise unknown in contemporary cinema.

In his latest, Last Days, as much a biopic of the late Kurt Cobain's final moments as Elephant was a picture about Columbine -- that is in everything but name -- Van Sant again tackles adolescence: in this case of the prolonged variety, the twenty-something rock star. As his drug-addled subjects, Blake (the Cobain character played by Michael Pitt) and his hangers-on, drift through a dilapidated Pacific Northwest mansion, which organically showcases the same deterioration as befell Blake's psyche in these "last days," Van Sant portrays lives lacking the emotional compass required for self-preservation. Yet unlike his beautiful, awkward, and in the case of his killers, tragically-misguided teenagers in Elephant, there is nothing but ugliness on display in Last Days. However romantic the character of Blake may be, beauty is not part of the calculus; the universality of Elephant has been replaced with the particularity of Blake, which indeed mediates the discursive power of his tragic end. To have compassion for the characters in Elephant is to draw on our own recollections of our teenage years. To watch Blake and his live-in guests idyll is to witness something to which the majority of viewers cannot relate out of their own experience. At best, pity ensues; at worst, disgust. In either case this is no replacement for a compassion compelled by understanding.

Though Last Days does not therefore equal Elephant in its emotional scope, it does rival the prior work in its aesthetic ambitions. Here, again Van Sant fragments time, replacing an exact inscription of the final 90-plus minutes of his life with a dispersed impression of these "last days." Dispersed, that is, as other characters float in and out of the narrative in order to give shape to his isolation -- gestures of help and abandonment are combined to instantiate Blake's final fate.

Of course, Richard Linklater took the opposite approach in his wonderful Before Sunset (2004), where the duration of the story is replicated in a near facsimile to real time. No similar ambition, however, is on display in his latest, Bad News Bears, a remake of the classic ESPN Classic, The Bad News Bears (1976). While this does not preclude the film from possessing substantial value -- School of Rock (2003) is not exactly ambitious, and yet it remains eminently entertaining -- Bad News Bears is slight nevertheless. Rewritten by the same pair who scripted Bad Santa (2003, Terry Zwigoff) and starring that film's vile Kris Kringle, Billy Bob Thorton, clearly Bad News Bears was conceived as an update of the earlier Bears with a shade of the Zwigoff film. However, Linklater's Bears can not match the unrelenting vulgarity of the Santa picture, which in its sustained lack of propriety achieved its own form integrity and demonstrated a clear (if decidedly bleak) world view. The film's mitigation, in this respect, is in part a function of its PG-13 rating. Likewise, Linklater's own political correctness softens the work's vulgarity: sure we laugh at the wheel chaired-character zipping out to play right field, but Linklater does allow him to make a key out. And of course the pitching sensation is female -- perhaps progressive pre Title-IX, but now, such a characterization is nothing more than comfortably liberal.

David Dobkin's Wedding Crashers is anything but. In this Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn vehicle, women are gullible, if not down-right stupid. This is not a film that proceeds according to the Prizzi's Honor or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels cliché, where it might seem that the men are in control, but where it is genuinely the female characters who are orchestrating events. Here, these "wedding crashers" breathlessly manipulate women through the most-transparently phony gimmicks one could possibly imagine; and even, for instance, when the Gloria character shows herself to be a bit wiser than she first appears, she still falls for Vaughn's B.S.

If this makes Wedding Crashers sound unduly reactionary, the fact is that the picture's impolitic qualities make it a renunciation of contemporary cultural values. The fact is that what's good for the goose has long not been good for the gander. Wedding Crashers is the sort of politically-incorrect work that restores the equation (though admittedly there is a limit to such a renewed equality, provided that it depends on the inferiority of one of the two genders). Still, this is a film whose comedy succeeds because it s taboo. And like Bad Santa before it, Wedding Crashers similarly sustains an integrity of impropriety -- the funeral crasher who appears may be a scumbag, but he's also a genius.

Wedding Crashers similarly succeeds because of the charisma and likeability of its leads, Wilson and Vaughn. Amiable without being admirable, like their characters, they give off the impression of being the life of the party, generous with everyone, even if they have less than laudable ends. Excuse the expression, but these are two guys who can really shoot the shit, and come on, who doesn't like that? They're guy's guys, who are as comfortable in a pick-up football game as they are in their ill-gotten moments of intimacy. In a society that has effectively rid itself of masculinity, there is something deeply satisfying about seeing characters like this on-screen. Sometimes sensitivity is gratuitous. Sometimes what is called for is a good punch in the face. Sometimes you just have to call somebody a "pussy."

