Victor Hugo once called exile
"the long dream of home" - a
turn of phrase that rings true
to me and explains the shared
aesthetic of the work that most
intrigues me... movies, poetry,
and literature that exist outside
the margins, celebrate the liminal
and are not afraid to consider
the soft or seedy underbelly of
people, places and things.
Still relevant* 53 years after it was made, Le Ballon Rouge (1956) is no longer standard viewing for elementary students but has become instead a reminder to adults of the power of will and belief in the talismanic - both too easily given up as inconsequential to adult life. Most descriptions I read of Albert Lamorisse's film classify it as a fantasy. And perhaps it has become so, as adults grow increasingly removed from their sense of wonder and belief in the impossible. And yet, I'm not sure that I would locate this poetic flight of fancy alongside films of dragons, unicorns and supernatural magic. Rather, the red balloon is a example of that rare, illusive visual metaphor that I prize and seek in films... and so infrequently find. Categorically, I have not yet found an acceptable place for these films. "Experimental" is too broad and slightly off-putting, not to mention a bit silly when applied to a film that achieved such immediate critical acclaim (won: Palm d'Or, BAFTA, Prix Louis Delluc, etc.) at the time of its release and now clearly stands the test of time. It is more accurately placed in the realm of docu-fiction. Like other filmmakers I've been studying lately, Lamorisse's films feature the people in his life (his son Pascal and daughter Sabine in the The Red Balloon) and directly address simple themes of profound importance to the real human life. Contrary to the current mores of Hollywood, films such as this are not concerned with providing an escape from reality, nor do they embellish ordinary experience to appeal to the vaguely dissatisfied ordinary viewer. While orchestrated jumps and darts serve to anthropomorphize the red balloon, I don't believe it was ever intended to be perceived as a sentient object; The red balloon could not be the red balloon without the boy. It's action is the will of the boy. It's madcap adventure and mischievous behavior are an illustration of the boys dreams and spirit. This is why all is not lost when the balloon is pierced by the stone from a bully's slingshot. This is why the boy sails away at the end (rather fantastically, I'll admit) on a thousand balloons, each inflated with the afflatus of his belief.
"Jacquot de Nantes is the sort of film that no one but Miss Varda would have made or, for that matter, could have made. It's neither documentary nor, in the usual sense, fiction."
"(Agnes Varda) lives in a present that is ever enriched by the accumulating past."
- Vincent Canby
Jacquot de Nantes is obviously a very personal film. But it was not meant to be a tribute; rather, it was conceived and filmed when Demy was still alive. "Jacques would speak about his childhood, which he loved," Varda explained at a New York Film Festival press conference. "His memories were very vivid. I told him, 'Why don't you write about them?' So he did, and he let me read the pages. The more he wrote the more he remembered—even the names of the children who sat next to him in school. Most children do not know what they want to do when they grow up. But Jacques did, from the time he was 12. He had an incredible will. So I said, 'This [material] would make a good film.' I wrote the script, and I tried to capture the spirit of Jacques and his family, and the way people spoke and acted in [the 1940s]. We shot the film in the exact [locations] in which he grew up. I also filmed an interview with him. It's just Jacques speaking about his childhood. It's not a documentary about Jacques Demy. It's just him saying, 'Yes, this is true. This is my life.' "He saw most of the final [version]. When Jacques 'went away,' I had to finish the film. It was difficult, but that's the only thing I know. I think the film makes Jacques very alive." excerpt from: http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Co-Du/Demy-Jacques.html#ixzz0WPVI7uPH
*** Agnes Varda's film for her husband Jacques Demy was released the year after his death, but the project was conceived before that. The idea grew out of a series of conversations that occurred between Jacques and Agnes. Jacques, suffering from illness, entered a phase of reflection and remembrance that occurs as life draws to a close. He began to relay memories and anecdotes of his childhood to his wife and fellow filmmaker. Varda built a non-traditional narrative around these recorded interviews, which grew into this filmic tribute to a man, the resonance of his childhood memories, and his love of film. I really appreciate Varda's approach to telling the story of a life. In this film about her husband and the more recent Beaches of Agnes (in which she tells her own life), she aims to tell personal stories of the individual life. I disagree with the reviewer who questions the relevancy of this project to anyone who wasn't personally familiar with Jacques Demy. True, this film is not traditional biographical fare, meant to illuminate the filmmaker for some public audience, but it explores profoundly relevant human themes. This film is an exploration of relationships: man and his wife, man and his work, man and the places and memories of his childhood, man to his waning life, etc. And perhaps most importantly it is a testament to the faceted relationship between Varda and Demy - creative cohorts whose final adventure together is this beautiful film. These relationships have a tremendous relevance in their specificity.
