No Boundaries

What constitutes fine art, who’s in charge of the process wherein art is called art, and why do those who make it, so often, get damaged in the process?

In an unusual way, the film Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child is both conventional documentary and personal narrative.  Without hearing the filmmaker, Tamra Davis, speak before and after the film, one would assume it is entirely the former. Davis, who was a close friend of Basquiat, has structured the film to speak for her, in describing his short life and their shorter relationship, in a way that would be appropriate to both his and his family’s wishes.

Basquiat was a darling of the New York art world in the 1980′s. He became the most publicly recognized of several artists including Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel, and was a close friend and protege of Andy Warhol. A high school dropout, he began as a graffiti artist and entered the cultural elite via the New York club scene and the early icons of the era: Madonna, Blondie, and David Bowie.

His work is primitive in nature and refracts African, Haitian and Hispanic cultural influences. The most significant outgrowth of his work has been in graphic design where colorful, bold and childlike images are juxtaposed with text. This has developed, in part, as a response to the ubiquity of neat and predictable computer graphics. Basquiat died of complications related to heroin usage at age 27.

The film presents Basquiat in an almost identical way as Wikipedia. The major difference is that some of the negative aspects of his life are not present in the film. Throughout, I found myself wondering the extent to which the film, as a celebration of his life, excluded negative details. In the Q&A it became clear that, through control of the display of his work, the Basquiat family also approved and censored the film. Negative aspects of his family life, including his mother’s mental illness, went without exposition in any great detail.

Another thing which could have stood in the way of a complete depiction of the artist is the filmmaker’s involvement in the same community of artists, dealers, curators, and buyers that produced and, perhaps, destroyed the artist. Since reading Tom Wolfe’s (of the Bonfire of the Vanities variety) 1975 The Painted Word, I’ve regarded the art world with healthy skepticism.

In the case of much modern art, a prohibitive factor in the escalation in the value of work is the productivity of the artist. Because a lot of new work can be created very rapidly, it is difficult to value existing work highly. Wolfe argues somewhat convincingly that it is the traders in art who make the market for it by manufacturing demand. In other words, it’s all about the PR. He also infers, less convincingly, that this process is independent of the quality of the art.

At any rate, while watching the various art representatives, dealers and buyers speaking, I wondered about the extent to which they may have financially benefited from the artist’s early death. Basquiat fits an established model of artistic incandescence, associated with notoriety, followed rapidly by decline and demise. I think it is worth wondering why this occurs again and again, and questioning who benefits from it. The absence of these questions was the film’s greatest fault.

The film is well made and worth seeing. I found it much more compelling than the similar drama made about his life. Aspects I enjoyed most were the Filmmaker’s use of music (jazz and Ravel), the abundant use of his art, and the tenderness with which the childlike essence of Basquiat is portrayed. It is unfortunate that the entire story could not have been told.

I wanted badly to love HOWL. I’m a beat-era fanboy and have been for decades. This is derivative of my, more general, love for lyricism in literature and jazz which extends well beyond the beats and is not a celebration of beat lifestyle or philosophy.  Though I do find much of the later compelling.

HOWL is not considered a documentary by its producers or those that make the decisions about what goes in which category at Sundance.  It certainly seemed like one to me.  I found it unusual, but a documentary none the less.

I’m not at all sure why it matters. I think it may be similar to the tendency of authors to cast their work as non-fiction when it isn’t, because the market for fiction is so very very lousy. The market for documentaries is poor relative to their dramatic counterpoints, or so I’ve heard. That the circumstances in film are exactly the opposite of that in publishing is curious indeed.

The HOWL audience could be divided into two parts. The beat fanboys (and fangirls) and those, unknowing at the outset, who watched in wondrous trepidation of all those flying penises. Both groups had reason for some disappointment. It would have been impossible not to disappoint the first group because, as dedicated cultists, we are protective of our favorite facts or persons or theories. We are easily upset by perceived  misrepresentation or omission. We tend to squeal.  I suspect that the film left many of the later group just wondering why.

This is an odd movie.  It is the story of the poem and not the poet. There are three intermingled veins: a James Franco narrative which both presents and explains the poem, lengthy animation sequences which interpret the poem, and a courtroom simulation which portrays the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, following publication of HOWL, in dramatic form.

I found the Franco narrative limited in that it dealt almost exclusively with the text of the poem. The animation left me thinking that time could have been better spent dealing with more context from the life of Allen Ginsberg and the other beats in a traditional documentary form. It was evident in the Q&A that some are upset with any animated interpretation of the poem. I disagree. Interpretation of literature in film is not exactly new.  It just didn’t fit with anything else. I enjoyed the trial simulation scenes most. David Strathairn and John Hamm are well cast and the dialogue which is taken directly from the trial transcripts is fascinating. If a drama was the goal than this should have been expanded to make up the core of a film along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck.

My personal complaint with most discussion of beat literature is the assumption that the style was born of jazz and  formed completely new in the minds of Kerouac and Ginsberg.  What about Thomas Wolfe? Of the Look Homeward Angel variety. Kerouac describes himself and Wolfe walking past one another on the Brooklyn bridge as a passing-of-the-baton sort of moment. He acknowledges Wolfe’s style as the predecessor to his own. And it so obviously is.

