4 FILMS ABOUT ART AND NUDITY

The computer that runs the Netflix algorithm has decided that I like art -- and also nudity.  They sent me four movies.  Okay, I picked them, but they sent me a limited list of streaming films.

“The Thomas Crown Affair”

“The Artist and the Model”

“The Woodmans”

“Interior. Leather Bar.” 

These four films bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever except that the computer evidently noted they are about art and contain nudity.  Everyone knows that real art is about nude people.

STANDARD ALL-AMERICAN SCHLOCK

Renee Russo, Pierce Brosnan

“The Thomas Crown Affair” is about an art thief played by Pierce Brosnan as though he were still James Bond.  The insurance bounty hunter is Rene Russo, very “Vanity Fair,” very "Vogue."  They go through glorious shenanigans evidently guided by a travel agent who likes warm climates.  It’s all nothing.  Posing.  Money.  A child’s notion of what being rich might be like.  Also a child’s notion of how grownups have sex.  It’s all a matter of who can fool whom and who’s tougher than the other. 

Budget: $48,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend: £916,452 (UK) (20 August 1999)

Gross: $69,304,264 (USA) (11 February 2000)

ART HOUSE FRENCH EXISTENTIALISM

The Artist and the Model in the Studio

“The Artist and the Model” is at the opposite pole of the spectrum.  Black and white, French (mostly), about an ancient sculptor married to Claudia Cardinale (you might not recognize her) and waiting for WWII to end.  A fleeing resistance fighter, a pretty young woman, is taken in by them and becomes his model.  She knows NOTHING about art.  The old man treats her like an object while he makes old-fashioned plaster statues of her that, as she points out, don’t look like her.  But they grow together into a relationship that includes the leaf-filtered sun, another resistance fighter, a Nazi officer who loves art, and a disapproving old woman.  

Box Office

Opening Weekend: $16,900 (USA) (2 August 2013)

Gross: $107,300 (USA) (6 September 2013)

DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A REAL ARTIST

Francesca Woodman, both photographer and model

“The Woodmans” is a straightforward documentary about an actual young gifted photographer who committed suicide.  The parents are an odd couple linked by a passion for art.  Both their children were artists, but the girl in particular was gifted, impatient, always pushing the limits.  Until she literally went over the edge.  Her parents, brother and friends talk to the camera quietly with much honesty and insight.  We see a great deal of her work, which is often of herself, nude, in tricky contexts like under fragments of wallpaper or lying on a sifting of flour.  Her journal is always present.  Her father, who was more attuned to her, leaves his abstract art to do photography rather like hers.  Her mother, a ceramicist, has success in her work but cannot solve the riddle of her daughter.  

Box Office

Opening Weekend: $5,874 (USA) (21 January 2011)

Gross: $38,330 (USA) (26 August 2011)

STAGED DOCUMENTARY CALIFORNIA IMPERSONATION

"Interior. Leather bar."

“Interior. Leather bar.” is another “documentary” about a forty-minute section of “Cruising” that was cut because of censor's ratings.  It was considered too obscene.  Not even Al Pacino in the role of a cop who is undercover in the SM scene can persuade the censor.  So this is supposed to be an account of an attempt to recreate those censored minutes, after a lot of time has passed, and a young actor (Val Lauren) has been hired to “be” Pacino.  He is flattered, eager, philosophically on board, and so are the other young men who have been hired as background.  They have not really been made aware of what might happen and they are nervous.  They ask each other,  “Have you ever played a gay before?  Have you ever kissed a guy?  Are you straight?”  

The point is supposed to be, in part, what impact this short scene has on the actors and on the viewers.  The director makes an impassioned speech about being open and actors accepting all human experience, and so on.  As it turns out, there is explicit sex  but we’re assured it’s between two committed guys, maybe married.  There’s no real SM, just leather accouterments.  Some spanking and boot-licking.  