My thoughts on Elvis Costello and "Concert Etiquette" by Matthew Singer

This evening, two friends and myself attended the Elvis Costello-Emmylous Harris show in Central Park. While I have long been a big fan of this Elvis (though I will admit some of my fervor has subsided in recent years) I was still extremely excited to see him perform in person for the first time. On the whole, I thought the show was something of a let down, especially when Elvis delved deeply into The Delivery Man and during the majority of his numbers with Emmylou -- I'm sorry, I just don't think their voices meld particularly well (not that I'm that big a fan of her's anyways). Still, it was a pleasure seeing the man in the flesh. If only I had seen him during the When I Was Cruel tour, however: now that's good recent Elvis!

Up-staging the performers on-stage, however, was a gentleman named Bob, who wreaked his particular form of havoc throughout the show. Parents, if you don't know what to say to your children about the dangers of long-term drug use, take them to the concert of some similar aging performer and scour the audience searching for your Bob. Once you find him, he'll do the rest.

One of my fellow concert goers, Matthew Singer, has graciously volunteered to contribute on the broader topic of concert etiquette. Read the whole thing, it's laugh-out-loud funny -- and that's not LOL... if you use that abbreviation, chances are pretty good that you suffer from the same "functional retardation" that our guest contributor has so accurately diagnosed:

It seems like common sense, but the distressingly poor
behavior of audience members at this evening's concert
by Elvis Costello and Emmylou Harris in Central Park
suggests that some of the drunker, stupider, and more
annoying among us need a reminder of how to properly
attend a rock show. Here, then, is your field guide
to concert etiquette:

1)Know the performers
Nothing caps off a good performance like a hearty
cheer. But when doing so, always take care to
remember the names of the musicians. For instance
it's "Emmylou" not "Emily" and "Elvis Costello"
not
"JACKSON!" If extreme inebriation or functional
retardation make remembering multisyllabic names
impossible, draw up a cheat sheet before heading out
to the show. Also, if it's been a while, don't forget
to relisten to those old records, just so you can keep
track of who sings what songs. Contrary to the
beliefs of the staggering lunatic in front of me,
Elvis Costello did not record "London Calling."

2)Watch your mouth
Be aware of your surroundings. If there are small
children around, berating the musicians with a stream
of explosive vulgarity may be inappropriate. Come to
think of it, unless the musicians have, directly or
indirectly, caused you egregious bodily harm,
explosive vulgarity really isn't appropriate whether
there are children around or not.

3)Respect personal space
Yes, you're excited, it's a rock concert. We're all
excited. Dancing, clapping, and the occasional
a'hooting and a'hollering is welcome and appreciated,
but take into account that you're sharing a very hot,
cramped space with other people. Dancing in place,
not into other people. Clap in your own area, don't
swing your arms wildly into the faces of others. With
the hooting and the hollering, it's pretty much fair
game. Just try not to do it during the solo acoustic
numbers (And certainly don't reply loudly to the
questions posed by the lyrics; this is a concert, not
a poll, friend).

4)Don't be "That Guy"
Though the "That Guy" at a concert is typically the
one who wears the band t-shirt to the gig, the other,
rarer species of "That Guy" is even more insidious.
This "That Guy" is the one that only knows one song by
the artist and shouts its title repeatedly until he
hears it. Additionally, should the musician
begrudingly reply, do not reply mid-song with "Thank
you motherfucker!" (For further instructions, please
return to rules one and two)

Happy concertgoing everybody!

Menopausal Adolescence, Paramount: Before the Code & Trouble in Paradise

With the Film Forum's Paramount: Before the Code winding down, something needs to be said concerning the true value of the program's best films. Their excellence, ultimately, has less to do with their content and more to do with their formal grace, which provides the best pictures in the series with a certain timelessness. Of course, formal qualities are not what bring audiences into theatres, which is among the reasons the program is packaged and sold according to the films' sexual frankness and their basic strangeness (to the modern observer). The best most critics can come up with regarding the program is that they are frank even by today's standards, or some nonsense of the sort. The audiences themselves act as though they were a late middle-aged urban liberal version of a Saved by the Bell studio audience, caterwauling at any instance of sexual explicitness. This is menopausal adolescence at its very worst. Which is unfortunate because many of the films screened are classical Hollywood at its very best, not that the films demand a hushed reverence per se, but at least some decorum would be nice.

