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.