These works have the flair of neoclassical narrative as if illustrating an adolescent nightmare fro a Grimm’s Tale.  But here, technique triumphs over content when one learns that these unbroken subtle lines are drawn with a fine point flame thrower.

This arcane tool, impossibly dangerous, a 3000-degree pinpoint etching pen, in the hand of Zansky, becomes a something more like a crow quill. He defies the law of averages executing long sinuous lines without breaking stride.  The Oxygen and Propane torch can burn through iron but is used here on paper.  He is a magician with an inspired motif, one that is rendered with surgical precision Unscorched, these characterizations morph into abstraction as textural subtleties begin to overwhelm fine line. Steady Hands, Michael Zansky, he could have been a pyromaniac from the Bronx. But, his is an extraordinary feat, pyrotechnics that breath new life into old forms.

By Tony Zaza

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What is celebrated in this show is the spirit of artistic freedom and the pathway that a handful of free spirits paved. “I am for an art that bleeds, weeps and sings the strong songs of poetry.” says an anonymous New York Dadaist. That poetic vision is seen fully realized in the exemplary works beginning with the earliest executed construction, Indestructale Object by Man Ray and his Rayograph print of 1922.  They echo F.T. Marinetti’s challenge to “Let us boldly create the ‘ugly’ in literature and kill solemnity wherever it may be.”* While Marinetti is considered the father of Futurism, he is the Godfather of Dada. His transformation epitomizes the gradual refutation of the classical in favor of the  unexpected elevation of the found object and the composite of opposites.

With Dada, one enlists the mystery of the everyday, see Marcel Duchamp’s Chess Score of 1965, and Andre Masson’s Ondine with its borrowed feather, sand, and shell.

These works are as different from classical sculpture as Music Concrete differs from Marinetti’s first sensuous explorations,”Her body is jeweled with the fine night dew and the sweat of lingering pleasures drunk long from the lips of the Stars”.*

With the re-interpretation of the sensual also comes the assertion of irony in works by  Magritte, Femme-bouteille of 1955 and Enrico Donati’s Shoes of 1945.  Dada is mostly “surface tension” that requires the observer to bring something to the perception of art. Where Max Ernst forces one to read his Un triste sire for an inherent emotion, Man Ray defies any intention of seriousness with Ballet Francais II of 1971, unless the viewer is politically astute. There is much to discover in this show of surfaces where minimalist tendency had a point, one that is soon to be all but buried in the muck of the 2020s.

By Tony Zaza

* Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 11 May 1912.
** The Sensual City, 1908

The post Objects of Desire: The Lost Art of Challenging Art appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Since the mid-1990s, celebrity has been the dominant stylistic trope of the cinema. When agents achieved the status of “power elite” in Hollywood distribution circles, it was the death knell for imagination and creativity.  Character-driven cinema revolves around the cult of personality. Actors have projects created to reflect their “face to the public”. Because of this egocentricity, no one ages in American Film.

Plot lines are concocted to display the attributes of the actor. More than in the 1930s, current distribution/production deals mandate marketing that sells “stars” not story.

Plot is subverted by spectacle because spectacle displays the creativity of the plastic surgeon.  The conceit of character-driven cinema is that its creators no longer need a message; they simply need a “brand”. This all appeals to the self-centered sentiment of the “Me Generation” who defines life experience via twitter.

Vanity and narcissism dominated this year’s Festival wherein the messenger is far more important than any message.

Nebraska

Displayed exquisitely in black and white, the landscapes of Nebraska and the faces of its people define this work as a beautiful portrait of a somber reality, not everything ages with grace.  In Nebraska that reality does not seem to trouble all the common folks that populate Alexander Payne’s pictorial elegy and contemplation on family loyalties, conscience, and “settling up.” Sense of place dominates the story and after a dutiful son painfully entertains his aging and vulnerable dad’s zany compulsion, a certain sadness and dignity emerges that makes you appreciate the simplicity of rural America.

