John Ashbery on Film

Two episodes into season Two of Jane Campion's series Top of the Lake (Sundance Channel) and I'm persuaded this is one of the finest series on television. Campion has an original vision and poetic sensibilities. I know she reads widely when preparing a script, and I wonder if the poet John Ashbery has any influence on the second season. Campion's storytelling in this new season is delightfully disjunctive; scenes paced like traditional police procedurals slam up against hilariously funny flashbacks or utterly tragic ones; there are pedantic asides that go on and on, growing stranger by the minute. The guiding hand over all of this is a craftsperson's hand, skillful and intelligent. 

It could very well be that my reaction to Ashbery's death (September 3rd) has me locating his influence  everywhere, even investing it into projects that probably never had the poet in mind. Nevertheless, Campion and Ashbery have similar sensibilities, specifically in regards to humor -- the unfamiliar becoming familiar in a surprising flash. Reading an Ashbery poem before watching an episode of Top of the Lake season Two can carry you to strange and wonderful mental ground. 

My Campion-Ashbery connection is speculative. But the connection between Ashbery and avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin is factual and glorious. 

Ashbery contributed dialogue and text to Maddin's Seances series, which began in 2012. You can find the trailer here: Seances

In 2015, Ashburry teamed up with Maddin for a show of collages at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. You can see some of the images here: Collages

Also in 2015, Maddin released his dreamy masterpiece The Forbidden Room. Ashbery wrote the dialogue for the "How to Take a Bath" sequence. Watch the trailer for this film and, unless I miss my guess, you'll do all that's possible to find a copy of it and also recover that Ashbery collection on your books shelf, the one you hadn't thought about in a long time, and let that strange, confident voice take you places. For my part, I'm rediscovering Your Name Here with pleasure and admiration.

Trailer for The Forbidden Room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwKvz-wA3I0

Silent Light

Carlos Reygadas' film Silent Light made the New York Times list of "The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far." The list has prompted many fun and aggravating debates. But Silent Light deserves the recognition, and I'm thrilled it made the list. The opening sequence is one of the greatest in cinema.  In my book, it is preceded only by the opening of Orson Welles' Othello.

I wore an article about Reygadas' film for the Texas arts journal Glasstire. Here is an excerpt:

"Carlos Reygadas is a high-minded wild thing out of Mexico City. He’s made four feature films, and all have screened at Cannes, where they were simultaneously harangued and cheered by critics. He employs a vintage camera and lenses and a small crew. The pictures are marvelous and totally out of sync with Hollywood norms. Reygadas is like a Romantic poet of the cinema; his films suggest that a love of humankind comes through Nature. They describe a cosmogenic imagination, in that each film is like an origin story and a meditation on the infinite. The images are, by turns: beautiful, hallucinogenic, brutal, erotic, and subversively funny."

You can find the full article here: Glasstire

Video Art with the Canon 5D

Tropic Pictures is proud to shoot Colette Copeland's video art pieces. Her latest, titled Bearding, is shot with Canon 5D Mark iii. The location is beneath a DART rail trestle, somewhere along the White Rock Creek Trail, Dallas. In this scene, Copeland's character, The Victorian Woman, traps and shaves her frequent spoil, The Man, played by Adam George. (Lens: Canon 85mm 1.8)

Find out more about Tropic Pictures:

TropicPictures.com

Artful Cinema

Joan Mitchell

My enthusiasm for color is so strong it can take over my memory.  Some of my favorite black and white films are those I once mistakenly remembered as being in color: Hiroshima, Mon Amour; I Confess; The Lady from Shanghai.  This also happens to me with abstract art. Recently I was looking at Franz Kline pictures. At the same time that my sense of wonder for the art renewed, I felt anxiety moving me to self-doubt. Why had I remembered there being more color in his work? -- surely that seems absurd. 

I worried that, upon seeing Marion Cajori's film, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter, I might be in a situation again of questioning my reality. Fortunately, this was not the case. Mitchell's paintings flame out from the film in wild traceries of color. 

It is a short documentary, compared with other of Cajori's portraits -- runtime is less than an hour. Cajori is limited by Mitchell's reluctance to talk. Mitchell seems neither unfriendly nor inarticulate. Rather, there are flashes in which she possesses the hospitality and skill of a masterful storyteller. What stops Mitchell from talking is probably an irresolvable contradiction. The color in her paintings is out of spontaneous expressions: the color in her paintings is out of a complicated reflexive process invested with meditations on nature. For Mitchell, it seems truth is impossible with language. Only image will do.

It is a pleasure to watch Mitchell at work in Paris and talk about the quality of light there. She doesn't react to light intellectually, like a poet does. Her way of transposing light into jaggedly arranged strokes of color is a process language doesn't match. Her paintings suggest a preconscious authority -- the wilderness in stride. 

Image: "Ladybug" by Joan Mitchell, 1957