As to their "formal grace," there is no better exemplification than Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 masterpiece Trouble in Paradise. From the very beginning, the director achieves a gestural precision that demonstrates the medium's ultimate vocation: there is no more sensual moment in the American cinema than Herbert Marshall's delicate unwrapping of Miriam Hopkins' shawl early in the film. Certainly, the heart of any viewer with a pulse should skip a beat at this moment; a reliving of the same reactions generated by middle school sex ed videos doesn't strike me as the proper tone here.

His is also a film of precisely calibrated glances, showing that Hollywood cinema is at its very best when it is at its simplest. This same economy is manifested in Lubitsch's utilization of actions, set-pieces and objects to denote psychological tension, with no more powerful instance than when Kay Francis' character goes to open the safe. As Herbert Marshall looks on, it is as though we are watching James Stewart's wheelchair-ridden protagonist watching helplessly across the courtyard as Grace Kelly is being attacked by Raymond Burr's character. Indeed, Lubitsch's cinema serves in many ways as a prototype for Hitchcock's in not only his masterful expressivity in gesture and usage of objects, but in the Lacanian precipice that his criminal couple finds themselves teetering over with Kay Francis stealing Marshall's attention away from Hopkins. These stakes are the very essence of the "Lubitsch touch."

Yet, if it is a simplicity that marks this early golden age of sound, it is a different brand then most observers seem to catch. One of the importance heritages of this pre-Wellesian moment in the American cinema is its spatial debt to the silent cinema. Lubitsch of course was a master of the silent cinema before directing his first sound picture in 1929. With this background, Lubitsch's cinema retains a spatial integrity through the last of his films; put another way, Lubitsch's narratives are acted out in space rather than in scripted dialogue which is simply committed to celluloid. This basic trait is something that all the finest directors who made this transition share -- an understanding that film is fundamentally spatial in its formal organization. If classical Hollywood's sins can be limited only to single most grievous deficiency in the intervening years, it is precisely a tendency to ignore this basic component of the medium, exchanging it for the thoughtless filming of dialogue.

So how then does Lubitsch's silent origins manifest itself in his spaces? First, in a most basic sense, one can see this inheritance in his tendency to allow characters to interact in space, which far from thoughtlessly mimicking theatre, belies a fundamental humanism in its conceptual conflation of players (versus the isolation brought forth in the shot-reverse structure). Second, there is the director's utilization of doors and other such set pieces which conceal drama and accumulate resonance in their representation of absence, whether it connotes romance or the potential for characters to feel real pain. Lubitsch's is a cinema that flatters its audience, presenting the romantic couple as an endangered entity. The movie's power indeed derives from Lubitsch's very handling of space, assuring that its strength as a narrative is intricately fused with the director's understanding of the art.

All of this is to say that the best pre-code films, like Trouble in Paradise, represent Hollywood narration at its very best, not simply for what they say, but more importantly, for how they say it. For those of us who value this cinema most for its formal excellence, at least a program like Paramount: Before the Code offers us a chance to see Hollywood filmmaking at its best, even if it is presented primarily for its capacity to induce an experience best described as ironic titillation.

Quick Thoughts on Timmy's Chocolate Factory and Certain Instances of Critical Oversight

Briefly, let me express my opinion on the primary criticisms I have seen leveled against Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. First, to A.O. Scott's critique that the subplot involving Willy's father simply isn't sufficiently interesting to merit inclusion, let me point out that in this way, Charlie forms a pair with the director's previous picture, Big Fish (2003): both pictures take a father-son reconciliation as their subject. Indeed this is the auteur theory at its most elemental -- the subject matter of the original text is adapted to fit the preoccupations of the author(s) (in this case Burton and screenwriter John August, who also penned Big Fish). In other words, the inclusion of this theme is a sort of authorial signature, which in deference to Scott, I find to be a good thing. In dismissing this subject by repeating one of the better lines in the film -- "candy doesn't have to have a point, that's why it's candy" -- Scott suggests that a film of this sort doesn't need to have a point beyond its magical set pieces, which to me seems patently absurd, and above all, stifling to the very idea of good art. If art is pointless, why create. The answer of course is that it isn't, which thankfully Burton understands. Surely Burton incorporates this meta-theme quite adroitly into the narrative as such: ultimately, this is a film that elevates the importance of family above all else, leveraging the father-son subplot to make this point, which in turn reveals the director's authorial hand.

