Colin Marshall

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 46. John Baldessari's Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1971)

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Six Colorful Inside Jobs by John Baldessari. Ubuweb's description:

In "Six Colorful Inside Jobs" he draws a parallel between a double process of life and creation. The video shows a room being painted in six different colors, each color of the spectrum corresponding to a day of the week. This work, which started as a performance/installation, integrates the artist as a comic figure faced with contemporary history — that of American painting — and shifts his function toward that of a house painter. Through this form of irony, Baldessari shows to what extent instruments and materials help him define the subtle limits between art and work, art and life.

The camera faces straight down into a very small, very white room; a blank cell, almost. John Baldessari enters and, in time-lapse fast-motion, paints the walls and floors a blood-ish red. Right after he packs up and leaves, the day’s job well done, the next day’s job begins: painting all the red over with a light orange. The day after that, he carts in a bucket of — so you’ve predicted — yellow. This hypnotizes me. Painting a room yourself can, in time, turn into a meditative process, but watching the trick-photographically twitchy, white-clad but slowly discoloring Baldessari do it induces a good old trancelike state.

I can’t tell whether this would work better as an installation, as Ubuweb’s description mentions it initially being, or if it’s best as a sped-up video. Had I been alive and art-going 34 years ago, sure, I’d have stopped to watch Baldessari paint for half an hour, but you can be damn sure I wouldn’t watch all week. (Did savvy viewers maybe “check in” on him a few times over the course of the project? Or does that strategy sound obvious to everyone but me?)

Two specific elements of the video never stop fascinating me: the way Baldessari deals with the ever-shrinking floor spaces he must paint even as he occupies then — he does the final footprints from just outside the door — and the fact that he never seems to leave to use the bathroom. Or did an editor artfully cut those moments out? I keep looking for telltale jumps, but none appear. 20th-century art has so much to do with bladder control.

Six Colorful Inside Jobs reminds me of the chance I had, about ten years ago, to re-paint an old childhood room. I chose a color called “Silver Sword” and listened to Thriller on repeat as I worked. No record remains of what, if anything, John Baldessari listened to. Given the video’s silence, I suppose nobody would stop you from playing Thriller yourself as you watch.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 45. John Baldessari's I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971)

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I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. 13:06 min., black and white, 1971. By John Baldessari. Ubuweb's description:

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls. Inspired by the work's completion — the students covered the walls with the phrase — Baldessari committed his own version of the piece to videotape. Like an errant schoolboy, he dutifully writes, "I will not make any more boring art" over and over again in a notebook for the duration of the tape. In an ironic disjunction of form and content, Baldessari's methodical, repetitive exercise deliberately contradicts the point of the lesson — to refrain from creating "boring" art.

The 85-year-old Calvin Tomkins recently wrote a New Yorker profile of the 79-year-old Baldessari. The article is called, as it happens, "No More Boring Art", and I've got to admit, the collision of this very old art journalist and very old artist made for more interesting reading than anything I've seen from the youngsters recently. (It actually prompted me to buy a digital subscription to the magazine, which meant, as a youngster myself, enduring that lingeringly heretical feeling of paying actual money for online content.) Unsurprisingly, Tomkins mentions this very project, both its get-Nova-Scotian-students-to-write-on-the-walls phase and the tape-myself-writing-on a-pad phase. He quotes Baldessari: "It's very boring, isn't it?"

Well, yes and no. It's easy to dismiss the kind of art Baldessari has spent most of his career making — Lance Esplund, reviewing "Pure Beauty" at LACMA in the WSJ, certainly did — but I can't deny the spark I get from this sort of thing. Would I sit down in a gallery and watch the gray hand of John Baldessari write out "I will not make any more boring art" for thirteen straight minutes? Probably, because how often does the opportunity come up? Would I watch the same thing on a computer screen? I guess that's exactly what I'm doing right now, but the resolution is low — I can't even make out the sentence — and I do feel the lack of an institutional environment to strange up the experience. I really should've made the trip to LACMA, but hey, with seven more Baldessari-related pieces available on Ubuweb, I won't have to do entirely without.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 44. Derek Bailey's On the Edge (1992)

