Her own woman in every way, Delphine Seyrig was a fantastic actress and a lesbian icon. What Alain Resnais made of her in his Famous masterpiece, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) was written on her body as an actress and a screen for his and other male fantasies. What she brought to this impossible role was all her own. As anyone can see she is a strong woman with a style all her own. In this way she reminds me of Romaine Brooks who created a performative self and made it the guiding principle of her life.Meditating
Learning patience
Monday, February 28, 2011
Incomparable Dephine Seyrig
Her own woman in every way, Delphine Seyrig was a fantastic actress and a lesbian icon. What Alain Resnais made of her in his Famous masterpiece, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) was written on her body as an actress and a screen for his and other male fantasies. What she brought to this impossible role was all her own. As anyone can see she is a strong woman with a style all her own. In this way she reminds me of Romaine Brooks who created a performative self and made it the guiding principle of her life.
Last year
Recently revisited Last Year at Marienbad. I had seen it as an 18 year old when it first came out. What struck me was the difference between movies= entertainment and cinema=art. It was so readily apparent in ways that I had missed or only had a vague notion of as an emerging intellectual in the 1960s.
Of course, at that time whether one was in a cultural backwater like Miami or in New York City, French films defined the territory. The up-dated Louise Brooks look was in, everyone who aspired to intellectualism of any kind wore black and was learning French. Of our generation I suppose the embodiment of female intellectual was Susan Sontag (a closet lesbian). She defined the formula for how to write about art and culture for decades. Her projected persona was a total turn on with that white streak in her free flowing black hair and her black leather jacket dropping idiomatic French she was riveting--a role model for many young women writers and artists.
I suppose in my last post the thing that I liked best about the Korean film poetry was the directors attempt to create cinema not entertainment.
In choosing to review Alain Resnais' 1961 film I put myself in a critical frame of mind. What is me was the play of memory and how arbitrary it is in retrospect. When I thought about going to the Museum of the moving image which by the way, is spectacular for those of you who haven't seen it, and made the journey to Queens, I hesitated because I remembered it as being terribly long, tedious and boring. Of course I was 18, so did not have the film experience or life experienced truly appreciate the film for what it is in a word, is a masterpiece.
The cinematography remains strikingly visual and aesthetically supeior. What help me appreciate the film more fully was Voelker Schlondorff's video memory of it, which was shown in conjunction with Resnais' film. L'Annee Derniere A Marienbad requires patience and a commitment to see the film through. It is about prismatic thinking and the filmmakers ability to create a continuity. This is a collaboration that is complex. Requiring incredible skills and teamwork. Written by the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet,photographed by the extraordinary Sasha Vierney and edited by Jasmine Chasney and Henri Colpi . It is a tour de force of the creative imagination. A kind of psychological game puzzle that is never fully unraveled, which is what makes it so fascinating. We never know exactly whose point of view this is really taking place from. It is supposed to be about eight constant lover who has made a promise to a woman he met at Marienbad a year ago that he would wait for her to make up her mind to leave her husband and go away with him. However, we are never sure that this actually happened or if it is all in his imagination when he sees this woman. In the film. All of this action is projected on the magnificent actress Delphine Seyrig. She is a kind of human screen upon which all of these men project their desire.
For the director of the film she is a combination of Gloria Swanson, Louise Brooks, and herself (a lesbian) as seen by Resnais through his film -addicted I-eye and love of silent films. For the writer it is a matter of imagining the it's your object of desire and for the cinematographer. It is the challenge of creating a visual narrative that complements the text.
For the actors. It is a matter of making themselves into whatever the director chooses for them to be.
And for the writer trying to come to terms with the limitations of what he has imagined and what can be shown through other media. When we add to this mix the spectator and his/her impressions we have the stuff that makes for cinema rather than entertainment. We are forced to think about the exterior picture in the interior monologue going on in the characters mind. What we visualize and what is actually there and how we remember it.
For me, this film holds up much better than many others of the period. This being said, I didn't like Renais' last film because for me it was too sentimental and smacked of a certain kind of the nostalgia that was not engaging. This may be a function of age is the director is 80 and coming to the end of the road that he like many of us has traveled for so long. It is a matter of summing up and taking the long view on our journeys and where they have taken us.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Poetry
Saw this film this afternoon. It is the 5th Korean film I've seen of late. Like Secret Sunshine it is another bleak and tragic tale of female suicide. In this case the protagonist is killed by her sense of right and wrong. Her heart is broken by what she knows she must do. What is striking about this film and the others is the bleak landscape that they are set against. Urban life in Korea looks like one horror after another of sexism, construction, rabbit warren homes and grandmothers taking care of children. Mainly, young, shiftless males who are over the top macho, lazy, good for nothings. And, people these are made by ambitious young male directors. So what gives here. The female characters come off as the ones with integrity, feelings and the strength to do whatever they have to. Very few men come off as caring or feeling in these films. I wonder why?
Makes me appreciate my current subject, Romaine Brooks will to survive and follow her destiny as an artist.
Makes me appreciate my current subject, Romaine Brooks will to survive and follow her destiny as an artist.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Writing funny
Henry James wrote, "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing." I love this quote my friend Laura sent me. It's delicious and right on target. More of us need to dance.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
So what did Unions do
This from Mother Jones: ABOUT A YEAR ago, the Pew Research Center looked looked at the sources reporters used for stories on the economy. The White House and members of Congress were often quoted, of course. Business leaders. Academics. Ordinary citizens. If you're under 40, you may not notice anything amiss. Who else is missing, then? Well: "Representatives of organized labor unions," Pew found, "were sources in a mere 2% of all the economy stories studied."