As to Depp's performance, Roger Ebert, in an otherwise positive review makes an unflattering comparison between Depp and Michael Jackson. If you've actually seen the film, my guess is that the thought may have entered your mind at some point, but that it departed just as quickly. Ebert's obstinacy in this respect reminds me of his hard-headedness in a review of Taste of Cherry (1997) a few years back. At the time, he criticized the film's construction on the basis of the initial ambiguity surrounding the character, claiming that because he thought its protagonist may have been soliciting a sexual favor from a passenger, then somehow the director erred. To me, his criticism was quite hollow indeed -- Ebert may have wanted a different movie, but this is the one that the director gave his audience. And if he had been willing to wait another five minutes all uncertainty would have quickly dissipated.

So too with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Sure, he invites children into his factory, but as a friend pointed out to me, he does have the parents come along. And you know what, this is a story for children, so children going to the oddball Wonka's factory with their parents really isn't so unseemly.

As to his specific criticism, Depp's performance is strange, but there is nothing as exceptionally perverse about it as Ebert infers. Actually the kookiness of the performance -- and by implication the strangeness of Wonka in the original text -- is underlined throughout the film, providing the work with an added dimension of interpretive insight. Put differently, Depp's odd concoction, in its dissonance, reveals more than it may obscure. It makes the film better because it helps us to understand its source material better. Sure this could have been accomplished in a different way, but it wasn't and Burton accomplishes it anyways. The moral is that certain critics need to stop critiquing the film they wanted to see and take a look at what's on the screen in front of them. If that's not good enough, A.O. and Roger, make the films you want to see. I have no doubt that you could secure the financing.

Television is not an art

Television is not an art. Television is a medium that engages in the broadcast of art -- in addition to that of journalism, sporting events, and other forms of entertainment -- but it is not an art form in its own right. What semantic difference does this make? It makes some.

First, it must be acknowledged that cinema which is broadcast on television is still cinema. If one was to watch The Bridges of Madison County on television with commercials, as I did for the time, one is still watching Clint Eastwood's work of art, even if the experience of the film is somewhat amended by the particularities of its mode of broadcast. The same is true for any experience other than its projection in 35, even if VHS or especially DVD closer approximates the intended circumstances of its screening. Assuming that it is not recut -- which is characteristic for the pay channels even if it is not the norm elsewhere -- Eastwood's ideas and their implementation are the same; he photographs the same subjects, cuts in the same places, etc. The work is the same discursively as well as ontologically; that is, the four fundamental elements of the medium remain unchanged on the small screen -- which is to say, it is (or can be) the same representation of space, time, light, and sound.

All of this is to say that cinema can exist on television, which surely is the first place that many of us have seen certain motion pictures, be it through broadcast or more often perhaps, home video. Moreover, works like Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982) and Dekalog (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1989) were themselves intended for television broadcast, with abridged formats that would be released theatrically. Few would deny their status as works of cinema, largely one supposes because of their authorship.

Which brings me to an important point: if film is a medium of director's (and theatre, of actor's) then I think we can say that television belongs to writer's. In the parlance of the medium (as in 'of broadcast,' rather than as an art form) the creator of the program -- David Chase with The Sopranos, Alan Ball with Six Feet Under -- is more often than not a writer, who continues to work in this capacity, to varying degrees, as the program continues. This is not to say that a director is always invisible in television broadcasting, but rather that as a default, he or she is. Television style tends to be invisible, and when it is not, a matter for replication from one work to the next. The mise-en-scene is not the thing with television, it is the story and characters.

Stepping back for a moment, this divide between film and television is artificial, admittedly. The basic ontology of a television program is the same as that of a motion picture -- with or without the commercials. (If Russian Ark were the rule rather than the exception, I might pause for reflection; as it is however, the dictates of the commercial break do little to effect its ontology, even though it does influence its narrative arc, which is a subset of its temporal dimension.) When a program does not have commercials, as with BBC programming or HBO, the question is null anyways.