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On the Edge parts I and III. 52:22 and 58:13 min., color, 1992. By Jeremy Marr and Derek Bailey. Ubuweb's description:

A series of four 55 minute films shown on Channel 4 TV in the UK in early 1992. To say this was the best and most intelligent analysis of improvisation to be screened on UK television is probably unnecessary: it has in all likelihood been the only televised programme on this form of music-making. Written and narrated by Derek Bailey, produced and directed by Jeremy Marr, it developed out of the first edition of Bailey's book on improvisation (the broadcast almost coinciding with the publication of the second edition) and attempted to provide a world-view of the subject, not being bound by country, musical genre or preconception.

1: Passing it on
Broadcast 2 February 1992 this programme featured: Douglas Ewart at Haynes School in Chinatown, Chicago; improvisation in Mozart with Robert Levin, piano and the Acadamy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood; John Zorn and Cobra; improvisation in religious and devotional music and communities with: Naji Hakim - organ improvisations in Paris; Gaelic psalm singing on the Scottish Isles of Harris and Lewis; and Indian singing with Pundit Hanuman Misra.

3: A liberating thing
Broadcast 16 February 1992, concentrating on jazz based and free improvisation. With Max Roach at the Harlam School of the Arts; Butch Morris conducting (with, among others, Shelley Hirsch); Sang-Won Park and Korean music; Max Eastley's sound sculptures; Derek Bailey (solo and fleetingly with Phil Wachsmann, Steve Noble and Alex Ward); Steve Noble and Alex Ward duo; Nashville musicians including Buddy Emmons; Eugene Chadbourne.

File this one under "wish we had more TV like this today." Hell, maybe we do have more TV like this today; far be it from me to actually check. And while we're correcting, file not this one but these two under it. Ubuweb doesn't have all four episodes of On the Edge, but they've got the first and third, and from the descriptions they'd seem to be the most interesting.

The series opens strong, with a pro-improvisation polemic — I don't think that's too harsh a term — from Robert Levin, who's still a well-known pianist and composer. "To invent something is totally beyond the scope of the modern orchestra," he says. "It seems to be more technological, or, at least, Pavlovian." This is along the lines of what Brian Eno has been saying about scripted and recorded music for years; Alex Ross has more recently taken up the cause with very specific, needling regard to what has been labeled "classical music." These shows aren't entirely or even especially about classical music, but as a framing device it's a stark illustration of what happens to a genre when you suck the improvisation out. As Levin sums it up: "We have a terrible problem: these pieces have become museum pieces."

If Ubuweb's summary hadn't already pointed it out, I can assure you I'd be making a very big deal about how the show goes on to approach improvisation from a bunch of different angles and in a diversity of contexts. So you've got the maverick classical piano improviser, sure, but you've also got the ragtag, anything-an-instrument band improvising in an NYC loft; the classes of little kids improvising on Douglas Ewart's made-up instruments and Max Roach's drum kit, the untrained but impassioned choral improvisation; the improvisatory sonic sculptures alongside which Max Eastley improvises; the Korean flower shop owner who, in the improvisation of his homeland traditional music, finds solace from "things that make me different from what I want to be."

I guess what I'm saying is that the programs are successfully about a concept. This is rarer than you'd think; even books have trouble with it. Musical improvisation is actually one of the better examples I can think of of an idea that can't really be directly described, at least not with any great accuracy. You've got to find as many and as different examples of it as you can, and just let your audience experience them. Including unadulterated performances at length — at what passes for length on TV, anyway — is one of the many ways On the Edge gets this right.

Episode three even includes a segment on Butch Morris and his practice of "conduction," that is, a hybrid of conducting and improvisation where he, as the conductor armed with gestures both conventional- and unconventional-looking, "plays" a group of improvisers. That's pretty neat, but what's important is what he says to his improvisational orchestra between pieces. He demands of his players that they now entertain themselves here by playing something that they wouldn't entertain themselves with at home. He'd rather they not play at all than play something they wouldn't like were they in the audience. "I don't want you to play any old thing," he says. "I can get any-old-body to play any old thing."