"If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes." ~ Agnes Varda
Agnes Varda was the only woman to make a significant cinematic mark amongst the filmmakers of the Left Bank, tangential to the French New Wave. Trained as a photographer, Varda picked up the camera on a whim, confounding the male-dominated medium and impressing her community of artists with her intuition and inventiveness. The purity and honesty of her work is a reflection of this spirit in her self-stated desire "to be loved as a filmmaker because I want to share emotions, to share the pleasure of being a filmmaker." It is Varda's modesty and humble nature that allow her to approach and describe her subjects in such a way that they can be truly seen. Her work is rarely strict documentary as it is more concerned with the impressions of reality rather than factual reality; Laurence Kardish, curator of the Museum of Modern Art Film Dept. describes it as "inflect(ing) narrative with reality." Stylistically, her films are collage-like, poetic, and steeped in visual metaphor. Her most recent effort The Beaches of Agnes (2008) is an autobiographical journey through her memory - using cinema "to tell a life."
* a sequence from Cleo de 5 a 7 (1962)
* clip from Vagabond (1985)
* a short clip from The Gleaners and I (2004)
* trailer for Varda's most recent film: The Beaches of Agnes (2008)
Voice(over) - is a production technique where a non-diegetic voice is broadcast live or pre-recorded in radio, television, film and theatre. The voice-over may be spoken by someone who also appears on-screen in other segments or it may be performed by a specialist voice actor. Voice-over is also commonly referred to as "off camera" commentary.
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because of the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is not sympathetic to us." - Fredrich Neitzsche
Kozloff, Sarah. Invisible Storytellers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
'Sarah Kozloff examines and analyzes voice-over narration. She refutes the assumptions that words should only play a minimal role in film, that "showing" is superior to "telling," or that the technique is inescapably authoritarian (the "voice of god"). She questions the common conception that voice-over is a literary technique by tracing its origins in the silent era and by highlighting the influence of radio, documentaries, and television. She explores how first-person or third-person narration really affects a film, in terms of genre conventions, viewer identification, time and nostalgia, subjectivity, and reliability. In conclusion she argues that voice- over increases film's potential for intimacy and sophisticated irony.'
*** My current project with my friend in Minneapolis will involve voice over, particularly when he's relaying memories from his past as we walk around his hometown. I think it's important to understand the functions and failings of voice over in both the narrative and fiction film before i employ them to make sure I use them to an effective end.
Alain Resnais is a French documentary film director who made films alongside the critic-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave (Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc-Godard) but he is more precisely a part of the filmmaking and literary community of the Left Bank, which included Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy, and Chris Marker. He is perhaps best known for his films of the 50's and 60's: Night and Fog (1955), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), which all deal with themes of memory and trauma. His films are typified by innovative techniques that he used to great effect to describe subjectivity and unconventional experiments with temporality. His work through the 70's and 80's did not bring him great critical success but his more recent films Smoking/No Smoking (1993) and Coeurs (2006) returned him to critical favor.
clip from Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
clip from Guernica (1950)
clip from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
scene from Resnais's most recent film Coeurs (2006)
alienation - Emotional isolation or dissociation. - a turning away; estrangement
- the state of being an outsider or the feeling of being isolated, as from society - a state in which a person's feelings are inhibited so that eventually both the self and the external world seem unreal
"There is only one way to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it." - Roland Barthes
Alienation is typically understood as a condition of modernity. Karl Marx theorized that this sense of antagonism and separateness grew out of the rise of a newly capitalistic society; people began to notice their insignificance as mundane jobs relegated their daily existence to nothing more than a cog in the machine. Other philosophers, like Jean-Paul Sartre believed that the human condition is steeped in anxiety and that alienation as a psycho-social phenomenon may have come to the fore with capitalism, but it has always been an undercurrent of a reflective consciousness. I am interested in all sources of alienation and all the ways in which it can manifest in the life of the individual. Like Barthes, I see it as an unavoidable response to being alive that is heightened in certain situations and for people of certain temperament. In my work I want to look at alienation not just as an estrangement of the individual from society or recognition of self as the other, but a necessary means of comprehending our relationship to the world and other people. And by comprehending I don't mean simply making sense of but paradoxically, understanding the impossibility of it's comprehension. Ultimately, I think it comes down to perspective and the ability to move back and for between subjective and objective, details and "the big picture" to maintain any sense of self - in relation to self and other.