Which brings one back to the essential difference between television and theatrical/home video cinema: the circumstances of its production. Television, because of the amount to be shot, whether its six, twelve, or twenty-two episodes, demands a different speed of production -- and of course, allows the writer far more space to develop characters and various storylines. How many great novels can you think of, after all, which you read in 105 minutes? This same 105 minutes, however, gives the director more problems to resolve than he or she needs: the performances, the blocking, the lighting, the camera movements, the cutting, the soundtrack, et al. Robert Bresson made all of fourteen films in forty years -- including the unmatched Pickpocket which clocks in at a lean 75 -- and still, his corpus rates among the greatest of anyone ever to work in the art form. The Simpsons is on season seventeen, Law & Order, number sixteen (in the first of five incarnations to date).

Naturally, then, television's shooting style lends itself towards a mass-production approach, curiously similar to that of the early studio system. And like the heyday of the studios, television has shown itself to be more than adept in the production of tele-visual pleasures. Consider the abundance of highly-involving programs to appear on American in television in just the past decade: Seinfeld, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Shield, The Wire, Nip/Tuck, Arrested Development, and Deadwood, to name only a few. Each of these represent storytelling, character development, comedy, or a combination thereof at their very best, even if they don't rate with the cinema of Eastwood, Lynch, Jarmusch, Linklater, Mann, Scorsese, Payne, and either one of the Anderson's in terms of their mise-en-scene. They do not equal them as works of cinema, but they do provide pleasures of their own. It's not even that they are deficient in their ideas: The Sopranos after all is an extremely ambitious examination of the American-myth gone awry; Seinfeld was a show about nothing that adeptly exposed its manipulation of its audience in the show's brilliant, though less than viscerally satisfying finale -- on second thought, maybe this does confirm at least Seinfeld's final episode as great cinema. Anyways, the point is, these are shows about something (or nothing) which are fully-sufficient in terms of their storytelling, though they often do not equal the organic complexity of cinema's best.

Often, because at times, television does rise to the level of great cinema. Fanny and Alexander and Dekalog are obvious examples. Less so, perhaps is another instance where the auteurs are the writer-directors rather than simply the writers is the BBC's The Office written and directed by the team of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. This is auteurist television, in the classic cinematic sense. Here it is not simply the brilliant comic writing that elevates the work to the status of great, but is, moreover, their handling of the space and time of this dreary setting: those interstices when nothing is happening dramatically; the character's awareness of the camera and its solicitation of performance; the wonderful moment in the second series when Tim takes off his microphone to ask Dawn an enormously intimate question, etc. Form and content are organically fused in The Office. This is great cinema in the classic tradition of the film serial.

Indeed, like the work of Louis Feuillade in the early 20th century, The Office, as is true of all good fictional television, most closely resembles the form of the serial in the manner that it compels the viewer to see what happens in the next installment. With the advent of the television series DVDs, entire seasons can now be consumed at the viewer's pace, as one might read a page-turner. Television has found its vocation in this format -- first-rate storytelling, and more often than not, second-rate cinema. So be it. It's time for Hell's Kitchen, and I don't want to miss a second.

Current Exhibitions: Pioneering Modern Painting / The Fabric of Dreams

The museum equivalent of Batman Begins -- a major summer blockbuster, though one lacking the cache of say a Van Gogh, the Sith of the art world -- Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 (running now through September 12th at the Museum of Modern Art New York) seeks to contextualize the work of these two late nineteenth century giants within their working relationship. At first glance one fears a curatorial straw-man: none of his contemporaries, let alone Pissarro, can match Cézanne's achievement in reinventing the language of an entire medium. After all, the art of Cézanne represents no less than a translation of 19th century science into the medium of painting, providing an important precursor to profoundly subjective literature of Joyce and Proust: in looking at one of Cézanne's paintings, the spectator is compelled to overlook intentional inconsistencies and to combine the work's disparate color fragments in his or her own mind's eye. In other words, the art of Cézanne portends a shifting paradigm in which it is no longer the artist alone who creates the visual object, but rather the artist in collaboration with the spectator, and particularly the eye of the spectator. Visual truth becomes subjective.

Who indeed can match this reconstitution of the medium's mode of spectatorial address? At best, Camille Pissarro is a master of atmospherics and a poet of the melancholy; his is not an original idiom. Still, Pissarro's excellence, such as it is, is on full display in the MoMA's double exhibition. In his Banks of the Marne in Winter (1866), the leaves that have fallen from the trees, the grey skies, and the field that is still green (befitting the earliest days of the season), all combine to create the sadness that marks Pissarro's finest work. On the other hand, when Pissarro's work fully inhabits the summertime -- occasioning not even a cool shadow as he does so well in Crossroads at L'Hermitage, Pontoise (1876) -- it seems little more than comfort food.

