Day Ten - Sunday (March 16)

The Gates

Director: Antonio Ferrera & Albert Maysles
United States/2007/35 min/English

A show in three acts. Christo & Jeanne-Claude, famous for temporary art installations like Running Fences, The Wrapped Reichstag, the Berlin Wall, The covered river in Colorado, etc., had lived in New York City since the early 1970’s, and had tried for over twenty five years to get permission to do a project in Central Park. The first third of the film chronicles the Gates (of Central Park, in New York) project from the early attempts to get city permits, unsuccessfully. Fast forward to around 2003, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in “a New York minute” essentially cut all the red tape and permitted the historic project. It's amazing to watch the naysayers vehemently oppose any use of the park for art, even for a two week period, arguing that the park is art and to install anything on the park would be like painting over the Sistine Chapel with pop art. All the power of American small town council politics is writ large in the borough of Manhattan, where every citizen has their say, apparently. And finally, with Bloomberg’s enthusiastic art-collector attitude, with a flourish of his pen, allowing Christo and Jeanne-Claude to raise all of the $20 million cost for materials, haulage, storage, security, and volunteers. Act two is the preparations and setting up of the gates and act three is experiencing the Gates from its moment of unveiling through the two weeks of the installation, during all kinds of weather in February, 2005. Jonathan’s comment was it would have been nice to see the dismantling of the installation. I had been sorry that I missed a chance to travel to New York to experience the Gates, and seeing this film just magnified that regret. If you weren’t there to see it, see the film – it really is magical to walk with the camera through the park and see what all the hullabaloo was about. I hadn’t been to New York for twenty-five years, and I just fell in love with the city all over again on our October, 2007 trip. Olmstead’s Central Park is a wonderful place to begin with, as is Mont-Royal Park in Montreal, which he also designed, and the Gates, for that tiny slice of time in 2005, made it even more special. A nice companion documentary to this one is Christo & Jeanne-Claude: On the Way to Over the River, by Wolfram Hissen & Jörg Daniel Hissen, that we saw at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival.

Utamaro: A Portrait in Purple

Director: Wakana Kamo & Nobuhisa Horiuchi
Japan/2007/49 min/English

A pairing of two films about printing making. This one was a NHK production, in an English language version delivered by a English native speaker, but with a translation that was mostly grammatically perfect English that sounded altogether too formal, with occasional discordant use of slang. Aside from this minor amusement, it was a very detailed examination of the Boston Fine Arts Museum's Spaulding collection, and how it has increased art historians’ knowledge of Utamaro’s art. His ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") prints are renowned for his studies of courtesan and later working class women, but what was lost to most scholars was his use of the colour purple, which had faded in most extant copies of his work. The Spaulding collection had been kept locked away from light for hundreds of years, and had not faded. Side by side high resolution imagery shows how much had been lost in most copies available today, compared to the BFA museum’s collection. The full stunning range of his technique is revealed, including thousands of very light black strokes to blur hairline edges, and his use of outlining or radical departure from it in some instances. The revealing of his use of forbidden subjects and colours completes our understanding of why he was finally arrested and tortured by the police, for breaking codes of only nobility wearing the colour purple.

John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature

Director: Lawrence R. Hott
United States/2007/60 min/English

The second printmaking documentary on this double bill. Audubon was a contradiction in so many ways – a lover of birds, obsessed with them. Yet, to arrive at his ability to so faithfully depict the Birds of America, he single-handedly probably killed more birds than anyone else in history. His story is so amazing that it sounds more like one of his own tall tales, like a Grey Wolf cum Daniel Boone. The illegitimate son of a French sea captain, born in Haiti, he escaped with his life to France during the Haitian revolution, where he escaped yet again from conscription into Napoleon’s army by emigrating to the U.S. And this is just the start of this man’s epic life. Audubon would travel across the continent several times, killing (out of necessity to study and pose them) and drawing every species of bird he could find. Ultimately he would have to travel to England to secure funding to print his immense folio, considered the finest depiction of American birds ever made. And finally, of course, his name was used to help establish the first conservation society, since he had already noted how man’s encroachment on the natural world seemed destined to wipe out species of animals.