It's not directly correlated but I think this poem by Wallace Stevens speaks to the spark of alienation which leads one to consider things from another perspective, thereby better understanding self and the world: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~cathy/connoiseur.html
There are many texts one could read that address different aspects and experiences of alienation. One that I am particularly fond of is the play The Zoo Story by Edward Albee. It's a story of the individual experience of alienation as it impacts a social interaction. It is a portrait of alienation run a-muck, un-synthesized and ultimately the cause of destruction. Albee, Edward. Selected Plays of Edward Albee. New York: William Morris Agency, 1987. a cartoon interpretation of alienation
Chris Marker (born 29 July 1921) is a French writer, photographer, filmmaker and digital media artist. He lives in Paris and does not grant interviews. Marker's work flexes the boundaries of documentary to consider philosophy, memory and the capacity of fiction to convey truth. His work is wide-ranging in form and content, and exists in disregard to the boundaries of medium or genre: from a science-fiction essay montage (Sans Soleil, 1982), a film made entirely from still photographs (La Jetee, 1962), and an multi-layered memoir in the form of an interactive CD-Rom (Immemory, 1997). Recurring themes of interest are memory, time, perception, and travel. When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers a photograph of a cat instead. His cat is named Guillaume-en-egypte.
Personal Mythology - I cannot turn up one "true" definition of personal mythology, so I'm going to "define" it, according to my purpose; loosely and probably inadequately as: the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
This concept is not entirely different from the concept of subjective reality, which holds that each individual holds a different truth or perception of reality. What has not been adequately accounted for is the individual's perception of self in relation to this perceived reality. Most of the information that can be found referencing the idea of personal mythology exists primarily in forums of New Age philosophy and self-help. Granted, Personal Mythology may not be the best term for what I’m trying to express, but for lack of anything more descriptive at the moment I will attempt to bend the terminology to my own meaning, for my own purposes.
This approach might be oddly fitting with the notion of Personal Mythology (as I choose to understand it) which evokes the spirit of modification of factual occurrence to the designs of memory (or imagination) to create a cohesive (or tolerable) self-perception. However, these stories do not exist in isolation or only within the mind of the creating individual, for they directly determine how people relate to and understand one another and thus one's personal mythology informs and is informed by those with whom they interact. What is created is some undercurrent of universal truth. Not an overarching, self-conscious meta-narrative that describes things in generalities, but some presence on the underside of that, quietly humming.
Some of the artists and work I've looked at are specific examples of a constructed personal mythology, sometimes inspired by mental/emotional idiosyncrasies that give cause for this typically suppressed story to bubble up. Other artists, I believe, contend with this notion or tangential notions within their work.
"As creatures that interpret experience mentally, we have no choice but to believe in the mind's made up version of reality." Milton J. Bates
1. Jonathan Caouette (filmmaker)
***Jonathan Caouette had a dramatic entrance to the film world in 2004 when his experimental, docu-fiction feature Tarnation was released. The film, which was itself a whirlwind, created a whirlwind and Caouette has yet deliver his next creative mark. It would be interesting to see Caouette's editorial rendering of these last 5+ years as I suspect it would tell us more about him (exaggerated though it would likely be) than any interview or written account. Caouette is definitely a mythmaker. His film Tarnation exceeds his autobiography by its unorthodox juxtapositions of memory, actual account, and reenactment in virtually every medium, arranged without regard for temporality, coherence or factual "truth". He is, in effect, telling the many stories that make up the story (or myth) of his life. Why this amounts to something greater than autobiography is due to Caouette's awareness of his own impact on the shape and structure of this story.
clip #1 from Tarnation (2003)
clip #2 from Tarnation (2003)
review:
Renee LeBlanc was a beautiful little girl; she was a professional model before she was 12. Then Renee was injured in a fall from the family garage and descended into depression. Her parents agreed to shock therapy; in two years she had more than 200 treatments, which her son blames for her mental illness, and for the pain that coiled through his family. "Tarnation" is the record of that pain, and a journal about the way her son, Jonathan Caouette, dealt with it -- first as a kid, now as the director of this film, made in his early 30s. It is a remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful. It has been constructed from the materials of a lifetime: Old home movies, answering machine tapes, letters and telegrams, photographs, clippings, new video footage, recent interviews and printed titles that summarize and explain Jonathan's life. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land," and Caouette does the same thing. - Roger Ebert
Ebert, Roger. "Tarnation." Chicago Sun-Times . 15 Oct. 2004.
*** My interest in Marker begins with his enigmatic nature. For example, he is known by a pseudonym and often self-represents as an owl, a cat or some other alter-ego. Marker's work deals with issues of time, memory and self-perception. Biographer Catherine Lupton notes that not only does Marker contend with these issues but that he does so from within his work. "The reality Marker offers has nothing to do with bald biographical fact... it is that of the human imagination, in which it is perfectly possible to be born in two or more places at once" (12). It is through his experiments in personal essay that Marker addresses the creation of personal myth; particularly in a work like Immemory - an interactive CD-Rom - Marker invites us to consider our own self-perception and consequent myth production as we stumble around in his "memory". Marker once said, "all I have to offer is myself" and in that offer is an invitation to consider oneself.