Box Office

Opening Weekend: $5,218 (USA) (3 January 2014)

Gross: $40,862 (USA) (11 April 2014)

Let’s be real.  Movies are supposed to make money.  Scandal is one way to make money.  Doesn’t matter much whether the scandal is about the actors, the director or the subject.  The REAL scandals about the world at large generally go unremarked. 

Let’s look at the art.  Thomas Crown’s “art” is all Impressionists in museums.  We learn nothing about the value of art or why the Impressionists are still all the rage (so is Thomas Kinkade) or the necessity of protecting fragile paintings.  I flinched when the thief folded the admired masterpiece in half, which would be likely to flake a lot of paint off.  But the paintings are pretty, familiar, and certainly sell for a LOT at auctions.

Sculpture by Maillol

The sculptures in “The Artist and the Model” are pretty standard -- faux Malliol.  The idea that one specific piece is a life-fulfilling masterpiece is a little bit bogus, but at least it’s based on the idea that a piece of art has integrity and value for itself.  The idea and execution of a work of art has meaning to the artist himself and, in fact, is drawn from his experience of life.  The Nazi fan reminds us that even the most objective people can understand this value and study it in a second-level experience.  The model keeps the focus from leaving real life, the sensorium that is the source of art.

The Woodmans

“The Woodmans” is two artists, married, talking about their artist daughter who committed suicide.  Her work was self-photography, usually nude and sometimes on video.  The art is shown to us and explained.  Many people think that being an intense artist is a kind of psychopathology: the first thing you know, the artist is cutting off his ear.  But by the end of this film (it sneaks up on you) the obsession is not with the art, but the success of the art.  And the real scandal might be that no one paid attention or valued Woodman's work until she committed suicide.  At one "jump" she became valuable and so did her art.

Travis Mathews

“Interior.  Leather Bar.” is not the same thing.  It is a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, each version imprinted with the ambitious narcissism of young men focused on sexuality.  There’s a lot of talk about freedom and reality, etc. but in forty minutes of fiddling around -- always keeping us aware that we’re seeing a simulacrum -- it doesn’t look like anything much is revealed.

These kinds of value judgments can’t be made by a computer, no matter how elegant the algorithm, because the algorithm IS a simulacrum, a derived reduction.  It has no sensorium, no empathy cells behind its forehead, limited ability (making lists of what to mail out and to whom), and only the wildest guess about what its programmers thought would make money for THEM (Netflix) rather than the film makers.

Jean Rochefort (sculptor) and Aida Folch (model)

My preferences and sympathies should be obvious by now.  I’ll watch almost anything, but big blockbusters attract me the least.  I prefer my French impressionism “straight up” as in the movie about the old sculptor as both his life and WWII end.  As for the "Leather Bar" movie, It’s clear that taking on a dark category of underground people while employing safe vanilla actors, is courting ridicule, even if you accept them as artists.  

But it is the actual lives and work of artists as understood -- or misunderstood -- that can break your heart.  So, I watch.

DRIVING THE NETFLIX COMPUTER CRAZY

There’s a computer at Neflix somewhere that’s going crazy, I hope. I’m trying to make it do that. The Netflix solution to marketing, like the Amazon solution, is to get all the products into categories, then get all the customers into categories and then match them up. Their major failure with me so far has been telling me which DVD’s were most often ordered in Great Falls, in hopes that I’ll order them, too, since because I live here I must be like them. But I look at the titles with horror -- I have never seen those movies and never intend to in the future.

The other bust has been trying to make me award stars to movies according to whether I liked them or not. I refuse to do this, even when they set it up so that I can’t progress through the movie ordering system without designating a star. I don’t do it because my opinion of a movie is not based on “liking” it and I think a value judgement of anything that is just one dimension is unfair, untrue and unuseful. When I failed to pick a star for a used book, the book dealer his/her self sent me a wounded email claiming I was ruining his/her life, because it affected his ability to sell books.