Day Nine - Saturday (March 15)

Entre enfer et paradis, Malcolm Lowry à Vancouver

Director: Anne Worrall

Canada/2007/27 min/French

Lowry ended up in Vancouver in the late 1940’s, far from his overbearing father, after having fled Mexico and a failed marriage, and not being allowed into the U.S. because he was drunk at the border. Detesting the provincial British life of Vancouver, he bought a squatter’s shack a few miles outside of town, on the river, and moved in with his soon to be 2nd wife, and it is there that he wrote most of the only novel published while he was alive, Under The Volcano, considered one of the big novels of the 20th century. Extracts from the novel and other works, and first hand accounts from friends and neighbours (Earle Birney, the Canadian poet, among them) illustrate his loathing of crowds, city life, and society, and desire for simplicity, nature, and solitude.



The Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman

Director: Fred Barney Taylor

United States/2007/75 min/English

As the director said in his pre-screening presentation, having made a documentary on New York City writers for the Discovery Channel and having met Chip Delany, as he is known, he realized that there was a lot more tto showcase than just twenty minutes censored by a “family” language restriction. Using Lawrence Sterne’s Tristan Shandy as a framework for the biography, Taylor lets Delany tell his own story. And what a story it is, and he does tell it, just about non-stop. And as to signal that this is most certainly not a “family” discourse (but one of the Sign, a small inside reference for fans of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand), it starts with Delany outlining a typical day working on his writing for 8 to 10 hours, with regular sojourns outside to burn off the creative anxiety with some sexual release with a multitude of men. For those not familiar with Delany’s reputation as a science fiction writer, he had published five novels before he was 22. A giant of the New Wave period of the 1960’s and 70’s, with Dhalgren, Nova, the Einstein Intersection, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series being just a few examples of his prolific output, he’s continued with many other fiction and non-fiction works since. A university professor teaching literature and creative writing for almost twenty years, he’s a hyper- intelligent, intellectual, queer, sexual, black, speculative and literary writer, although all of these labels barely begin to inform the fullness of the man’s enormous abilities and interests. Echoes that came to mind were My Dinner with Andre, with Delany playing both roles, his own story poured into the mold of Spalding Gray's monologues. Taylor worked in some sequences from Atlantis, his 2006 film study of New York's bridges, to good effect. I had the privilege of meeting Professor Delany when he spoke to our Utopia, Dystopia and Anti-Dystopia literature class at Concordia University in the late 1980’s, the night before he gave the annual Lahey Lecture. However, I did not have sex with him. For those who want a good primer on Delany, by Delany, this documentary delivers aplenty.

Day Eight - Friday (March 14)

Keith Sonnier—In the Cosmos of Colours

Director: Marco Wilms

Germany/2007/26 min/English

Keith Sonnier lives in New York, but is a Cajun raised in a small town in Louisiana, and he tells it, the garish colours of the Creole bars of his youth are the starting point for his light sculpture and installations, always in red, blue, and yellow. Starting with the Lichtweg, a kilometer-long lighted path in the Munich Airport, he started getting serious notice as a large installation artist. Other installations in Germany (an underground passage in the Munich Re complex, and the Berlin Nation Library), and private commissions have followed, and Sonnier is interviewed both in Germany moving through some of his installations, and at home, contemplating the rich light field of New York City.


The Universe of Keith Haring

Director: Christina Clausen

Italy, France/2007/92 min/French, English, German with English subtitles

Haring’s distinctive minimalist lines remain in the international publics’ mind even though he died in 1991 of AIDS at 31. Fusing high art with low, comic book simplicity with graffiti-like subversive presentation, he also used his art to political ends, helping with the fight for government acknowledgment and funding for the AIDS crisis in the early 1980’s, and in the fight against racism and apartheid. Haring’s dictated audio history to his biographer John Gruen and lots of contemporary interviews with his family, friends, and fellow artists is the narrative of Keith’s almost magical rise to fame from his very un-urban upbringing in the small Pennsylvanian town of Kurtztown. There's a good quantity of video clips of him hanging out with friend and mentor Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, and many other Soho artists of the 70’s and 80’s. An interesting historical moment is some footage of Madonna, almost completely unknown, performing at one of the club nights Keith helped arrange.The documentary never feels padded, since Keith lived so large.

