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"Patti Smith: Dream of Life"

On the Waterfront

“The Edge of New York: Waterfront Photographs,” at the Museum of the City of New York, examined the waterfront and its transformation during the 20th century, pairing historic pictures with contemporary images by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel.

“I had this idea of New York and the waterfront as this mythic thing,” said Sean Corcoran, the curator of prints and photographs, who conceived the show.

The photos of Berenice Abbott, Andreas Feininger and David Robbins captured the heyday of the working waterfront in the 1930s and 1940s. They conjure the world of Joseph Mitchell and Elia Kazan; a world where longshoremen toiled, smoking tugboats towed and docks and piers thrust into the water like antennae. New York’s waterfront was once the busiest port in the world, as crowded as a bustling sidewalk but one that was connected to the far reaches of the globe.“It’s so different from what New York is now,” Mr. Corcoran said. “It’s a very stark difference.”

link: Lens Blog

 
 

"Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008"

Italian artists may be credited with such accomplishments as linear perspective (via Brunelleschi), chiaroscuro (via Caravaggio), and, pretty much every other formal tool comprising Western art. But their more recent creative triumphs have received notably less fanfare, so to speak—an oversight that Italian curator Francesco Bonami seeks to correct with his new exhibition, Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008.

Italics debuted this summer at the Venice Biennale to much criticism from the locals, and the show recently mounted its first and only U.S. stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it will remain on view through February 14, 2010.

via: The New Italian Renaissance -The Daily Beast

Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters

 Van Gogh's letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs ("Starry Night"), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.

Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest.

via: guardian.co.uk

 

“I alter material by organizing it unchanged. Each work is an organized area of identical elements. Neither successive nor additive, there is no result or sum.” – Peter Roehr

 

When the Frankfurt artist Peter Roehr died in 1968 at the young age of 23, he left behind several hundreds of works in which he pursued exclusively the idea of serial repetition. From found commonplace materials he created ever new montages of photographs, text, typography, objects, sound, and film probing the concept of redundancy. 

Roehr abstained from both making a statement and sticking to an individual style. His formal repertory is deliberately reduced to the selection of an object, the definition of the number of its repetitions, and their arrangement. The element used is still recognizable, although it becomes absorbed in the series, so that the original form and color scheme are subjected to a potentiating effect.

 Last year, the Städelsche Museums-Verein was able to acquire the artist’s ten Schwarze Tafeln (Black Panels) for the museum, a central work in which the method of a non-narrative serial arrangement of identical objects culminates.

Now that four decades have lapsed, the commonplace nature of Roehr’s works pushes to the fore even more vehemently. They become amazingly enhanced and turn into narrative formulations oscillating between ready-made and seriality, pop and minimal art, everyday life and abstraction. 

The exhibition Peter Roehr illustrates that Roehr’s strict formalism is much more complex and eloquent than it seems to be at first glance.

link: Städel Museum 

 

“Nothing is small when it comes to childhood.” ~ François Truffaut

 

 “I Never Tire of filming with children,” François Truffaut once said. “All that a child does on-screen, he seems to do for the first time.” More than any of the director’s other works, Small Change (1976) is devoted to cataloguing these magically fresh exploratory acts and gestures.

Made in collaboration with the people of Thiers, a steep-sloped town in central France, Small Change was shot over a two-month school break during the summer of ’75. Truffaut’s workshop approach to filming a group of child nonactors brings to mind Laurent Cantet’s recent film The Class (2008), but unlike that timely docudrama on classroom politics, Truffaut’s film is an ode to the peculiar delicacy and resilience of youth.

Read more here.

 

Small Change runs November 25–December 1 at the IFC Center in New York. For more details, click here. The film will also screen on November 24 as part of the French Institute’s “François Truffaut: A Winter Portrait” film series. For more details, click here.

"Stranger Than Paradise" Clip

 Jim Jarmusch's debut feature Stranger Than Paradise seems both a throwback to the American independents of the '60s and '70s, and a harbinger of what was to come in the years following its release. The film stands as a link between the past and the future, a synthesis of the Cassavetes-Scorsese brand of streetwise naturalism, and the aloofness and wry humor that characterizes much of modern independent cinema (Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater's output, in particular).

At once artless and artful, dramatically unfocused yet layered throughout with unmistakable observations about mid-'80s American melancholia,Stranger Than Paradise displays all the strengths and weaknesses of Jarmusch's brand of cinema. While experiencing his stories, the viewer may suspect that, beneath the patina of captivating movie moments, the director has nothing particularly to say about, well, anything, but is simply creating images because he feels like it, and stringing them together with vintage jazz, rock, and world music selections. Just short of expressing any sense of purpose or point of view, at least conventionally speaking, a Jarmusch movie will peter out. The characters do not advance much, though each will have embarked on journeys, and shared moments of wry hilarity. But, spiritually, they remain near or exactly where they began.

Read more at: amc filmcritic

"Precious"

The movie Precious is the story of an overweight and abused Harlem single mother fighting to survive. The film came out of the Sundance Film Festival this year with the Audience and Grand Jury prizes, as well as Oprah Winfrey as a supporter.

Director Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer, The Woodsman, Monster's Ball) talks us through his journey.

Daniels reveals what attracted him to Precious, his preference for difficult subject matter, feeling an outsider in Hollywood and his conviction that there is a little bit of Precious in all of us. 

He also discusses lead actress Gabourey Sidibe, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey's involvement in the film, the role of music, how the film's fantasy, humor and soundtrack help balance the harrowing elements, and his desire that African Americans not to be afraid of this film.

Listen here: The Treatment

 Poster by Ignition.

MoMA Announces a Retrospective of French Director Jacques Tati

 

 The Museum of Modern Art presents a 10-film retrospective of the French screenwriter, director, and actor Jacques Tati 

(born Jacques Tatischeff, 1907-1982), in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from December 18, 2009, through January 2, 2010. Jacques Tati features newly struck 35mm prints of his six feature films, including beautiful restorations of M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), and Playtime (1967); his long-dreamed-of colorized version of Jour de fête (1949), the revelatory Traffic (1971), and the little-seen Parade (1974); as well as three short sketch comedies. Complementing these is Claude Autant-Lara’s rarely screened wartime fantasy Sylvie et le fantôme (1945), in which Tati gives a charmingly spectral performance. The retrospective is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. 

One of cinema’s greatest comedians, Tati was also one of its most radical modernists. As a director, his experiments with sound, color, and image, and with language, design, and technology, are a fundamental, if often overlooked, bridge between the innovations of Buster Keaton and Max Linder in the silent era, those of his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and Robert Bresson, and filmmakers today who owe much to his style and humor, from Roy Andersson to Wes Anderson, Otar Iosseliani to Elia Suleiman, Takeshi Kitano to Sylvain Chomet. 

Tim Burton Retrospective

 On November 22, the Museum of Modern Art will open “Tim Burton,” a retrospective for the man who, it goes without saying, has brought us some of the most fantastical movies of the last two decades, from Beetlejuice to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Rather than cobbling together a predictable slew of movie stills, the curators have assembled a sprawling show of films, photos, props, and puppets, as well as dozens of immaculate, beautiful, and sinister drawings the director has done throughout his life. Much of the work has been stored in his London home for years. MoMA “contacted me and it forced me to open it up and look at everything,” Burton recently told New York. “It's like opening up an old closet or something — like ‘Oh! What's all this crap?’”