This is the problem with the beat fanboys. Impossible to satisfy.

Crime is punishment. Fear is the most of it. You can’t run but you can hide.

The only options are to leave that way of life.  Which, for socioeconomic reasons, can’t be done.  Or to build a shell around one’s self.  To become a zombie-like creature only capable of the most base emotions.  With this comes a myriad of coping strategies, addictions to the most base stimuli, complete isolation from everything. And almost everything outside the shell is fear. These are the makings of a criminal sociopath and the root story underlying a lot of good films.

Yesterday I saw Animal Kingdom, the first feature-length film of Australian David Michod.  WOW.  In the Q&A he said: “I just love American crime movies.”  This one is very good.  Perhaps one of the best of that genre and all done with a fraction of the budget. Not only does it completely enthrall, surprise, and shake-up our neat and tidy little worlds (if only for a couple of hours), it offers a believable glimpse into the makings of that unfortunate personae.

My experience with the World Cinema Competition films has not been particularly good.  I’m drawn to the Palestinian and other middle-eastern flicks which are quite common at Sundance.  They are largely invisible in the United States outside of the festival, so if you want to see them, it is good to see a bundle here in Park City.  But this year I found myself worn out with the topic and let “just what sounds interesting” be my guide. I’m glad I did.  Animal Kingdom is perverse in an awe-inspiring way.

With elements of Casino, Reservoir Dogs, The Usual Suspects and Mystic River, Michod does an enormous amount with an ensemble cast including two first-time actors.  The lower budget of the film relative to it’s American counterparts is apparent but not fatal. Insight into the criminal mind is clear and makes one wonder what Michod did for a living before the movie business.

It is always good to see Joel Edgerton, one of my favorite Australian actors. Keep an eye open for both Michod and Jacki Weaver, a theater actress, who plays the matriarch of this ultimate version of the dysfunctional brood.  She’s just creepy magic!

Because Sundance constitutes an onslaught upon one’s thought capacity, I decided it might be good to post here and there throughout rather than wrapping things up at the end. By the end it is difficult to remember what one was thinking at the beginning.

My first day brought me to to a day-long seminar on the marketing of independent film via the various tools, social and otherwise, that constitute the “new media”.  With the exception of one gathering of the mega-webites, the seminar was not well attended which was a bit of a surprise.  The event, organized by Jigsaw Global, was nicely put-together and informative, if only skimming the surface, very lightly, of the subjects at hand.

Presenters included the director of i-Phone gaming for the Adult Swim Network (something to do with after hours programing on the Cartoon Network I think) on building film/television related aps for the i-Phone, a web consultant on the general makings of a new media marketing strategy, and the Microsoft queen of twitter who unveiled a new Windows 7 twitter utility called Look.

There were also two impressive panel discussions: the first was arbitrated by Kara Swisher, of the Wall Street Journal’s allThingsD.com, and involved the content potentates of most of the new media powerhouses including Oprah, Youtube, Facebook and mySpace as well as a token filmmaker and the fellow who did the social media marketing for last year’s Indy films’: “The Cove” and “Food Inc”.  The second panel involved what I would call a PR procurement chain that began with a filmmaker in this year’s festival extending through various obscure new media functionalities to a actual real-life new media designer at the bottom of the food chain.

A few thoughts:

Things are not well in the movie business.  This is not a surprise but things are particularly terrible in the Indy movie business.  This was made most cogent as one filmmaker shouted from the crowd: “People won’t finance our films if they can’t sell them”.  The malaise appears to extend even into the iPhone realm where downloads of film studio aps are falling far short of expectations, and the number of available aps is swamping the potential for any given ap to achieve profitability.  Throughout this presentation I kept thinking: wait until Flash hits the iPhone ap market in the middle of this year.

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Park City at Night

I’m about to begin a fairly extensive period of  new photographic work now that the “summer of code” is behind me, so I want to get a bunch of older images processed, posted and removed from my desktop clutter. This is the first series of several which have been hanging about and waiting to be fooled with.

They constitute the third part of an experimental evaluation of HDRI for the resort market.  The general idea is that it is much easier to set up and take HDRI photos than to lug about bulky and intrusive lighting equipment. This is more important where many present are paying guests and not very interested in being inconvenienced for the sake of the photographer’s mission.

HDRI is unique also and provides imagery which complements other styles well and, in certain cases, is superior to anything that can produced by non-HDRI methods. The photos shown in the linked gallery are all exterior and HDRI has been used for aesthetic rather than practical reasons.

Several of the shots are shown more than once in the galleries because they have been composited and tone-mapped by more than one technique.  The techniques used/evaluated include:  Photomatrix Details Enhancer, Photoshop Local Adaptation, and Picturenaut Photoreceptor.

The images were then processed using conventional methods in both camera raw and photoshop.  In some cases I did get a little carried away with image modification beyond that necessary for purely comparative purposes.

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