Day Six - Wednesday (March 12)

Eileen Gray—Invitation to a Voyage


Director: Jörg Bundschuh

Germany/2006/52 min/English

Now here was a gem to enjoy, and I thought it would be some fluff about textiles. Eileen Gray was an Irish libertine, avant-garde design artist and architect, who lived life on her own terms, coming into her own at the turn of the 20th century. A sample: a close association and later falling out with Le Corbusier, designs for furniture that remain world famous in authorized (and likely unauthorized) reproductions – the Bibendum and transat chairs, and of course, her famous minimalist house E-1027, patterned after an ocean liner, built on a craggy hill overlooking the Mediterranean at Roquebrune, not far from Monte Carlo. Great narration, great story, loads of talking heads who are engaging, interesting, and lively.



The Melnikov House

Director: Rax Rinnekangas

Finland/2007/58 min but should have been 30/Finnish with English subtitles


Unfortunately, sometimes a completely monotonous narrator and bad editing can just reduce an otherwise interesting subject to an exercise in excruciating boredom. Such was the narration and pacing of this documentary, that the few words spoken in Russian in the film sounded positively lively. Konstantin Melnikov designed his own house and had it built in the center of Moscow, towards the end of the 1920’s. The famous round house with hexagonal windows remains an iconic example of Constructivism, something Stalin banned in the 1930’s, with the decree that no modern architecture would be built in the USSR. Melnikov was confined to his house and took up painting as a means of supporting his family, until the early 1950’s, when he was considered “rehabilitated” and permitted once again to practice architecture. Maintained in the Melnikov family by his painter son, and then his granddaughter, the house is now destined to become a museum. While the utopian vision of the house and its design were very futurist, with very interesting socialist experiments, such as the communal bedroom with dividers providing visual privacy, and beds on raised plinths, it’s a striking contrast to his choice of old, comforting furniture for the majority of the house.

Not seen, but originally on our list:

Passolini Next to Us

Director: Giuseppe Bertolucci

Italy, France/2006/63 min/Italian with English subtitles

This film was cancelled, apparently the director (younger brother of Bernardo Bertolucci) wanted to show it and the producer didn’t. Since I had managed to sit through all of Salò, or 120 days of Sodom years ago, I would have really liked to have seen a documentary made on the set of the film, albeit with still photos set in a montage with Pasolini's interview. For some information on the film, look here.

Day Five - Tuesday (March 11)

Voom Portraits—Program 4 (Winona Ryder)

Director: Robert Wilson

United States/2004/16 min/No dialogue

Gitmo soundtrack: Laurie Anderson meets Ashley McIssac meets an audio engineer who wants late 40-something year-olds to realize that they can indeed hear above 15 Kilohertz, if the violin screeching is prolonged and loud enough. Oh, and Winona is a head sticking out of pile sand with the lightning mimicking a day’s worth of sun moving around the sky, over sixteen absolutely torturous minutes. All that was missing were straps on the chairs and eyelid priers and eyeball lubricant (see A Clockwork Orange for details of the Ludovico Technique).

