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Along with Maddin’s brilliant
serial, Cowards Bend the Knee, also released in 2004, Saddest Music is
splendid pseudo-silent expressionist filmmaking—channeling both
David Lynch and Buster Keaton. These are the type of films Chaplin might
very well have made the first ten years or so of talkies if he had embraced
the new technology instead of fighting it. Silent film is pure; crafting
it while using sound in a subordinate manner is eloquent brilliance.
Colour is anti-puritanical.
Colour is pure sensation.
Colour threatens disorder; but also promises liberty.
Colour is vulgar, purity is dull.
Colour is silence.
His show at Salander-O’reilly (upper east side!) consisted of 5
large paintings and 1 small work. In the main room five colors, emotions,
“states of being.” Black: rich, thick, in one corner the paint
carved out from a point on the edge. Lavender: Ethereal, questioning,
yet comforting (a safe place?). Green: Earthy warmth, vigor, and spirit—a
metal clip of some sort caught in the thick layers of paint in one portion
(like an insect caught in a web). Red: Horizontal, smaller, not fire as
would be expected but temperate, cautiously alive. Yellow: pockmarked
canvas, gaps in the layered paint throughout, vulnerable, haphazard and
thick in spots, emaciated in others. This world one of emotional contemplation
solely through colo(u)r.
| I’ve experienced Butoh master Takenouchi’s summer performances at CAVE four years running now and always been spiritually moved, nay, blown away by him. This year was no exception, but I’ve come to think of what he does less as “performance” and more a spiritual, religious experience. What Atsushi engages those of us who flock to see him once a year in is something of the Butoh movement equivalent of “vacation bible school.” Spiritually the tanks get refilled. He lay on top of a bed of what initially seemed tiny rocks but was later revealed to be raw rice and lentils. |  |
He ate mounds of this while twisting and writhing about, his hair tossing it into the audience as he sway through his movement. A later conversation confirmed that Takenouchi indeed does not conceive of what he does as “performance” or “art” but as something that is hopefully spiritually deeper. “Numerous eyes on the tree’s body. We try to look at the tree with our ears, mouth, all the skin of our body.”
Osato is an artist from San
Francisco who now calls Brooklyn home. She crafts sculptural paintings
out of found objects to lyrically moving effect. She’s ventured
into filmmaking the last few years and screened this abstract black and
white short of highways from the west coast through the south for a small
group of friends in her studio during the D.U.M.B.O Art Under the Bridge
Festival. Revenant is a visually and spiritually arresting piece of work.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/27/dems.obama.transcript/
Perhaps there is hope, maybe, though we are talking politicians.
Perhaps there is hope, maybe, though we are talking politicians.
 |
Rashomon meets Crouching Tiger but even more strikingly beautiful—a psychological love story in a time of war told through layers of colors. Hero is a serious film with intriguing things to say about “empire,” though not necessarily in a manner that comforts. |
I was on this tip about comparing Kerry to the Jet Li character, W. to the Emperor, and the various Chinese Empire dramas to present world strife—but never got the chance to do so because someone else wrote about it for the Brooklyn Rail. The unsettling part is how the film eventually plays out. Maybe that’s why Miramax wanted to hold it back for so long. But then why’d they eventually drop it right before the election? Zhang’s elegiac, more soap opera-ish House of Flying Daggers, also released in 2004, was even more visually stunning, if less coherent. Who could ever have imagined from Raise the Red Lantern to sword-fu masterpieces? Yimou had a helluva year.
This interpretation of Milton’s
Paradise Lost by Bushwick’s Real People Theater included a wicked
Lucifer named “Lucy” played by an 18-year-old and incorporated
a five-minute monologue interlude in the guise of the tree of knowledge
in which teenage Chantelle Jones rants about the marginalization of young
people of color in American culture. These youngsters rework classic and
modern plays into what they call the “ghetto remix”—a
combination of original texts, street slang, and Spanish. The kids (along
with a smattering of adult collaborators) start with a basic text and
then re-contextualize the material using urban language and references,
a sampling process similar to that of hip-hop. I really dig their desire
to “keep it real”—profanity, urban subject matter and
all. A lot of what they craft is so raw, articulate, and powerful as to
teach adult companies a thing or two about the spirit of true theater.
Year Dispactké2004 p. 2