passages October 02, 2019

Robert Frank (1924–2019)

THE WEEK ROBERT FRANK DIED, the West Berlin building formerly known as Amerika Haus, now the gallery C/O Berlin, opened the exhibition “Robert Frank: Unseen.” As it happened, I was in town, staying no more than a few blocks away. The press preview was packed, the mood far from funereal—Frank was already an immortal. Indeed, his first German show had been at Amerika Haus back in 1985, when the place was programmed by the USIA, the now-defunct cultural diplomacy branch of the US government. Perhaps his work should have been permanently installed there.

The title was a teaser. The show was half

books September 2019

ODE INFINITUM

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons, by Hannah Frank. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pages.

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a posthumously published Ph.D. thesis nudges the world of cinema studies off its axis. All hail Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (2019), by Hannah Frank, who completed the book shortly before her tragic death in 2017, at age thirty-two, from an illness believed to have been pneumococcal meningitis.

Frank is not the first theory-minded cine-historian to suggest that with the advent of CGI the history of motion

previews May 2019

“ERICKA BECKMAN: DOUBLE REVERSE”

Curated by Henriette Huldisch

Characterized by ingenious artisanal special effects and communicating an infectious POW!, Ericka Beckman’s early movies infused object theater with playful psychodrama, advancing the notion that girls just want to have serious fun. These enigmatic games, in which contestants, often female, learn how to act in or on the world, suggest self-reflexive metaphors for the films’ own creation. While early pieces like You the Better, 1983, and Cinderella, 1986, sometimes shown as installations, were made in Beckman’s “black box” studio, her recent work is more architectural

print April 2019

PERFECT CHAOS: VERA CHYTILOVÁ’S SEDMIKRÁSKY (DAISIES)

PUBLISHED TOWARD THE END of 1964 in the avant-pop journal Evergreen Review, Susan Sontag’s essay-manifesto “Against Interpretation” ended with the ringing declaration that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Her model for this aesthetic revolution was the movies. Two years later, in 1966, Czech director Věra Chytilová and screenwriter–production designer Ester Krumbachová debuted a sort of cinematic version of Sontag’s call to arms. Innocuously titled yet wildly confrontational, Sedmikrásky (Daisies) should be considered as among the quintessential performative artworks of

film March 2019

LOVE ANOMIE

“ARTY,” A COINAGE DATING to the heyday of Jugendstil, isn’t a term I like to use, but it seems unavoidable in discussing the work of the Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan. Two features into his career and just shy of thirty, Bi has established himself as the artiest internationally known director this side of the arch-pretensoids Terrence Malick and Darren Aronofsky. I don’t much care for either of those filmmakers, each a textbook practitioner of what Manny Farber, in the Winter 1962–63 issue of Film Culture, famously called “white elephant” filmmaking, but Bi is something else.

Farber took issue with

film December 2018

J. Hoberman

1 WORMWOOD (Errol Morris) I saw this six-episode, four-hour-long mix of documentary interviews and dramatic reconstructions in mid-December 2017 and have been haunted by it ever since. Wormwood delves into the notorious case of army biologist Frank Olson, who became the unwitting guinea pig of the CIA’s LSD experiments and in 1953 dove to his death from a hotel window. An examination of obsession as well as a chilling Cold War mystery, Wormwood entwines Olson’s story with that of his brilliant son Eric, who has devoted his life to (or thrown it away on) an attempt to know the unknowable.

2 LE

books Summer 2018

HOT TAKE

From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader, edited by Ed Halter and Barney Rosset. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018. 336 pages.

“ANYTHING PUBLISHED by Grove Press was a must,” John Waters recalled of his high-school reading (and perhaps shoplifting) habits in his 1981 memoir, Shock Value. In that belief, Waters was not alone. Back in the early 1960s, Barney Rosset’s publishing house was an avant-pop name brand, like Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics.

As the signifier of hip modernism, Grove Press published Beckett, Burroughs, and Genet, as well as Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade. Grove

books May 2018

BIG NEWS

Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the “PM” News Picture, by Jason E. Hill. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 375 pages.

“WHO WANTS YESTERDAY’S PAPERS? Who wants yesterday’s girl? Who wants yesterday’s papers? Nobody in the world!” So sneered Mick Jagger back in 1967.

While it’s true that old newsprint may serve to wrap fish (or, as one of my former colleagues at the Village Voice colorfully put it, “wipe a bum’s ass”), anyone who has ever been hypnotized by an unspooling roll of microfilm, sneezed in a musty newspaper morgue, or suffered the pain of brittle paper crumbling

books March 2018

THE ZINE AGE

Yeah, edited by Tuli Kupferberg. New York: Primary Information, 2017. 342 pages.

NOW LET US PRAISE the less famous Beats. Naphtali “Tuli” Kupferberg was born in 1923 into a Yiddish-speaking, secular Jewish family on Cannon Street in New York, five blocks from the East River on the madly congested eastern edge of the lower Lower East Side. He died eighty-six years later, only a mile and a half west, having spent most of his life in the city.

A Beatnik bard and a hippie sage, a Young Communist turned anarcho-pacifist, noted in Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem “Howl” for having jumped off the Brooklyn

print December 2017

J. Hoberman

1 DRUNK (AKA DRINK) (1965) (Andy Warhol) An astounding behavioral performance: Emile de Antonio slugs an entire bottle of scotch and gets hopelessly hammered in real time. This 1965 Factory masterpiece was shown once late last year at the Museum of Modern Art. Rather than being returned to the vault, it deserves to be in heavy rotation.