Inside Llewyn Davis

This portrait of the uncompromising artist concocted by the Coen Brothers with a certain air of compassion, nevertheless celebrates the cult of youthful self-indulgence. Structured as a commentary of the struggles an exemplary singer/songwriter trying to establish himself and the new early 1960s musical idiom of folk. As portrayed by Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis embarks on a “misbegotten odyssey” toward success. Circumstances, timing, and rhythm are nicely plotted to evoke quiet desperation and it is his presentation that seems to doom him. The character is so into himself, he can’t feel the audience only his own passions and frustrations. Like so many “savants” Llewyn just misses the boat. Pioneers don’t succeed; others harvest the fruit of their labor. I would like to think the Coens are celebrating the single-mindedness and self-destructive tendencies of creativity. We might even feel, after all is lost, that this character embraces and is sustained by the artistic energy he creates in each solitary performance.

Stranger By The Lake

Swollen over as it is with ample amounts of explicit man on man sex, Alain Guiraudie’s ominous tale moves from romance and jealousy to a horror story. Developing entirely in a beachfront “cruising spot”, Stranger tries to document one man’s quest for continual pleasure while understanding his own sexuality and what drives him. A plot could not be more self-centered. Intimacy and trust are the emotional drugs that lead to a scary conclusion one that makes eloquent use, as in most of the film, of ambient sound and the loss of natural light.

La Jalousie

The lead character is a study of narcissistic selfishness. , the persona is an actor, committed more to himself than his wife or the woman with which he has an affair. Blind to the needs of anyone around him, Louis allows himself the privilege of despair when everyone runs out on him.  Director Philipppe Garrel paints a picture of poetic justice.  Louis is stuck with himself. Directorially, it is a celebration not a cautionary tale. While it avoids elevating self-indulgence to a virtue, this portrait is somewhat forgiving of itself.

Jimmy P. Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian

This film lacks the magic needed to explore its subject: the exploration of the interchange between patient and physician. Director Arnaud Desplechin is too respectful of his source material Reality and Dreams by Georges Devereux, who melded both the theories and practices of psychotherapy and anthropology.  This directorial reverence for his countryman (actually an expat Hungarian of Jewish persuasion) does not result in thought provoking characterization or imaginative plot. It is the ego of the director that refuses to indulge his actors, Benecio Del Toro and Mathieu Amalric, who, in the hands of another, may have provided the magical mystery tour this movie was meant to be.

OMAR

Director Hany Abu-Assad bears the soul of Palestine in OMAR, a film that reflects the oppressive relationships between Israelis and Palestinians. The fragility and the necessity of trust drives the plot and all the characterizations and the intricacies of solidarity, as compromise propels a story that is essentially one of lost love. Propagandistic and single-minded, OMAR is, nevertheless, a sensible yet emotional story of painful choices and mutated ideals.

Still from OMAR, directed by Hany Abu-Assad. Image courtesy of NYFF.

The Dog

The real-life exploits of the man who inspired the film Dog Day Afternoon is raucously devolved in this exquisitely satirical documentary by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren. A subversive force of natures, John Wojtowicz Vietnam Veteran, self-proclaimed bisexual sex addict and latent stand-up comedian, enacts his own bio as a darkly humorous comedy in which he explains with irreverent passion his iconoclastic lust for life. This is a portrait of an outrageous ego that manages to survive the life of self-imposed hazards. The Dog presents what happens when an individual believes in the virtue of his debauchery.

Le Week-End

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan portray seniors on Holiday in Paris. Less about growing old than about acting old, this serio-comic episode of the implied long relationship of husband and wife details what happens to dreams deferred and ideals compromised.  And as petty foibles are displayed and crotchety habits imposed, we understand that personhood always manifests a deep loyalty to self.

Bastards

A seafarer , Marco (Vincent Linden),  inexplicably moves in temporarily into an apartment just vacated and strikes up a relationship with the estranged wife of an affluent businessman and their son. Sexual passion keeps them addicted to each other even though each has a vulnerable loyalty to others. Marco has not done a good job protecting his own estranged daughter from a life of exploitation, but he yearns to set it all right. It feels like an episode of NYPD Special Victims Unit.