Helmut by June

Director: June Newton

France/2007/55 min/French, English with English subtitles

Helmut Newton attained a certain cultural notoriety with his fashion photography that in part of his career put tall, lithe models in poses of sadomasochism, bondage, or violence, nude or in skintight costumes of a myriad of materials. This loving portrait, shot mostly in the early 1990’s by his wife June, on a video camera she bought for Helmut but ended up using herself, documents the photographer at work in Hollywood, Paris, Monte Carlo, and other ritzy locales, with some of the top female models of the day, such as Claudia Schiffer, famous actors, and celebrities, like Versace, Pavarotti, Sigourney Weaver, Yves St-Laurent and June Anderson. Even Carla Bruni, now Sarkozky, wife of the President of France, is in a shoot with another model. Watching Newton work his process with the subject and seeing the final result (famous photographs in each case) on its own showcases his genius eye. But we also get him explaining his motivation and interest as well – he talks incessantly about his work while June documented him on location and at rest – he has the images in his mind that he wants to photograph, but he has never lived the “life of excess or anxiety of the rich” that he photographed, as he thought he’d never live very long if he did. There is the fascination with the strong, tall, powerful woman that is his leitmotif. His wife June always was with him, but as she admits, he said that she was his second love, after photography.

Day Four - Monday (March 10)

Breaking the Maya Code

Director: David Lebrun

United States/2007/115 min/English

An excellent WGBH documentary on the linguistic / archaeological / anthropological quest to find the “Rosetta stone” for the ancient language encrypted in the hieroglyphs of the central American lost Mayan cities. After Spanish monks burned all but four paper books, forced linguistic conversion to Spanish meant that Mayans could no longer read their ancient texts. Over four hundred years of research, with periodical insights and theoretical missteps, advances and canonically imposed wrong theories, gradually brought back the ancient script to a point where today, ninety percent of the language can now be read in the original. The amazing circumstances of chance through history that involved so many insightful (if, at times, wrong) people makes the story that much more amazing, especially since the last big breakthrough was solved by a precocious teenager. The director was on hand to tell us he’d just completed the film tens days previously after ten long years of work, and that this was the second time he was watching it in full. Very detailed and methodical, but completely fascinating watching the nature of scientific study and epiphany unfold over the course of time.

Day Three - Sunday (March 9)

Heavy Water: A Film for Chernobyl

Director: Phil Grabsky & David Bickerstaff

United Kingdom/2006/52 min/English, Ukrainian with English subtitles

The Chernobyl disaster remains mankind’s worst nuclear accident, with over 600,000 people directly affected in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and potentially millions more across the world. That reactor in Unit 4 exploded during the night of April 26, 1986, because of an ill-conceived test of the emergency shutdown system is well-known; even the authorities' attempts to cover up the magnitude of the disaster is common knowledge. What this film (based on Mario Petrucci’s book-length poem) does, then, is focus on those that have largely been forgotten, except by their families – the conscripted “heroes”, the pilots, fire-fighters, soldiers, collectively called “liquidators. All the more ironic, given that the liquidators were themselves liquidated by their short but usually lethal exposure to the horrific levels of radiation spewing from the burning, melting wreck of the reactor core. Pripyat, the deserted power plant town as seen both before the disaster and twenty years later, and archival footage of the liquidators doing their work, are the visual background for the poem as narrative.

Looking for an Icon

Director: Hans Pool & Maaik Krijgsman

Netherlands/2005/55 min/English

How does the World Press Photo Foundation choose its Photo of the Year? How does a photograph become an icon – a truth that evolves and often diverges from the historical fact that it purported to capture? Four famous photos are examined and discussed, by the people who took them, judges for the World Press Photo agency, and various photography critics and theorists, among them, Oliviero Toscani, the photographer/designer famous for the Benneton “Colors” ad campaign. Eddie Adams’s 1968 photo of a Viet Cong prisoner’s public execution, an anonymous photograph of Salvador Allende’s final moments during the 1973 Chilean coup that took his life, Charlie Cole’s 1989 Tiananmen Square photo of a student blocking a row of tanks, and David Tunley’s 1981 Persian Gulf War photo of an emotionally overcome soldier in a helicopter. Oliviero has some particularly insightful comments that furthers the icon hypothesis from the Western Judeo-Christian anchor that most of us bring to our interpretation of what we see in a photograph, with an articulate and funny, but embarrassingly candid observation on the nature of guilt and sin.