It wasn't always this way. Union leaders like John L. Lewis, George Meany, and Walter Reuther were routine sources for reporters from the '30s through the '70s. And why not? They made news. The contracts they signed were templates for entire industries. They had the power to bring commerce to a halt. They raised living standards for millions, they made and broke presidents, and they formed the backbone of one of America's two great political parties.
They did far more than that, though. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein puts it, "The strength of unions in postwar America had a profound impact on all people who worked for a living, even those who did not belong to a union themselves." (Emphasis mine.) Wages went up, even at nonunion companies. Health benefits expanded, private pensions rose, and vacations became more common. It was unions that made the American economy work for the middle class, and it was their later decline that turned the economy upside-down and made it into a playground for the business and financial classes.
Technically, American labor began its ebb in the early '50s. But as late as 1970, private-sector union density was still more than 25 percent, and the absolute number of union members was at its highest point in history. American unions had plenty of problems, ranging from unremitting hostility in the South to unimaginative leadership almost everywhere else, but it wasn't until the rise of the New Left in the '60s that these problems began to metastasize.
The problems were political, not economic. Organized labor requires government support to thrive—things like the right to organize workplaces, rules that prevent retaliation against union leaders, and requirements that management negotiate in good faith—and in America, that support traditionally came from the Democratic Party. The relationship was symbiotic: Unions provided money and ground game campaign organization, and in return Democrats supported economic policies like minimum-wage laws and expanded health care that helped not just union members per se—since they'd already won good wages and benefits at the bargaining table—but the interests of the working and middle classes writ large.
What has congress done since then? Pay itself and become puppets of the moneyed interests like the Koch's in Wisconsin. What is being fought for here is the survival of the middle-class and working American wage earners. It is for a decent standard of life with the possibility of upward mobility through hard work and education. Not bribery by the top 1% buying themselves a congressman or woman who has no interest in the people who vote her/him in but only in those who make large campaign contributions.
What about campaign reform? Does anyone ever hear about it any longer! NO and there is a reason. One vote per person does not work if the person you expect to carry your interests forward is bought and paid for by special interests. This is the case now and O'bama seems clueless as to how to hold democrats responsible for the values that the party is supposed to represent. At this point there is only one party--the business party that represents the 1% at the top of the feeding chain and is now unwilling to even give crumbs much less cake to anyone.
Wake up and smell the coffee. You can't afford not to.
It wasn't always this way. Union leaders like John L. Lewis, George Meany, and Walter Reuther were routine sources for reporters from the '30s through the '70s. And why not? They made news. The contracts they signed were templates for entire industries. They had the power to bring commerce to a halt. They raised living standards for millions, they made and broke presidents, and they formed the backbone of one of America's two great political parties.
They did far more than that, though. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein puts it, "The strength of unions in postwar America had a profound impact on all people who worked for a living, even those who did not belong to a union themselves." (Emphasis mine.) Wages went up, even at nonunion companies. Health benefits expanded, private pensions rose, and vacations became more common. It was unions that made the American economy work for the middle class, and it was their later decline that turned the economy upside-down and made it into a playground for the business and financial classes.
Technically, American labor began its ebb in the early '50s. But as late as 1970, private-sector union density was still more than 25 percent, and the absolute number of union members was at its highest point in history. American unions had plenty of problems, ranging from unremitting hostility in the South to unimaginative leadership almost everywhere else, but it wasn't until the rise of the New Left in the '60s that these problems began to metastasize.
The problems were political, not economic. Organized labor requires government support to thrive—things like the right to organize workplaces, rules that prevent retaliation against union leaders, and requirements that management negotiate in good faith—and in America, that support traditionally came from the Democratic Party. The relationship was symbiotic: Unions provided money and ground game campaign organization, and in return Democrats supported economic policies like minimum-wage laws and expanded health care that helped not just union members per se—since they'd already won good wages and benefits at the bargaining table—but the interests of the working and middle classes writ large.
What has congress done since then? Pay itself and become puppets of the moneyed interests like the Koch's in Wisconsin. What is being fought for here is the survival of the middle-class and working American wage earners. It is for a decent standard of life with the possibility of upward mobility through hard work and education. Not bribery by the top 1% buying themselves a congressman or woman who has no interest in the people who vote her/him in but only in those who make large campaign contributions.
What about campaign reform? Does anyone ever hear about it any longer! NO and there is a reason. One vote per person does not work if the person you expect to carry your interests forward is bought and paid for by special interests. This is the case now and O'bama seems clueless as to how to hold democrats responsible for the values that the party is supposed to represent. At this point there is only one party--the business party that represents the 1% at the top of the feeding chain and is now unwilling to even give crumbs much less cake to anyone.
Wake up and smell the coffee. You can't afford not to.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
College Art Association meeting
Eye opening sessions on new media and publishing. Opens up all kind of creative possibilities to have your say and various audiences. I only hope I can find a publiher for my Romaine Brooks book with this kind of creative vision. Other sessions were also useful, particulaarly Joanthan Katz's session dealing with censorship in the arts when it comes to GLBTQ images be they lesbian, gay, homoerotic, or AIDS as the National Portrait Gallery show(Hide/Seek-catalogue available) he organized with David Ward proved. We are still a very puritanical and unsophisticated nation.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Artistic Influences
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
How contemporary is Romaine
Have recently come from reading various news reports about the oppression of women in Islam. If clothes make the man I wonder what Brooks and thousands of women between the wars were saying with the fashion statments they tried to project. Brooks own great self portrait of 1923 and her other portraits of women who were determined to follow their own individual path no matter where it took them. Can you think of any?
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