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 43. Alex Bag's Untitled Fall '95 (1995)

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Untitled Fall '95. 56:58 min., color, 1995. By Alex Bag. Ubuweb's description:

Bag, at the time an art student, "plays" Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman's struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag's character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.

Interspersed between these confessions are eight set-pieces, in which Bag performs scenes from the background noise of her imagination: a pretentious visiting artist, London shop-girls discussing their punk band, a Ronald MacDonald puppet attempting to pick up a Hello Kitty doll, the singer Bjork explaining how television works. These surreal episodes sketch out what Bag sees as the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of contemporary youth culture, and teeter on the divide between parody and complicity.

How apropos I mentioned my use of Ubuweb as art school in the previous writeup. Not only is Untitled Fall '95 about art school, it's by an art school student. You see, she's well-known now, but back in the days of Melrose Place and Beavis and Butt-head — both of which are name-checked in the video — Alex Bag was just another kid at NYC's School of Visual Arts. Steering by the tried and true principle of "video what you know," she put together this saga of urban art-school life.

The chapters of this semi-fictional academic career, each of which takes place at the beginning of a new semester, are sort of proto-vlogs. The first has the bright red-haired Bag chatting into the camera about how "stoked" she is to finally be around "people who, like, understand me." As the semesters pass, her appearance changes and her on-camera intake of coffee and cigarettes increases. She announces her decision to "do the fine arts thing," because "advertising is so evil" and "I'm not going to kiss anyone's ass, basically." She's reasonably heartened to notice "big improvements in my shading and foreshortening," but then finds her self stuck writing "these really boring papers." By the time her hair assumes a bob-like shape and she gains a pair of retro Far Side glasses, she's met this RISD guy who impresses her by being "into all these really specific things."

School takes a turn for the worse around the sixth semester. Having dyed her hair black and picked up a nose ring, she admits to being "a little bit depressed," that "everything goes all wrong when I'm forced to explain my work," that she thinks "I shouldn't have to stand next to my thing and explain why I made it." She moans about having to endure her classmates' questions during critiques, having to explain endlessly how "my parents" and "high school" "fucked me up." She complains about the supposed superiority of everybody else at SVA, asking, "What is the point of making work for people who are so smart, they don't even watch TV?"

As the end of art school approaches, she appears to have imbibed that classic cocktail of bitterness and negativity. She's realized that "artists are so boring." She's been "reduced to applying for these really lame jobs." She "can't wait for it to end." She's "scared for it to end." Her one green shoot is the promise of the gritty but kaleidoscopic outside world, which offers an endless array of real, tangible things that may or may not be art-related. At least it's an escape route from the world which keeps her head "buried in some post-structuralist, anti-Lacan, MIT Press thing."

It's in her final couple semesters that her internal pendulum swings to an almost sympathetic position. Despite patches of transcendence and optimism, her history at SVA has been one of complaint. She "decides" to pursue fine art because she can't stand commercialism, yet she resents her professors' insufficient mastery of current pop culture. She's wowed by the presence of other artists, yet she also can't stand them. She works for a successful artist whose practice of hiring students to to his gruntwork she finds loathsome yet somehow inspiring. She doesn't care if she ever makes money from her work, yet she does. "I'm the first to admit that I'm a mass of self-contradictions," she says to the camera, "but I don't think there's anything wrong with that." She finishes off with a cri de coeur against those most villainous of Gen-X villains, those "selling my culture back to me."

It's kind of funny that we postmillennials don't seem to care about that thing, though I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Despite the generational divide, though — and despite the fact that I go to Ubuweb, not SVA — I can feel the resonance in this character's apparently potent combination of camaraderie and spite, confidence and wariness, optimism and dread. True, in many ways she cuts a ridiculous figure: taken from certain angles, she seems vapid, bombastic, directionless, entitled, unreasonably demanding. But maybe there's nothing wrong with that.

