Marfa Film Festival

One of the highlights of being in Marfa in July was catching this past week's Marfa Film Festival. Running from July 13 through 17, it featured six dozen films, by my count, ranging from shorts to full-length feature films and documentaries. What better way to take a break from writing than catch a few films that might in their own way spark some thought and creative possibilities? Though the festival passes, merchandise and information book were in the Marfa landmark Hotel Paisano, most of the films screened at the Crowley Theater a few blocks away. A few specially designated films, however, like the singular Belladonna of Sadness, about which I'll say a bit more below, ran at more atmospheric spots like El Cósmico, an outdoor restaurant, bar, semi-drive in, and recreational space with--I kid not--charcoal-fired hot tubs. Despite the fact that it was a small-town event, the festival's weeklong passes were pricier than I forecast, but I indulged and purchased one to ensure hassle-free entry into any film or related event.

On the festival's first day, which began with an afternoon screening of Greg Kwedar's feature Transpecos, there was a free outdoor Opening Night Party, on one of Marfa's two main streets, the north-south artery Highland Avenue, which had been blocked off to create a plaza in front of the Paisano Hotel. The event aimed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of George Stevens' movie Giant, which was filmed in and around Marfa; stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean stayed at the Hotel Paisano while filming, as a large photo attests once you walk past the hotel's foyer. The party included a historic room tour, a red carpet photo booth, revelers sporting 1950s Hollywood style, and a dance party DJ'd by local turntablist "Manolo Black." It started slowly but within an hour or so the plaza was brimming with people.

After I grabbed a drink and settled at one of the long tables, I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Antonio García Jr., a young actor, writer and director. Garcia is a California native now resident in Brooklyn. He was in Marfa because his short, Flying Eggs, which he'd written and starred in, was among a series of films screening Wednesday morning. After my conversation with Garcia I took in a little more of the revelry, though I didn't dance, pose on the red carpet or take the Paisano room tour, then headed home to read and write a bit more before tucking in early so that I could catch García's film and a few others I did not want to miss.

Downtown Marfa blocked off for the
free Opening Night Party festival  

People gathering on Highland Street 

Many of the film were shorts and screened in continuous blocks, so the range in quality was bound to be variable. One judgment I can offer without hesitation was that the overall visual quality of every film I saw demonstrated polish, even if the content was lacking or not up to. None of the films looked too amateurish, despite the youth of many of the filmmakers, and several were clearly filmed on limited budgets, using digital video. Among the 11 am block, García Jr.'s film, Flying Eggs, directed by Sheldon Chau, and a documentary short, Train Surfers, about Mumbai-based daredevils, directed by Adrien Clothier, was the strongest of the many offerings. Set in New York City, Flying Eggs took a premise that many pedestrians--someone harassing you from a façade window as you walk underneath--would dread, and turned it on its head, with a horrifying revelation in store for the lead, played by García Jr., once he decided to confront his tormentor. This was anything but your light-hearted metropolitan diary. Train Surfers gave glimpses of a world with which I am only passingly familiar, and its strongest elements were the mise-en-scène moments when the daredevils were undertaking their stunts, and its decision to let them speak. I would have loved a bit more context, though, about their lives and prospects outside this activity.

The other films I found less compelling, and two really rubbed me the wrong way. One, Baby Doll, a short by John Valley, entailed a Freddy Mercury-costumed white man lipsyncing to the eponymous song by Austin-based pop-rock band Sweet Spirit. He dons a blond wig (of course) before a captive audience of...captive young women! By captive I mean literally so: bound, ball-gagged, and forced to watch as he frolics, in grating fashion. An ironic twist resolves his presence, but the film ends with the young woman still bound and gagged, so it wasn't enough to redeem the premise or the imagery, at least for me. Another, Brix and Bitch, a short by LA-based filmmaker Nico Raineu, could serve as a textbook example of what liberal misogyny might look like. In it a white woman, "Bitch," must participate in fight club matches with men to pay off a debt. At one of the fights, they lustily chant "Bitch," etc., as a man repeatedly wallops her. (Yes, she fights back, but still--nope.) The white male debt-holder decides that if she can beat one final opponent, she's off the hook. Her partner, a black woman, "Brix," decides to help her out. You can probably guess where this is going. I should note that many in the audience thankfully did not applaud when it ended. 