Lupton, Catherine. Chris Marker: Memories of the Future . London: Reaktion, 2005.
clip from Sans Soleil (1983)
clip from La Jetee (1962)
review:
Given the state of things, there appears to be three options for contemporary auteurs. They can either carry on as a kind of classicist of the medium, like Pedro Almodovar or Wong Kar-Wei, delving deeper into the formal tradition of the great mid-century masters who set their time-bending, narrative-suspending pace. The more self-consciously "progressive" filmmaker might take his cue from the likes of Wes Anderson or Todd Haynes, Americans who tend to cannibalize their lineage with no apparent concern for the fact that, in literature at least, pastiche is considered a minor skill.
Marker represents a unique case of a third way, which is a decided step outside of cinephilia into the broader and more relevant digital world at large. Marker remains, perhaps unjustly though logically, a middling figure in the motion picture history.
This is because what Marker does is less like producing single masterworks and closer to keeping a blog, albeit an astonishingly prescient one started almost 50 years before Typepad. With his long scroll of documentaries, installation pieces, photography books, political cartoons, CD-ROMs and poetry, he's refined a remarkably consistent set of themes with the care of a philosopher or a coffee shop dilettante, depending on your opinion of him. Among the themes are the fragility of radical political movements (The Train Rolls On, A Grin without a Cat), the positive and negative sides of Orientalism (Statues also Die, The Koumiko Mystery), and his ever-present bugaboo: memory.
Stout, Andrew. "La Jetee/Sans Soleil." Flak Magazine. 1997-2007.
*** Guy Maddin is an unapologetic mythologist. He mines his family history, both place and people, to create modern fables projected into some bizarre antiquated past. Typically referred to with cross-genre terminology ("surrealist-inflected pseudo documentary" and "docu-fantasy" the film My Winnipeg is the filmmakers attempt to grapple with his own personal mythology through the exploration of places of origin - both locational and familial. The film's tag line is a particularly apt double entendre: "truth is relative". While the film purports to tell certain truths about the Canadian city, it is really an exploration of the filmmakers psyche with the city serving as a point of entrance and reference. Gay Maddin still resides in Winnipeg, actively constructing personal myths centered around this attachment to his place of origin.
clip from My Winnipeg (2007)
clip from Brand Upon the Brain (2006)
review:
To be honest, I’d rather not know. Fact-checking “My Winnipeg” would be absurd, since the film, which combines archival documentary images with freshly shot, antique-looking passages, is more concerned with lyrical truth than with literal accuracy. And even though I suspect that some of its more outlandish assertions are at least partly grounded in fact, Mr. Maddin is engaged less in historical inquiry than in hallucinatory autobiography, ruminating on the deep and accidental relationship between a specific place and an individual life.
As “My Winnipeg” conjures it, the bond between city and filmmaker is ambivalent and reciprocal. Much as he may dream of taking that one-way rail journey to somewhere else, Mr. Maddin can no more spurn Winnipeg than it can disown him. In a thoughtful, occasionally excitable voice-over he dutifully tries to explain the place — its riverine topography and wintry climate, its civic traditions and architectural landmarks. But his real point — and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest — is that Winnipeg explains him.- A.O. Scott
Scott, A.O. "Permafrost Makes the Heart Grow Stranger in a Haunted Snow Globe."
clip from an interview: talking about how his editing works as a facsimile of memory
4. Charlie Kaufman
I don't think that the world exists outside of (the) point-of-view of human experience or that if it does it doesn't look anything at all like what we think that it does... my movies take place from the point-of-view of this interior story- Charlie Kaufman
*** Charlie Kaufman claims that he's never really telling a story. He writes from the inside and says: "I'm not interested in having perspective in the things that I write about--I'm interested in writing about them from where I am. Because that's always where you are. You never have perspective." While this statement seems to contrast with my admittedly makeshift notion of personal mythology, I see much in Kaufman's work that speaks directly to my ideas. While he disowns any interest in perspective (in the sense of clarity producing distance) I think his work demonstrates a profound interest in matters of perception - particularly of the individual from inside his daily existence, which I would argue is a perspective, albeit mostly one short on clarity.
I think Kaufman embodies the idea of personal mythology in his life and work - particularly in his most recent film, Synecdoche, New York (2008) a film which tells the story of an artist who becomes absorbed with and within his own masterpiece.
It's a tough ask to make "monumentally sad" sound like a recommendation, which could make Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (pronounced si-NECK-duh-kee) the hardest sell I'll ever give five stars to. Its subjects are loneliness, senescence and failure. It's kind of a comedy, only death is all around. You may come out confused; you may be crying. I want to see it again.
Kaufman's previous conceits as a screenwriter, in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, explored relationships, creativity and the human condition through dancing prisms of wit. The approach here is different, but we'd expect nothing less than an off-the-wall idea: a theatre director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), mounts an improvised production in an impossibly vast Manhattan warehouse, which consumes decades of his life and never draws in a single audience member.