2 ZAMA (Lucrecia Martel) Latin America’s preeminent director (and one of the world’s most inventive narrative filmmakers) finds an even more violent and absurd—and disconcertingly beautiful—degree of stagnation in an eighteenth-century backwater than

previews September 2017

“WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF AQUARIUS”

This erudite Summer of Love golden-anniversary exhibition places the Beat-generation muse, proto-hippie, politically radical poet-engraver, and generally unclassifiable William Blake in the context of twentieth-century American art and popular culture. Exuberance is beauty! Identifying Allen Ginsberg, Agnes Martin, Maurice Sendak, counterculture communards, and the Fugs (to name a few) as Blake’s successors, the show features more than fifty of Blake’s engravings, etchings, watercolors, and illustrations, as well as some 150 paintings, drawings, photographs, film

film May 2017

Paz Encina

PAZ ENCINA makes film objects and situational documentaries, or sit-docs, movies in which a dramatic narrative is transparently constructed from a handful of organized audiovisual facts. Sound in Encina’s minimalist films generally takes precedence over image. The artist is a formalist whose subject is the history of her native Paraguay—poor, landlocked, governed for decades by the ruthless right-wing dictator General Alfredo Stroessner.

Encina, who studied classical guitar as a child, learned to read music before she knew the alphabet. She builds her films, she has said, on the foundation

film February 2017

Julio Bracho

THE FUTURE OF CINEMA STUDIES demands an expansion of the past. Take the case of Julio Bracho (1909–1978), who was reintroduced to the world with a seven-film tribute at last October’s Morelia Film Festival in Mexico. Once that country’s most esteemed director, Bracho is nearly unknown outside his native land. (None of his films seem to have been represented in the scores of clips on view in the recent “Mexique 1900–1950” show at Paris’s Grand Palais.)

Bracho’s reputation has been eclipsed in Mexico as well—not least because the many movies he directed during the last two decades of his career

film January 2017

Pablo Larraín’s Neruda

WITH HIS NEW FILM, Neruda, Chile’s master of the political gothic, Pablo Larraín, exhumes a sacred monster: namely, his nation’s 1971 Nobel Laureate, the poet Pablo Neruda. Hardly a biopic, Neruda focuses on a brief, if dramatic, period in its subject’s life—a fifteen-month period from January 1948 through March 1949 during which the poet, an elected senator and an outspoken member of the banned Chilean Communist Party, went underground, finally escaping over the Andes to Argentina.

Neruda devotes only a dozen pages to the topic in his memoirs, half of them concerning the exciting last stage

print December 2016

J. Hoberman

1 THREE SCREEN RAY (Bruce Conner) This superkinetic triptych, created by the artist in 2006 using material from his 1961 film Cosmic Ray, was the moving-image high point of, as well as a synecdoche for, MoMA’s recent Conner retrospective, “It’s All True”—itself a triumph of installed film pieces.

2 O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA (Ezra Edelman) Nearly eight hours in length, Edelman’s documentary meditates on O. J. Simpson as a person and as a construct even while using his life as a text illuminating the force of race and the nature of justice in late-twentieth-century America—and beyond.

3

performance September 2016

the Wooster Group’s Town Hall Affair

WHAT EXACTLY IS The Town Hall Affair, an hour-long performance piece the Wooster Group staged this past May as a work-in-progress at the Performing Garage in SoHo? Is it a reconstruction of Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1979 feature Town Bloody Hall, which documented the “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” presented April 30, 1971, at New York’s Town Hall by the Theatre for Ideas? Is it a deconstruction? A hall of mirrors? A stroll down memory lane?

Multiple iterations of a narrative (often jumping from medium to medium) tend toward myth. Such has been made of that archetype-populated April

print September 2016

Steve McQueen

FIRST EXHIBITED as a six-hour, single-channel projection in 2012, Steve McQueen’s End Credits was recently installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (with an expanded running time of nearly thirteen hours) on two large screens facing each other across a space nearly three-quarters the length of a football field.

The work’s title suggests the stately, somewhat enigmatic list of names and job titles projected at the end of a movie while audiences customarily exit the theater, but here the continuously scrolling text’s subject is the scholar, athlete, actor, singer, political

print February 2016

“Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact”

“ICONS OF HOLLYWOOD have richly circulating afterlives which belie the alleged obsolescence of the medium,” writes curator Robert M. Rubin in his introduction to the catalogue for the Museum of the Moving Image’s dense and eccentric show “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact.” It is, he declares, “A goddam zombie apocalypse.”

Or maybe the Dream Dump described in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939)—the “Sargasso of the imagination” that his protagonist encounters slogging across a studio backlot. The notion that we’re all out there lost among the stars is not unfamiliar.

print January 2016

J. Hoberman

THE FIRST FILM by Chantal Akerman I ever saw was News from Home (1977). In some ways, it remains my favorite: Her vision of Manhattan as a succession of shabby, geometrically framed streetscapes just knocked me out.

Jackie Raynal (then programming the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village, where I would finally catch the already-legendary Jeanne Dielman a year later) projected News from Home for me in her apartment in the autumn of 1977, and, because it was the French version, she provided a rough translation of the voice-over—the pleading, wheedling, repetitive letters written to

print November 2015

CLOSE-UP: THE FILM IS THE SEARCH

NEW IDEAS in motion pictures typically arrive from the so-called margins. Thus, modern (or postmodern) cinema comes to Europe by way of Africa. Working out his own particular destiny as an ethnographic filmmaker in France’s West African colonies, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) invented the French New Wave.

A professional anthropologist with a long-standing interest in Surrealism and, by his own account, an early regular at the Cinémathèque Française, Rouch credited the introduction of the 16-mm format with the “revival of ethnographic films.” He himself became a filmmaker when he started packing a