For a long time I was ordering BBC murder mysteries. There are endless numbers of them and my “default” choices are generally MI-5 these days, which they couldn’t call “Spooks” (It's Brit name) because in the USA that word doesn’t mean ghosts. It means roughly the same thing as “shovels.” Blacks. One learns a lot while ordering movies and even more if the DVD has international explanations included.

Then I got tired of that and went to costume dramas, the big sprawling epics of history, which led the computer to believe I might want to watch musicals, but I didn’t. Then I fell into Brit Indie movies, largely produced by FilmFour which is the government BBC channel #4, designated for alternative “serious” stuff, like social comment.

So the red envelopes I threw in the mail this morning included “John Trudell,” which is an American “serious” documentary. You could tell because heavyweight liberals like Robert Redford and Chris Christopherson had a lot to say. Trudell is actually one of the most appealing AIM leaders. I had not known that his house was burned down with his family inside, probably arson, and quite possibly the FBI. Consider PUSH, WACO, and lately the NA artifact bust that was so violent that one elderly man’s toes were broken. At least he wasn’t burned alive. Trudell sank into immense sadness, far beyond depression, and then resurfaced -- a poet. It’s hard not to admire him, even like him.

The other two films were BBC. “Pierrepoint” is the story of the last “King’s” executioner, a hangman whose father and uncle had also filled that post. Excellently cast, beautifully filmed, it is a horrifying subject that is really about how decency and care should shape something basically barbaric into something at least bearable.

The executioner, played by Timothy Spall, was a real person and events really happened. Spall, well-known as a character actor, brilliantly channels compassion and civility. “I will take care of you,” he tells the condemned and he means it. Some of the most powerful moments come AFTER the hanging, when he carefully washes the body, puts a shroud on it, and lays it gently in a coffin. This was not the shameful debacle of hanging Hussein. When at Nurenberg, there are so many bodies that they run out of coffins, he is outraged. His wife takes an economic point of view: she is determined to remain a proper wife, but even she is not much interested in his physical needs. He’s no prince, but he has a good job.

“This Is England” features another protagonist of dubious charm, this one a little boy with Oppositional Defiance Disorder (if you’ll allow such syndromes) brought on by the death of his father in the Falklands. The movie gives the story an impressive historical frame with newsreels and still photos, both from Maggie Thatcher’s era in England and the shadow events of WWII that somehow get entangled in immigration and welfare. The boy, mocked and bullied whereever he goes, is picked up as a sort of mascot by a gang of skinheads, the whole bunch of them infected with ODD. They love to smash and vandalize. Then a new leader arrives from prison and things get entirely out of hand. It’s not the most charming movie, but it does tell a vivid story that anyone ought to understand. I have NEVER heard the F word so many times, not even in “Platoon,” though they pronounce it "fokking."

We seem to be in a time when we’ve not been able to throw off the past, even as we enter into the dystopic situations of our own times and of the predicted future. Over and over the themes are conformity, prosperity and authority. Forget about cars that can fly and the cure for cancer. These issues are where the action is. But I can only bear these polemics for so long -- then I need a different kind of movie.

Some people would be best served by movies categorized according to how many explosions they have or how many sex/love scenes. Maybe a lot of people would rather watch movies about animals. I have a kind of penchant for movies that are nothing but long conversations, like “My Dinner with Andre.” There aren’t many of those around. My cousin loves haute couture and often recommends movies about Paris designers. I wanted to see “Aria” but it has become mysteriously unavailable.

My newest addition to my Netflix list, which I’m told I will have to wait a long time to see, is “Battlestar Galactica.” I do like sci-fi, but I didn’t get interested in Battlestar until yesterday’s NPR story about how the sound track for this show, which was meant NOT to be like the John Williams orchestra score for Star War. It took on such a powerful influence -- I guess using sort of “earth music” or “space music” more like Paul Winter -- that it actually began suggesting the plot. This I’ve gotta see! That’s what MY life needs -- a better sound track! Luckily, I have a lot of Paul Winter CD’s. Prokiofiev will do in a pinch.