Kaufman, who also directs for the first time, intends this as a joke at his own expense: what if this wizard of drama conjured an idea so clever and all-encompassing that no one could possibly wish to see it? Furthermore, what if Caden's life – a series of estrangements, feuds and ailments – was a wreck, and not an easy, funny wreck, but a state of being so sore and unhappy that laughter chokes halfway up your throat?
As ever, we must factor in the acres of miscellaneous weirdness: an estate agent blithely explaining the selling points of a house that's on fire; Caden's daughter, Olive, doing a green poo; the unnerving old guy (Tom Noonan) who appears to be following him around.
Kaufman all but dares his detractors to hate this film, and hate it they have: "too clever by half" seems to be the standing charge. For the record, I'd say it's actually at least eight and a half times too clever, and anything but flawless. To be fair, though, it's also a stark, unflinching and heroically honest exercise in self-examination, so the flaws are largely on purpose.
*** Todd Haynes, like many others, is interested in the mythology surrounding Bob Dylan. But unlike biographers who chronicle Dylan through his work, Haynes is not interested in exploring Dylan as a biographical subject. In the opening credits we learn that the film was "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan" a qualification meant to prepare the viewer for not merely an account of a life but a series of ruminations on the myth that a life can become.
Haynes is obviously not interested in even the illusion of fact or reality as he uses six different actors (men and women) and an inter-cutting narrative to embody the essence of Dylan. Perhaps I should qualify this as the essence of Bob Dylan... as expressed by Todd Haynes. And isn't this as true as any truth? Especially for a personality of such magnitude, so shaped by the perceptions of individuals and the collective cultural context. But not just anyone could inspire such a film. Bob Dylan, so in tune with the permutations of his own personality, so instrumental in the construction of his own character, is an ideal subject
clip #1 from I'm Not There (2007)
clip #2 from I'm Not There (2007)
interview:
Michael Parkinson tells an anecdote about being at a top Sydney restaurant one night: who should he see at the next table, dining alone? None other than the hunch-shouldered, frizzy-haired, shades-wearing legend himself, Bob Dylan. Parkinson had long pined to get Dylan on his show. Perhaps only the cast of Dead Ringers could do justice to the encounter that followed.
With nothing to lose, Parkinson decided boldly on a direct approach. The restaurant fell quiet as he walked over to Dylan's table, where the icon was concentrating ferociously on his meal. Parkinson delicately leaned over to speak. "Ahem, Mr Dylan, I -" "He ain't here," snapped the non-interviewee, without looking up. The meeting was at an end, and Mr Parkinson tactfully withdrew.
Much of Dylan's enigma, his refusal to be tied down and his authentic artist-hauteur is summoned up in that reply, when he refused to speak as if screening out a phone call. Better than "I'm not there", or indeed "It ain't me", this might even have made a better title for Todd Haynes's latest picture: an idiosyncratic tribute to the many faces of Bob Dylan. It's not a conventional biopic but a cine-portrait, casting a string of actors to play the many facets of Dylan - and even these are not actually Dylan but Dylan-variants, Dylan-figures with different names. Haynes weaves in genuine songs with hints and scraps, quotations and references; echoes of images, ideas and album covers. Amid it all, Dylan himself remains elusive.
His conceit does justice to Dylan's fugitive charisma - although Dylan himself did his best to bugger up this fugitive charisma with his appearance in the monumentally bad 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, worryingly playing much the same sort of Dylan-character offered here: an outlaw troubadour called Jack Fate. It's a cult classic of awfulness about which Dylan fans are globally in denial, though this movie may help to expunge it from the record.
I'm Not There addresses an unfashionable subject, easily mocked: the artist's need to change, and evolve, in order to survive. Blanchett's performance as Transitional Dylan is the key. Not merely does she mimic him with terrific sympathy and wit, but she shows Dylan's puzzlement and anger at boneheaded middlebrow interviewers who triumphantly alight on what they consider to be a killer objection: evidence that he has changed his music and changed his mind. A sneering BBC reporter (played by Bruce Greenwood) obtusely insists on finding hypocrisy and insincerity in Dylan, unable to judge the music on its own terms. "Do your early stuff, man!" Dylan yells self-satirically up at a statue of the crucified Christ - and many in the media wouldn't see that his change-imperative was what led Dylan to his much-feted "early" material in the first place. I was reminded of the documentary The US Vs John Lennon, which showed haughty interviewers attempting to patronise Lennon by preferring his "old" style over the "new" - while clearly not understanding either.
