This whole concept was too brain-explodingly excellent not to share: 8-bit Marina Abramović. “You can actually make it to the front. I did it yesterday and it took 5 hours. But once you get to the front, you can stare into her eyes for as long as you want.” [via The Awl]
Lawrence "Looker" Levi notices something strange about Willem de Kooning's painting "Carole Lombard," included in MoMA's current show:
In their discussion of de Kooning's game-changing 1950 abstraction Excavation, Stevens and Swan note that, as he was finishing it, he "painted a small rectangle near the bottom of the painting. He described it as a 'door,' a way to leave." In the painting, the door appears to be open. There's a door painted near the bottom of Carole Lombard, too, and it's closed.
I've been an un-fan of de Kooning since seeing a show of his women at, I think, Tate Modern back in 1995. But does anyone else think Zeroville upon learning of this door?
Lawrence named his post "To Be or Not to Be," which is flimsy excuse enough for me to turn to perhaps the most intriguing [to me] snippet from The Daily Notebook's recent festival coverage:
Conference, after starting with its credits running backwards, reveals a two-part film made up of 8mm black and white footage of video clips of actors who've played Hitler in the cinema—over 60 of them. Clarity of mise-en-scène in individual clips avoided in favor of a uniform aesthetic across the short, suppressing the ability, and desire, to identify which clip comes from what movie, thus creating what seems a single film of a multitudinous mass of Hitlers. It begins (that is, "ends"), at first, with a series of Hitlers walking into rooms and looking at each other, creating both a study of all the iconicity that makes up his photographic figure—the eyes, the hair, the slouch, the moustache, fatigue and mania—and an entirely new meta-cinematic movie which conjures a fantastical gathering of multiple Hitlers. This cinematic "conference" thus posits an endless series of Hitlers, each subtly different from the other but from the same essence.
The short then transitions to include more comedic interpretations, cleverly moving from Chaplin's dictator to Downey Jr.'s Chaplin's dictator, drawing into the fold Hitler's performative nature and the nature of performing Hitler. The soundtrack throughout is a degraded vocal sample of Chaplin's pseudo-German nonsense langage from The Great Dictator, put into the mouths of all, with constant applause abstracted to static and giving the film a relentless, hall of mirrors rhythm, moving from the paranoid gathering at the beginning of the film (but narratively the end), ending (at the beginning) with a speech, and between finding so many variations as to suggest that Conference is but a fragment of something larger and even more grotesque, morphing but recognizable, elusive yet everywhere, about both Hitler the man and Hitler the cinematic figure.
Doesn't that sound amazing? Gah, I wish I could see it.
Conference's denial of "name that clip" viewing brings me to the curious case of Christian Marclay's "The Clock" and the slept-on news [sorry] of its run at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston through October 11. Three takes from the Boston Globe's "Movie Nation" blog:
My stint lasted from 7 p.m. until midnight, when Geoff Edgers and Wesley took over. I stayed a little longer, though, since no way was I going to leave without seeing what Marclay would do at the stroke of 12. Part of the joy of "The Clock" is how the rigid adherence to chronological time lets it be otherwise unstructured. One of the few recurring patterns is a kind of rhythmic and visual crescendo at each hour -- and midnight got special treatment, climaxing with Welles' extremely unhappy experience with a clock tower, in"The Stranger." That's Welles, at left, with Loretta Young and a somewhat smaller clock earlier in the movie. This is the thing about Marclay's piece and clocks: Once you've watched even a bit of it, you start noticing the damn things everywhere. They're like chronological kudzu. (Feeney)
Of all that Christian Marclay's horological odyssey achieves, the boldest feat is a simple matter of etiquette. If a movie's got you, it's got you. There's nowhere else you'd rather be. If a movie's reallygot you, you don't want it to end. So what do you do when a movie's lost you, when it's never had you, when you simply can't take another minute? You check the time. It's second-hand criticism. (Morris)
I glanced at the artist’s credit. Marclay’s crew was big enough to work the Indy 500. Drat. For me, part of the pleasure was imagining this nutcase surrounded by DVDs and Beta tapes and laser discs in his endless search for time references. I didn’t want to think of him farming out tasks like Bob Timberlake cooking up his latest cabin print.
Another mood-ruining thought: How on earth did Marclay get such wonderful picture quality if he didn’t license these clips? Those who go legit – and pay millions, in some cases, for licensing – get nice, high-definition tapes supplied. I had figured, coming in, that he was working off standard DVDs. (Edgers)
OK, time's up!