Claire Denis cannot avoid finding a way to preserve the importance of French middle class values even when all narrative roads seem to bludgeon the bourgeois sentimentality. Bastards is ultimately more about Denis’ nimble storytelling and resolve to come to a civilized expression of the possibility of justice.

Child of God

Scott Haze acts the feral human. Some movies exist for the actor, are nothing but an excursion into the deepest cauldron of acting magic. In James Franco’s portrait of an underdeveloped hillbilly, plot improbabilities and excesses are the excuses for tour de force acting technique. Child of God is a showcase of performance art yet unlike Captain Phillips, All I Lost, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the film is not a vanity project to allow established talent to flex their craft and ego.

By Tony Zaza

The post Cinema Without Conscience: Tony Zaza Takes in NYFF 51 appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Neither an interpretation nor a translation of  a literary work, but rather the basis for a deconstruction, The Great Gatsby rolls along feverishly like a bad memory.

And so to entice you to pay attention to the pivotal point of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, director Baz Luhrmann sugar coats numerous scenes with eye candy, and adorns quick-cut party scenes with stylistically anachronistic glitz rap. These decisions are meant to “Luhr” you toward the quiet tearful Zen moment when Daisy, played by the delicately feminine but vacant Carey Mulligan, effectively destroys the myth of American romantic love. In stating tearfully that she did once love her husband even though she now does sort of love Gatsby, Daisy effects a curious feminist duality and new kind of female identity.  This confession, of course, converts Leonardo De Caprio into the Great Catsby, scratching and clawing at his own tragic psychic impotence.

When the camera zooms back upward like a roller coaster, you can’t really see anything in the vast party mise en scene, it’s just more icing and structurally in conflict with the purpose of 3D.  There is nothing Luhrman has achieved with the 3D mode that he hadn’t already established with his elegant deep focus compositions. If anything, 3D diffuses the intimacy of some scenes and changes the emotional focus of others. His bold cityscape strokes miss the nuances of New York in the 1920s. It’s a tableau for foreign tourists who would come away with a feeling of the old NY city that’s more like a Terry Gilliam Brazil than a Scorsese Five Corners.  And one wonders about the scale of the Gatsby ego reflected in the dreamscape of his monstrously excessive habitat, a configuration that conflicts with De Caprio’s well studied pseudo Germanic look and sense of acquired nobility. Perhaps everything has to be served with hot sauce to satisfy the jaded palettes of American audiences.

In stark contract, Therese Desqueyroux takes a more subtle, but daring route in expressing the milieu of male dominance women endured in France during the same “Gatsby” era.  Claude Miller, however, allows the bleeding soul of his anti-heroine, played by Audrey Tatou, to poison both the  mood as well as her husband. Her liberation rings true where Daisy has no avocation to be independent.  Miller is no more faithful to  Francois Mauriac than Luhrmann was to Fitzgerald, but his transgressions are brave not opportunistic, delicate not bombastic. It is the basic difference between old and new world cinema; one says too little, one says too much.

Therese senses selfhood as a child and by the time she consents to a scheduled marriage to an affluent landowner, she is repulsed by her lack of choices. Daisy on the other hand has too many options, all bad, so she establishes herself as the typical  “flapper” era  “object”. Where Daisy seeks consolation and balance, Therese strives for escape but within the confines of an accepted French social order. While Miller does not embellish, Luhrmann can’t help but do so.

We are invited to Daisy’s party and to Thereses’ torment. When Therese finds herself in solitary confinement estranged from her husband and child, she’s tortured by conflicts of sentiment, decrying and lamenting  the romantic successes and failures of her sister-in-law. Daisy just wants to be fair. In Miller’s tale, men are boorish monsters. In Luhrmann’s  fantasy, men are flowered but almost heroic role models of a sort like guys who get lucky at a singles bar. Both women are discarded trophies, yet it is hard to say if they are worse off than any woman today.

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