6. Henry Darger (painter)
*** Henry Darger is probably the most well known outsider artist. His master work is an illustrated fantasy titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which spans a six decade period. He also wrote a 5,000+ page autobiography called The History of My Life, and an unfinished work of fiction: Crazy House. Must of Darger's work serves in the construction of a mythic world. Many believe this propensity to indulge in feats of the imagination stemmed directly from either paranoid schizophrenia or Asperger syndrome, and that he may also have been abused as child. Many of the threads of Darger's stories were inspired by news clippings to which he developed a strong personal attachment. Most notably was an article concerning the kidnap and murder of a five year old girl. When the article was stolen from his locker the shock of that loss provided the inspiration for Darger's great work.
clip from the documentary In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)
snippet of a review of Henry Darger's work by Stephen Prokopoff
There is little purpose to add to the polemic that has continued over the last several decades concerning the artistic validity of outsider art. The great emotional and formal beauties found in the best examples of this work as well as its profound influence on “high art” in our time would appear to have settled the matter. Darger was certainly an untutored artist in any traditional sense and his work, like that of other outsiders, stands outside of the history of art. He probably never visited a museum and had only very limited exposure to art. Yet his creative sensibility was such that it was possible for him to spin gold from the daily experience and fantasy, which in his mind easily co-mingled. If Darger was largely ignorant of art in the museums, he was in close touch with the abundant imagery of popular culture available to the pack-rat collector. Topical events are continually reflected in his texts and images just as cut-outs from newspapers and magazines, comic books and religious tracts easily found a place in his visual narratives.
Like all genuine talents, Darger developed a set of techniques that was at once individual and entirely adequate to his expressive requirements. He was at best a mediocre draftsman, for example, having particular trouble with human figures. Yet Darger created an art filled with legions of figures whose images were appropriated. Darger’s method was to simply trace images from children’s book illustrations, comic strips and similar sources. If the needed image was not of the required size, the artist would take it to the photography counter of a near-by drugstore and have it enlarged or reduced to the proper measurements. Frequently favorite images were repeated in a given picture as well as additional works. Other elements deemed suitable- butterfly cut-outs, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, fragments from coloring books and game boards and many more- were confiscated into Darger’s pictures and, because of the easy alliance in them of the real and the imagined, seemed perfectly at home.
Darger’s particular brilliance lies in a keen organizational sense. His major compositions bring together massive casts of characters in ways that surely would have gladdened the heart of a Cecil B. DeMille. These elaborate forces are deployed with a sure eye for intricate, often cunningly balanced relationships that activate the entire picture plane. Darger’s compositions are commonly set in expansive landscapes or, somewhat less frequently, in interiors, both particularly well-suited to the horizontal format he favored.
film adaptation of the book, Slaughterhouse Five (1972)
9. "Billy the Kid" - Jennifer Venditti (filmmaker)
*** In interviews, Jennifer Venditti locates her work in the cinema-verite tradition - while she may be inspired by the likes of Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, her film is a more modern, stylistic approach to the philosophies of verite filmmaking. Her first feature film Billy the Kid (2007) is a documentary portrait with a strong narrative bent, which deals with themes of adolescent alienation. Billy is unique for many reasons but it is his precociousness - stemming from a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome - that makes him such an articulate and resonant subject through which the filmmaker explores her themes. Billy, like most adolescents, particularly those with mental and emotional idiosyncracies, constructs his own world and as a place of refuge from the ravages of growing up.
trailer for the movie Billy the Kid (2007)
interview with Jennifer Venditti
New York Times review of the film:
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: December 5, 2007
“I know I’m unique,” announces Billy, an opinionated 10th grader and the willing subject of Jennifer Venditti’s sly documentary, “Billy the Kid.” Delivered almost apologetically, the comment is without arrogance. But as one candid confession follows another, the camera’s role in their solicitation becomes difficult to overlook.
Filming for eight days during the summer and winter of 2005, Ms. Venditti follows Billy as he navigates his close-knit community, Lisbon Falls, Me. A seemingly normal teenager who likes girls (“but I’m not a jerk about it”) and loves heavy metal, Billy also struggles with a volatile temper and the disconcerting tendency to say exactly what he means. Both traits have isolated him from his peers, inflamed the local bullies and driven him more deeply into a mind that may or may not conceal more serious psychological problems.
Presenting neither an argument for medication nor its rejection, “Billy the Kid” is a deceptively simple portrait of a shockingly self-aware and articulate young man. Quoting Robert Frost as easily as “The Terminator,” Billy discusses his troubled past (“I don’t know where to start”) and his deep-rooted desire to protect women. This is evident in the tender, patient interactions between the boy and his mother, Penny, which provide the film with a much-needed core of stability and an antidote to Billy’s free-form observations.
Yet the filmmaker’s decision to eschew other viewpoints underscores the fundamental friction at the heart of the documentary process: the flattery of observation is difficult to resist. When Billy, after persuading a shy waitress to be his girlfriend, is loudly applauded by a clique of town hangabouts, he is pleasantly surprised.