While these segments could hold their own simply strung together one after the other, Bag intersperses them with a series of bizarre vignettes. Each stars different eccentrics, all played by Bag herself with what must have been an epic raid on the theater department's costume closet. An unappealingly coiffed guest lecturer medicatedly describes her 365-screen installation and how "it's not as impactful" seeing the videos sequentially instead. A couple slack-jawed Brits yammer on to one another about how boring everything is except for punk rock songs whose lyrics yammer on about how boring everything is. Androgynous teenagers have an after-school-special moment. Bag stares, somehow both in astonishment and with deeply dead eyes, at a video of Björk disassembling a television set. Is the whole lesser or greater than the sum? I'm not sure I'd want to take it apart to find out.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 42. Francis Bacon's South Bank Show episode (1985)

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The South Bank Show on Francis Bacon. 54:55 min., color, 1985. Ubuweb's description:

Part of The South Bank Show series, avid Hinton directs this BBC documentary about British painter Francis Bacon, known for his horrifying portraits of humanity. The program consists of a series of conversations between Bacon and interviewer Melvyn Bragg, starting with commentary during a side-show presentation at the Tate Gallery in London. Later in the evening, Bacon is followed through various bars hanging out, drinking, and gambling. In another segment, Bacon provides a tour of his painting studio and a glimpse at his reference photographs of distorted humans. The artist discusses his theories, influences, and obsessions.

I've started thinking of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project as my own art school. On the downside, it lacks the whole social aspect, which may well be the most important part of art school. (It's the kind of place, after all, where one meets a young Brian Eno.) On the upside, I don't have to deal with anyone I don't want to deal with to get through it. (Certain art school students, naturally, taking pride of place in the ranks of people I don't want to deal with.) Back on the downside, it lacks a curriculum recognized in any traditional way. Back on the upside, it lacks a curriculum recognized in any traditional way.

Watching this episode of ITV's The South Bank Show, I realize that, taken similarly in its enormous entirety, it, too could be a kind of art school. From 1978 to 2009, the program followed Melvyn Bragg — he of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, also known as one of my favorite things ever — in his conversations with and explorations of the working spaces of figures like Peter Gabriel, Alec Guinness, Paul Bowles, the Pet Shop Boys, and, of course, a certain Francis Bacon. It's the sort of thing to which I could easily become hopelessly addicted; I guess I'm glad there's not a convenient episode archive on the net.

This particular episode won an International Emmy, and it's not hard to see why: in less than an hour of television, it captures three or four of those golden moments for which "real" documentary filmmakers long. I'm thinking especially of the part where, grasping for the words to explain his artistic mindset, Bacon asks if he can just use the notes he'd prepared earlier that day. He then produces a folded sheet from his leather jacket and reads off a paragraph that may explain everything about his paintings, or nothing.

I doubt Bacon himself would have approved of my search for a surrogate art school. When Bragg asks him if he was ever formally trained, Bacon swiftly comes back with something like, "No, thank god." He describes his fear of ever becoming an "academician," presumably because of the dissociation with the stuff of life that entails. In this show, you see an artist very much engaged with the stuff of life indeed — especially with its baser elements, and really especially when the drink is involved.

Bragg, being the ultimate intello-artistic-culturo-literary roving reporter that he is, naturally follows Bacon wherever these pursuits take him. I believe they go drinking, on camera, more than once. (The wine, which Bacon keeps pouring, seems to hit the presenter harder than the artist, unsurprisingly.) When you're dealing with a subject for whom going out drinking is his very element, can you afford not to do that? In the same manner, a healthy chunk of the long-form interview this show ultimately is takes place in what is either the middle-aged men's section of a gay bar or the gay section of a middle-aged men's bar. Bacon was in the thick of his life, and the art seems to have come out more fascinating for it. This episode of The South Bank Show does the same, and it, too, is thus art.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 41. Beth B.'s Stigmata (1991)

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Stigmata. 38:13 min., color, 1991. Part of The Cinema of Transgression. By Beth B.

