| Issue #30, October 20, 2006 |
Art Commentary
With Marion Wolberg Weiss
FILM AS ART: “MOVING PICTURES” AT GREY ART
GALLERY AND THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Part 2
That film and the visual arts have more in common than is generally acknowledged, is given noteworthy credence in the current show at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. While the presentation only covers examples from the late 1800s and early 1900s, it is the “first exhibit to integrate cinema into the history of American art.”
Works by our own local residents William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam, are displayed to prove the point, juxtaposed with landscapes from early motion pictures by the Lumiere Brothers (Niagara, Horseshoe Falls). This is not to suggest that such movies were similar to Chase’s and Hassam’s work in regards to style and technique; rather, the subject of landscape was the connection. Another connection, subject-wise, happened when the year 1896 saw the production of both the film, The Kiss, and the lithograph advertising Carmen.
A third similarity was seen in the influence of cinematic motion, in John Singer Sargent works “Studies of Male Nudes”.
Over the years, cinema has become more “painterly,” although such characterization is rarely used. Even so, the term certainly applied to many works at the recent New York Film Festival. Let’s take one feature film as an example, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Documenting the adventures of a Danish/Inuit explorer in the 1920s, the movie was shot on location by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn (who made the outstanding Inuit movie, The Fast Runner).
What makes the latest film “painterly” are two particular lovemaking scenes between the shaman’s daughter and her departed husband. (We never see the spouse, of course, which defines the episodes as imagined). The slow motion, out-of-focus imagery and overexposed lighting evoke the textural quality of paintings. At times, moreover, the film’s style (especially the last panoramic shot of the enveloping landscape) recalls Impressionism.
Several avant-garde films shown in a special program could also be considered “painterly,” such a description is certainly indigenous to the genre. Works by Stan Brakhage, including the well-known Cat’s Cradle, helped define this kind of aesthetic (which, for this critic, signifies sensual imagery and a plasticity that belongs to both film and art).
Thus, Brakhage’s films give us a fragmented view of impressions, feelings, objects, landscape, and everything else in-between. The quick editing, superimpositions and fuzzy images contributed to the fragmentation as well.
But there was another aspect at work in the avant-garde films, one that is less formal and more philosophical: the idea that the world (and life itself) is unknowable in its entirety, that perceptions are fleeting and incomplete, that we are part of an ambiguous universe.
Such works as My Person in the Water by Leighton Pierce and 0778 man.road.river by Marcellvs were especially extraordinary in these regards. In both films, we are trying to figure out what is happening, what we are seeing; no doubt they resemble conceptual art.
After a while, we give up trying to decipher their meaning. We surrender, instead, to the experience. Just like we sometimes do when we’re looking at a painting.
“Motion Pictures” at the Grey Art Gallery will be on view until December 9.
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