“The years of loneliness have been murder,” he tells them, and the men collapse with laughter. Whether a blurted confession or a line to the gallery, we’ll never know.
"Supreme Fiction" (or, the "essential imagination = the source of our fictions) is an idea Wallace Stevens explored in his poetry and essays; most notably in the poem in three parts: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Stevens presents this terminology as a way of addressing the interval between reality and fiction, perhaps more accurately described as reality and the imagination or reality and the perception of reality. "Supreme Fiction exists somewhere between idealism and pragmatism, as they might be defined in loose correlation to the imagination and reality, respectively. Idealism addresses how the mind mediates reality. Pragmatism deals with practical consequences and real effects. Milton Bates explains, "To see the world and to write poetry are essentially the same fiction-making activity, arising from the same desire to overcome our estrangement from reality." (51)
"As creatures that interpret experience mentally, we have no choice but to believe in the mind's made up version of reality." Milton J. Bates
"the nicer knowledge of Belief, that what it believes in is not true." Wallace Stevens
"I find my story in the telling of that story." Sam Keen
read:
Bates, Milton J. "Stevens and the supreme fiction." The Cambridge Companion to Wallace
Stevens. E. John N. Serio. United Kingdom:Cambridge University Press, 2007. 48-61.
Bates's essay deals with Wallace Steven's poem "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"
Jim Jarmusch is an American Independent filmmaker who has achieved critical and popular recognition for his films made over the last 25 years. He has always worked outside the system of Hollywood, not because he is unwelcome but because he is unwilling to work within their guidelines and on any schedule other than his own. His initial interest was in literature, he first attended college for journalism and briefly attended Columbia with the intention of becoming a poet. After a ten month foray in Paris, Jarmusch returned to New York and applied to the Tisch School of the Arts. Although he had no experience with filmmaking he was accepted to the program and made his first film Permanent Vacation (1980) with money that was intended to pay his tuition. Jarmusch is a minimalist filmmaker who is less interested in narrative and plot and works with mood and character to distinguish himself. He has experimented with different styles and genres but all of his films are permeated with dark humor, drifting protagonists, long silences and still shots. He allows his characters to say a lot (especially when Roberto Benigni plays a part) but much of what his films say exists in the spaces where the dialog is spare or non-existent; his characters non-verbal responses to one another are very telling.
clip from Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
clip from Night On Earth (1991)
clip from Down By Law (1986)
clip from Jarmusch's first film: Permanent Vacation (1980)
***Road Movies are often claimed as a distinctly American genre. From Easy Rider (1969) to Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the road movie indeed often takes place on the road but it is possible for the thematics of this genre to be projected onto other types of journeys. The underlying theme beneath the act of physical travel is the enactment of a transformative experience. As outlined in the above "definition" (and similarly to the bildungsroman of literature) the character experiences some loss and follows the trajectory of his/her exile down the open road.
One of my next projects is an exploration of the mythology of self, conceptualized as an actual journey and described in three distinct stages: the process of leaving, the act of travelling, and the goal of arriving. Since the second section of the film involves an actual journey - car on blacktop - I think it's important to consider the history of the road movie genre, both in how its conventions might inform my work and in how I may circumvent these conventions, in the true spirit of the transgressive road movie.
clip from the classic road movie, Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
read: Sargeant, Jack and Stephanie Watson. Lost Highways: an Illustrated History of Road
Coleman, James. Projected Images: 1972-1994. New York: DIA Center for the Arts,
1995.
***James Coleman was originally a painter but began to work with film, video and photography in the 1970’s. His preferred medium today is slide projection, typically paired with audio. Michael Newman writes: Coleman’s work explores “the relationship between the identity of the subject and image as they are mutually conditioned or ‘caused’ through time.” The viewer’s perspective and interpretation is an integral part of the work. His work cannot be understood from looking at the visual images, they are experiences; Because of this I can really only respond to his work through interpreting what others have written. But I am interested in what I have read and feel that some of my goals for my work are related to his efforts. Jean Fisher writes: “ One might say that (Coleman’s) work articulates a kind of semi-permeable “membrane”, where what exceeds the image – its mechanisms of production and of interpretation (the viewer) – contribute as much to its possibility of meaning as what seems obviously intrinsic to it – its content and point of “origin” (the maker).” I wouldn’t say my work has succeeded yet in extending beyond (if even reaching) the meaning I ascribe, but I am at work, thinking of ways to further involve the viewer and the subject.
2. Todd Hido (photography)
Henry, Patrick (curator). Fabula. Bradford, West Yorkshire: National Museum of
Photography, Film & Television, 2003.