If, like me, you grew up in the 1990s, you remember with great resentment how your Saturday-morning cartoons were saturated with public service announcements. Maybe you only realize it now; back then, after all, it just seemed normal to hear, every few minutes, a mini-sermon about drugs or the environment or shoplifting or the ozone hole or informing your priest or rabbi if you've been inappropriately touched every few minutes. I hope, for the sake of the children, that media preachiness has since descended from this zenith. I pray for a generation that can grow up watching Yu-Gi-Oh and commercials in peace.

Stigmata strikes me as not hugely dissimilar to those ceaseless PSAs, and in fact has its roots in that same squirrely era. It's sort of their extended 12" mix, non-radio edit: more people telling their stories of drug-related shame and degradation, more music of despair, more talk about rape. Six talking heads, intercut, take you through their personal histories. Despite each having a suite of distinctive details, they all follow pretty much the same lines: crappy childhood; incompetent parents; oppressive schools; self-loathing; a turn to the sweet, sweet brain medicine; descent into dissolution; greater self-loathing; bottoming-out, perhaps with a suicide attempt or something equally dire; the beginning of the long, slow, agonizing grind to get at least semi-clean.

I don't pretend to know what Beth B. intended with project, nor do I really think that's important. She could have meant it in essentially the same way the Ad Council meant all those 30-second spots with the junior-high kids shoving those potheads right back. If so, I find the subjects as difficult to relate to now as I did back then. This, I think, has been the fatal flaw of anti-drug PSAs since the dawn of man: you can't scare anyone straight without horror stories, but horror stories tend, by their very horrific nature, to seem unrelatable and thus irrelevant. I actually fear the probable lack of productivity brought on by a, say, a slightly too-regular weed habit. I do not particularly fear the possibility of slashing my wrists in a den of child prostitutes.

Piling atop that, most of these speakers seem to have been pre-screwed. "I never had a chance," goes one fellow's repeated lament. (I also detect a certain anti-Catholic school theme, which might explain the title. Stigmata is a Catholic thing, right?) Hence the impression that, hey, I didn't grow up in such an apocalyptically troubled household — I'm gonna be okay! Their stories thus gain an even more tragic edge, but they also get more alien. It all ends up like one of those action movies whose extremity ensures a certain blah hermeticism. The only addiction I worry about is to the immediate information access of the internet, and even then, I'm far from the Polk Street harem. Well, reasonably far. Far enough. Certainly out of shouting distance. I should probably close this web browser now.

Fifteen reasons James Franco owns you

I'd heard rumblings that James Franco wasn't your average silver-screen heartthrob, but I figured that just meant he's read Proust or paints with gouache or owns two wineries or something. Turns out no. He's actually some sort of superhuman artist-academic. Alex Mann passed me this profile of him by Sam Anderson, my favorite New York Magazine writer. The fifteen choicest bits follow:

1. "We’ve just finished listening to a lecture by the performance artist Marina Abramovic — a talk Franco introduced"
    
2. "He’s trying to nail down the details of an art show that will be based, somehow, on his recent performance on the soap opera General Hospital."
    
3. "He has class every day — since he’s enrolled in four graduate programs at once"
    
4. "most of his student films, he tells me, have been adaptations of poems"
    
5. "Was he flirting with me, or metaflirting — making a sly reference to all the gay rumors swirling around him"
    
6. "An unusual actor — he overprepared for minor roles, read Dostoyevsky and Proust between takes, and occasionally drove colleagues crazy with his intensity"
    
7. "He persuaded his advisers to let him exceed the maximum course load, then proceeded to take 62 credits a quarter, roughly three times the normal limit."
    
8. "He’s engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art."
    
9. "This is, no doubt, mildly insane, even if it’s a form of insanity many of us might want to have."
    
10. "He’s not a savant or an obvious genius — he’s someone of mortal abilities who seems to be working immortally hard."
     