If Pissarro is thus a bit uneven, there would seem zero evidence of this in Cézanne's enormous corpus: he is very much the Bresson of painting, steadfastly proceeding according to an individual logic which has touched everything of importance since. Cézanne is not only the father of twentieth century painting, but is almost certainly the greatest single artist in his medium since Rembrandt. None of his peers compare in terms of both aesthetic invention and historical importance... and yet, Pissarro somehow remains a master hanging beside Cézanne. The moral of this is that surely Pissarro is a superlative artist indeed, with touches of grace when his subject matter matches his melancholic temperament. Similarly, Pissarro's work also serves to illuminate Cézanne's somewhat counterintutive high-key tonal register (that is for someone who spent a lifetime painting landscape's, still life's and self-portrait's: Pissarro's is an art of muffled tears, Cézanne's of guttural whelps).

Then again, in contrast to Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams
His Art and His Textiles, Cézanne's work seems down right Apollinarian. To me, the real value of the Metropolitan Museum's reconsideration of Matisse's extra-textual sources (on now through September 26th) was its revelation of Matisse as a supreme aesthete, as opposed to the artist-philosopher that I had long assumed, provided his unmistakable preoccupation with line. Speaking for instance of Morocco in connection to one his famed Odalisque's, Matisse noted that he "felt an irresistible need to express that ecstasy, that divine unconcern, in corresponding colored rhythms, rhythms of sunny and lavish figures and colors." In other words, Matisse's confesses a memory and preoccupation with the visual stimuli of the place. Surface appearances guide Matisse no less than touch does Renoir (which can be seen in his soft, gauzy works), or light and air does Monet. One can see Matisse's eye in this assembly of his work.

Of course, the textiles that are on display beside the paintings clearly did provide Matisse with many of the patterns that he would replicate in one work after another. Indeed, the Met exhibit makes a compelling case for his heavy borrowing of this curious source. However, the true value of "Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams His Art and His Textiles" is less in the details of his debt to these pieces than in the role they play in showing how his artistic mind worked. Surely, the textile was precisely what occupied his two-dimensional imagination. It was the sort of subject that engaged his Dionysian spirit. It seems strange to me to classify Matisse in opposition to Cézanne (and with Renoir no less!), but there can be no denying his interest in the purely aesthetic. In this way, Matisse almost becomes an ahistorical figure, guided by the dictates of his aesthetic feeling and not the broader cultural fources that shape each age's art. Then again, the reflexive results of Matisse's concerns produced an art that perfectly instatiates the self-consciousness of his epoch. As such, Matisse must remain to us one of the defining creators of his generation.

In closing, let me make the following observations concerning the curation of the two shows: both do an excellent job providing context for the particular pieces, whether it is the similar subject matter produced by Cézanne and Pissarro or Matisse's borrowing of the graphic qualities of certain textiles. The MoMA exhibition falters a bit in its lighting, impelling the viewer to search out a passable vantage from which to view the paintings; but otherwise, these are first rate, blockbuster shows, more Christopher Nolan than George Lucas.

A New 'New World Order'

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on Mark Steyn's Telegraph piece, in which he argued that the 21st century might just see the continued dominance of the Anglosphere with India playing an increasingly prominent role. Yesterday, Michael Barone picked up the thread in "An Emerging Alliance with India." In it, Barone claims that though "there is not likely to be a formal NATO-like alliance among Japan, Australia, India, and the United States... increasingly there is the functional equivalent of one."

All I will add is that to me, it really does seem as though we are witnessing the creation of a new New World Order, with the axis of global power shifting from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the Pacific and Indian. More than five hundred years after arriving in the new world, Columbus, or at least his American surrogates, have finally made it to India -- bearing a share of their international might. In the process, the old world seems to have been left behind.

The Poetic Gesture and Tropical Malady

At the conclusion of Chantal Akerman's feminist masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976), the titular protagonist, a housewife and prostitute, murderers one of her john's. This sudden act of violence shatters the prevailing transparency of Akerman's work: to this point her narrative has been a kind of Sisyphus with spuds, rendering the crippling banality of Jeanne's life in a series of static, one shot-one sequence takes. Her life consists of cleaning her house, preparing meals for her son, running errands, and performing sex acts on her afternoon clients. (As glib as I might make it sound) the underlining point to this objective representation of her routine is quite obvious: to underscore her psychological inquietude and to reveal the fundamental incongruities produced by her attempt to remain a doting mother and provider for her student son.