*** I am primarily interested in Todd Hido work with landscapes and homes and night. Most of Hido’s work is done at night and all using ambient light and long exposures to create photographs that although distinctly devoid of people are always referencing their presence through their absence. Patrick Henry writes, “Hido’s pictures both tease and disturb us. We are aware of them simultaneously as fiction, as allegory and as documents… Hido holds us expertly at the intersection.” I am also interested in the intermingling of fiction and document. What I appreciate most about Hido’s work is that the material is “true” – these are real houses, streets and cars - but there is a fiction implied by leaving people out of it. By fixating on barren and desolate situations, Hido leaves his work open for the viewer to imagine or suppose what they will.
3.William H. Gass (non-fiction)
Gass, William H. Finding a Form. New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1996.
*** While he has been known to laugh it off, William Gass created the term metafiction in the 1960’s to describe his own and other writer’s work that sought to subvert the conventions of novel writing while openly acknowledging and discussing the act of experimentation. Also called self-reflexive, this type of work is literatures contribution to the postmodern. Some consider metafiction to be the death of the novel while others argue that it’s in fact a rebirth. Patricia Waugh realizes that “contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality of history are provisional.” I like Gass because he seems always to be looking to open things up and broaden definitions. His dissertation, A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor, demonstrated an interest in expanding the notion of metaphor beyond its purely linguistic origins. As Gass’ writing has progressed his interest in metaphor has grown outside of his own work as he has become “principally interested in establishing the relationship between fiction and the world” as a metaphorical one.I think this idea is directly relatable to certain explorations made in the world of film.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984.
4. William Christenberry (sculpture/photography/painting)
Lange, Susanne (curator). William Christenberry. Dusseldorf, Germany: 2001.
*** William Christenberry appropriates found objects for both direct uses in his work and as models for sculpture, painting and installation. While his work shows the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and others of the found object art tradition, Christenberry uses the object as something more than stylistic device. Claudia Schubert notes that Christenberry’s use of products and everyday articles “can be regarded as quotations… they are the equivalent of “direct speech” in linguistics; they have a documentary character.” I think there is a correlation between the way in which Christenberry incorporates objects and locations in his work and the way I work with personal story telling and subject perspective. He displaces objects, or reinvents them not to alter their veracity or disrupt their directness, but to call attention to it. I take conversation, dialog and storytelling out of context. I appropriate free-floating personal narrative and mythology and deliberately place it into some context for what I believe to be the same or similar reasons: to give substance to the immaterial and to uncover poetic truth.
*** C.D. Wright has been called an elliptical poet but is nervous about the label. Elliptical poetry is the current avant-garde, or ‘post-postmodern’ movement. Stephen Burt of the Boston Review writes: “(they) tell almost stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.” I think parts of this statement could be ascribed to contemporary experimental documentary/narrative work. Or any medium/all mediums that are trying to redefine or undefine themselves. I like that Wright rejects this. And I agree with her. Her work is not empty or intentionally anti-meaning. But she does seem to question traditional forms. Burt writes, “elliptical poets try to manifest a person-who speaks the poem and reflects the poet-while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves.” I can’t quite say exactly how this might relate to films (or my films) but there is definitely a playing with perspective in Wright’s work that I find intriguing.
only the crossing counts
It's not how we leave one's life. How go off
the air. You never know do you. You think you're ready
for anything; then it happens, and you're not. You're really
not. The genesis of an ending, nothing
but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting
of furniture with a remnant of the revenant's shirt.
Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn
away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face.
O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer
will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more
shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light.
Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left
the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove
the butterflies home. You must know
how it goes, known all along what to expect,
sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity.
Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly
- C.D. Wright
6. Marcus Kenney (painting)
Kenney, Marcus. Marcus Kenney. New York, D.A.P., 2007.
*** I’m calling Marcus Kenney a painter because this is his self-classification. Granted, his work reads as decidedly mixed-media. William A. Fagaly of the New Orleans Museum of Art writes, “painting is subservient in these works to the applied papers and other materials that constitute the bulk of the space and composition… (however) for Kenney, each of the many horizontal cigar bands that fill the sky in his 2006 work The Infidels is a brushstroke. Paper is his paint.” Kenney is generally at least cursorily political in his work but he never forgets the art and strays to activism. He has said, “I don’t care what you think about my work as long as you think.” I am drawn to Kenney’s work because of his use of repetition, appropriated image, and collage techniques. Kenney calls his work painting, implying a seamless cohesive piece, but he creates this seamlessness by joining pieces together – very similar to film editing. I am reminded of how the French terminology for film editing (montage, decoupage) calls attention to the craft by acknowledging the importance of the cuts and how they are juxtaposed. This is in direct contrast prized and praised (by Hollywood) notion of continuity editing, which seeks to diminish or erase the cut.
ALBERT LAMORISSE (1922 - 1970)