11. "One of the central points of Franco’s art and career, as I read them, is that adolescence isn’t something we should look away from, a shameful churning of dirty hormones. It’s the crucible of our identity, the answer to everything that comes later"
     
12. "Once he gave up trying to control his acting career, everything kind of came his way."
     
13. "as he slides further along the continuum from Gyllenhaal to Warhol — his entire career is beginning to look less like an actual career than like some kind of gonzo performance piece"
     
14. "For an earnest guy, Franco has always been ragingly addicted to meta."
     
15. "It’s either hypocrisy or complexity, self-delusion or radical self-acceptance. It’s the defining fault line of his career, the source of much of his energy. Were he to resolve it in one direction or the other, he might cease to be so interesting."

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 38. Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether (1975)

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Music with Roots in the Aether. 102:43 min., color, 1975. Listed under Robert Ashley. Ubuweb's description:

Music with Roots in the Aether, an artwork by Robert Ashley, is comprised of seven two-hour programs featuring noted American experimental composers, created during the 1970s. Each program is two hours long and consists of one part Landscape / Interview (one hour) and one part live performance (one hour).

I'm not sure where of if Music with Roots in the Aether was originally broadcast or distributed, but I like the concept. Not only does Ashley's vision accommodate both performance and interviews, it also uses a visual style meant, as he once wrote, "to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not 'cut' the seen material in any way — that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions."

Though this episode on one of his own pieces doesn't contain an interview, it definitely adheres to that aesthetic. The handheld camera roves around, getting as close as possible to its subjects, and the only cut comes between the two segments. The first segment is the more elaborate, with Ashley himself and a small cast of oddly period-costumed performers laying down some piano and electronics while text appears and disappears onscreen. Like the cast's dress, the words have a historical feel that seems accurate at first but then deeply askew. Much of it is biographical data about various figures: "Guglielmo Marconi, Father of Mass Communications," "George Washington, Father of Our Country," "Whistler's Mother, the Mother of Whistler". The designations and the biographic data get stranger and stranger, until we're talking about the "inventor of the bolognaphone" and Colonel Sanders. (Preceding all this, I feel I should note, are recipes for tuna noodle casserole and pear jello salad.)

What to make of this? I'm not really sure, though the electronic music is pretty cool. The production is dated 1975, but something about its look and feel keeps me from fully believing that. I expect text a lot more public access character generator-y from that era; this stuff looks like something out of the 1990s. And the music itself also seems ahead of its time, though perhaps that's just the way of forward-thinking composition. All the while, the slow-moving camera has a lot to look at (and sometimes focus on) in what comes to nearly an hour, given the eccentric clothing and all the music gear and just plain weird stuff on stage. I mean, I've always know that there were such things as commemorative plates; I guess I've just never seen them before.

The slightly shorter, comparatively minimalist second segment begins with just a semi-tacky framed picture of palm trees and an island in silhouette. The camera slowly zooms out to reveal the one Stoic-faced suited man. Eventually, it reveals not one but two of them. Over Enoesque background music, the men stare straight ahead and communicate — though not, apparently, to one another — with a form of sign languages that sometimes looks real and sometimes looks totally made-up. The camera drifts to the faces, to the hands, back to the faces, and so on, and so forth. Speech seems to happen on the soundtrack, but it's not exactly speech, or at least not intelligible speech.

Verdict: while you could definitely watch this, you could even more definitely freak people out a little by projecting it on the ceiling of your next house party. I look eagerly forward to the next Music with Roots in the Aether episode.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 37. André S. Labarthe's Antonin Artaud (2000)

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Un Siècle d'Écrivains: Antonin Artaud. 45:47 min., color, silent, 1992. Listed under Antonin Artaud. Ubuweb's description:

En janvier 1947 sur la scène du Vieux-Colombier, Artaud donne l'ultime représentation de son "Théâtre de la cruauté" : une scandaleuse et mémorable conférence où, pour s'incarner, il se déchire devant un public médusé. Un portrait non chronologique et structuré, plutôt que par sa vision du théâtre ou sa critique hallucinée de la société occidentale, par des motifs qui traversent tous les écrits d'Artaud : angoisse, impossibilité d'être au monde, incapacité à "atteindre" ses pensées.