However, Akerman moves beyond a simple description of Jeanne's emotional state with the concluding murder. Unlike the acts of prostitution which are woven into her daily routine, this violence represents a definitive break from the everyday, in turn providing the film with its political meaning. And yet the preciseness of this gesture's meaning remains unclear: surely it intimates a break from the roles ascribed her, especially after it follows a day filled with frustrations unlike the routine others; and even so, what then is the solution to her alienation outside of the narrative's negation? Indeed, Jeanne's act is not one which unmistakably announces its reasons. There is a strangeness too it, and an openness involving its interpretation. It is, to coin a phrase, a poetic gesture.

The poetic gesture is by no means alien to film history -- it appears time and again throughout history and across cultures. Then again, the sheer profusion of this (often) causally-unconditioned trope in the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul sets a new standard. From the outset of his latest, Tropical Malady (2004), Apichatpong features circumstances that at best defy logic: for instance the opening clamor by soldiers to have themselves photographed with a dead body that they've found, the next sequence's quixotic presentation (in long shot) of a naked man walking in the brush, or the ostensible occupation of the local boy in a factory where ice is cut. To see these actions and events is to witness behavior (and perhaps customs) that has not been explained sufficiently. Again, this is why Jeanne Dielman is so instructive: in spite of the clarity that the narrative presents up to its denouement, there is an interpretative opacity created by so odd a behavior.

Which leads one to the second point involving the so-called "poetic gesture": that it presents behavior which is not commensurate with our understanding of rational action. It is in this capacity that Apichatpong's films show the fullest co-option of this trope. Part one of Tropical Malady ends with a scene of romantic intimacy involving its two gay lovers, where they take turns licking one another's hands. On its own, this behavior is preposterous: this is not a normal expression of physical love and desire, full stop. However, when understood in terms of the film's guiding matrix -- "that all of us are by nature wild beasts," and that it is our "duty" to keep our "bestiality in check" -- the impetus behind such behavior is articulated. Like the concluding card game in Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961), sex is transfigured into an action whose literal reading does not follow causally from the preceding.

What sets Tropical Malady apart as an exemplar of this trope, however, is not simply the presence of irrational behavior, but is moreover the form's facility in lending meaning to the unaccountable. Part two of Apichatpong's film ultimately refracts the first half, consigning new meaning to a romance masked by the protagonists' near ubiquitous smiles. Subtitled "A Spirit's Path," this journey into a folkloric world populated by a shaman with the power to turn himself into animal form, establishes a parallel to the first half, albeit in a phenomenologically unreal space. Whereas part one purported to present an unembellished modern world, though one whose meaning is obscured in the strangeness of the protagonists' behavior, part two is a purely fictional, fabulist world where causality is dictated by the parameters of the narration. Yet, it is through this illusory world the abstruse earlier half is explained: desire, as is present in the preceding romance, invariably leads to the same destruction wrought by the tiger-spirit in the subsequent fable. Through the second-level matrix of the 'Spirit's Path' narrative, Apichatpong sheds meaning on a sequence of outward gestures which are at once obscure and unreliable; in theory, part one could represent a replicated time and space in a way that science makes clear part two does not. However, Apichatpong uses the unreal to give meaning to the real, which is nothing more than the essence of art itself.

However, it is important not to go too far afield from the topic at hand. Part two also succeeds in further instantiating the poetic gesture's operative function: to convey meaning elliptically, just as poetry uses language in the same capacity. As art is itself a step back from reality with the intention of seeing with greater clarity -- as if we are not only seeing through a glass dimly but are likewise far-sighted -- the poetic gesture's purpose is to distance representation from the everyday, to shatter the illusion of mimetic reproduction, and in the process, to compel active critical interpretation. When meaning is not immediately evident within the contours of an action, the viewer must work more judiciously to grasp a work's meaning. This very process is allegorized in Tropical Malady: the strange world of part one is shown to signify broader truths, while the isolated expressiveness of its gestures often fail to sufficiently convey meaning. With the accompaniment of the second part, the unaccountable things of the first again gain intellection. Indeed, part two is the critical process demanded by the first half's ambiguity; that it is in fable where the truth becomes clearest -- not in the less abstract replication of reality described in the first part -- only underscores art's functional remove from the banal.