Wednesday, September 24, 2008

WE ARE WILD FOR THIS MAN




and we think his son is oh, so, sexy...



we'd like to give them both honorary membership in the Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater. We'll have to think of a name for the award (the Bruno, has been taken already by the SETI league), but it's clear that it will be in the form of a miniature revolving disco ball (what else.)

What to say about this clip except to quote Deleuze on Garrel which is how I found him in the first place.

"This may be the first case of a cinema of constitution, one which is truly constitutive: constituting bodies and in this way restoring our belief in the world, restoring our reason...It is doubtful that cinema is sufficient for this; but if the world has become bad cinema, in which we no longer believe, surely a true cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to believe in the world and in vanished bodies?"

This is from Garrel's L'enfant secret (which is UNAVAILABLE!!!as far as I can tell.)



Here you see the quiet, intense focus on gesture and movement. Bodies, volumes, emerge from or are consumed by light and shadow.

Reading: lovely little essay on L'enfante secret http://www.rouge.com.au/1/garrel.html

Speaking of bodies and missing persons. I saw the Vik Muniz show at Sikkema this week. I thought it was a clever idea--making exact replicas of the verso sides of iconic paintings and photographs. I was prepared to be tickled for a moment by the trick, but wow! GREAT SHOW! http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/exhibitions.html




Muniz makes us, the viewers, the missing bodies of the future. The experience becomes an elegiac projection of the past as well as the future. In the here and now, to read the verso of Van Gogh's Starry Night is to evoke a personal history of the missing image. I felt such (bodily) tenderness to those wooden objects. To think that humans had cared for, made their mark, and passed on this object, was heart-rending. Not, because it elicited the lost aura of the masterpiece, but because it made me mourn the loss of the physical object in the midst of all its images. I thought about a day when it would be too expensive or dangerous for the painting to exist outside of some titanium underground vault, and even if that were not the case, how the generations to come will perhaps not even be aware that there is a difference.

1 comment:

peter said...

l'enfant secret

available at

www.raredvds4sale.co.uk

i was chasing garrel threads and ended up here

unending