Uh oh. Looks like a job for Google Translate:

In January 1947 the scene of the Vieux-Colombier, Artaud gives the ultimate performance of his "Theatre of Cruelty" an outrageous and memorable conference where, to incarnate, he tears before a stunned audience. A portrait not structured chronologically, rather than his theatrical vision or hallucination of his critique of Western society, for reasons that go through all the writings of Artaud anxiety, inability to be the world's inability to "reach" its thoughts.

Fair enough. This isn't so much by Antonin Artaud, the French writer/actor/dramatist, as it is about him. Makes sense, given that he died in 1948 and this was made in 2000. Production credit would seem to go to the equally French actor/producer/director André S. Labarthe. From what I can gather, it's one episode of a television series whose title translates to A Century of Writers. The video has no subtitles, so best of luck to the non-Francophones, myself included.

But film and television are fully audiovisual media: even if you can't understand what's being said, you can still experience the sound design and the play of images. I would venture to say that you could draw about 90 percent of full enjoyment from all my favorite films without understanding their dialogue. (And given how low-dialogue my own filmmaking aesthetic is turning out to to be, how much allegiance could I have to the stuff?) Donald Richie fell in love with Japanese cinema before he knew the language. In fact, watching movies in tongues I don't understand — which might as well just be "in tongues" — keeps with my recent self-styled cinematic training of watching things either completely without sound (so as to focus on the assembly of the visuals) or completely without images (so as to focus on the assembly of the sound). This would, I suppose, land somewhere between.

There are some pretty cool images here: architecturally-intensive tracking shots, a nude at a piano scoring a silent film-within-the-film. There are also some pretty pedestrian ones — several of them in the kind of runny slo-mo that only Wong Kar Wai has ever pulled off, and even then not really — and I can tell you now that, if you're into extreme close-ups of typewriter ribbons running through their machines, you're in for a treat. But strong or weak, these visuals seem to serve a technique of which I approve, and which I may not have seen as clearly had I been linguistically able to concentrate on words and narrative.

Labarthe's story of Artaud, you see, appears to be told mostly in voiceover, and the Artaud figure — the fellow in the white hat, I assume — only rarely enters the frame. What's actually shown onscreen is pitched intriguingly between the way fiction would deliver its materials and the way documentary would: old photographs and film clips, turntables, trains, floppy dogs, urban scenery, sketches, notebook page after writing-filled notebook page, and yes, that typewriter. At times, the imagery feels almost abstract, though again, that just be my noncomprehension on duty. As for the way that the words "ARTHUR RIMBAUD" morph into the words "ARTAUD" at the beginning, well, I got nothin'.

Tarkovsky as hipster

Turns out that Andrei Tarkovsky was so deeply imbued with the cinematic spirit that he even took astonishing Polaroids. Here are a few of my favorites from the aforelinked, newly-collected collection:









While I'm more inclined to do motion photography — i.e., cinema — than still photography, I'm nevertheless extremely interested in the places where motion and still meet. As the blog post that collects Tarkovsky's polaroids says, his films "often seem to be composed as a montage of still photos." Count that as one of the many reasons his films will remain forever among my absolute favorites. Being a decided un-fan of cuts and camera movement, where they can be avoided, I can't help but let my own cinematic syle — such as it's so far developed, which ain't much — be informed by established filmmakers who share these extreme prejudices.

As I get to the Do or Die age re: major projects in film or any other medium, I've come to routinely examine my influences very, very closely — closer than I ever have before. Cinematically speaking, sure, Tarkovsky's important, but there are other image-makers whose compositions I can't afford not to freeze and study.

There's Ming-liang Tsai:



There's Jim Jarmusch:



There's Hirokazu Kore-eda:



There's Peter Greenaway:



And, perhaps most importantly, there's Apichatpong Weerasethakul:



Approached correctly, images can be powerful indeed, especially in terms of shaping our own work. Too often, we forget that.