Several other films were visually striking but fell short in terms of content. In Max Barbakow's short The Duke, a black former football player suffering from the effects of CTE damage, cannot remember the violence he wreaks in every day life. In another, Oh My God, Forgive Me, a world premier by Alex Coblent, a young interracial couple's argument takes a grotesque turn. Both were striking to look at, particularly The Duke, but neither struck me as more than a bizarre anecdote transposed into visual media. Outside of the documentary short Nascent, by Lindsay Branham and Jonathan Kasbe, and filmed in the Central African Republic; filmmaker Alisa Cacho-Sousa's Circunstancia, which poetically explored the Caribbean's duality as an isolating and liberating figure for Cubans; and Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Siegenthelar's beguiling science fiction short Starfall, which I wish were a full-length feature, several other short films and films had the same effect on me; each felt well intentioned, but limited by the constraint of not pushing the idea far enough, even if the film itself had only a few minutes to do so. Again, the technical quality of every film I saw was high, and many of these filmmakers are still at the early stages of their careers, leaving me with the thought that if they can find writers operating at the levels of their cinematographers and producers, they could have strong careers on their hands.

A DJ's booth

Dancing in front of the Marfa Film Festival logo 

I want to comment on two highlights of the festival that I won't soon forget. One was the evening outdoor screening of the newly restored Belladonna of Sadness. Originally debuting in 1973, this animated fable represents Eichi Yamamoto's and Yoshiyuki Fukuda's riff, in combination with the artist Osamu Tezuka and the Mushi Production animation studio, on Jules Michelet's 1862 tome Satanism and Witchcraft, though set several centuries before in a peasant village somewhere in France. In it a young couple, Jean and Jeanne, suffer a devastating blow to their connubial bliss when a local Baron and his allies brutally rape Jeanne on her wedding night. Jean consoles his wife and urges her to look to the future, but a phallic spirit urges her to avenge the attack by allying herself with the devil. As a famine strikes the village and the Baron prepares for war, he demands that Jean, who has become the local tax collector, to press more money out of the locals, and when Jean cannot, the Baron severs his hand. The spirit cajoles Jeanne into taking Jean's place, which she does, to great success, and as a result she provokes the ire and envy of the Baron's wife, who denounces her as a witch. When Jean will not accept Jeanne, she flees to the forest, becomes the lover of the spirit, who turns out to be Satan, and when she is captured and burned at the stake, she marshals her powers and sparks a revolution that overthrows the standing order.

As the above summary suggests, the fairytale elements of Belladonna of Sadness's plot quickly curdle into what is essentially a horror story. Tezuka's images are Klimtian in their mixture of flatness and complexity, and the larger tableaux enrich the plot, often in complementary fashion but sometimes in imagistic counterpoint. Much of the animation consists of pans and small variations on the still drawings, with vibrant use of composition and color, such as when the Baron's rape of Jeanne precedes a red line between her legs that turns into a widening river of blood. The graphic sexual material, which includes ribald jokes and a Dionysian orgy near the film's end, signal it as a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Manga and anime artist Osamu Tezuka's stylistic sensibility, at least in this film, appears to derive in part from late 19th and early 20th century European and Japanese visual art traditions. 

Two unappealing throwbacks were the blatantly contrasting color scheme for Jeanne, whose skinned was presented white as snow, while the Baron, particularly when raping Jeanne, and later Satan, when having sex with her, were pitch black, as the images I post below attest. Another obvious and repugnant throwback was the depiction of the "usurer," who helps Jeanne establish herself as the tax collector after Jean's behanding; imagery drawn directly from anti-Semitic templates that circulated in Nazi Germany made me want to walk out. I cannot believe I'm the only one who noticed these aspects of the film, but nothing I've seen online mentions them. Belladonna of Sadness ends with an homage to the French Revolution, evoking Eugène Delacroix's famous painting, Liberty Leading the People; Jeanne, we are supposed to believe, has morphed into Marianne, France's liberation icon, but the leap feels politically incoherent. In fact, the overall effect was a bit stupefying: unforgettable, often trippy visuals paired with a simplistic, moralistic narrative that was both misogynistic and exploitative. On the one hand, I am glad I caught it, particularly at El Cósmico, which was an experience in itself, but on the other, I could stand without ever seeing it again.

Scene from Burden (2016)

Another standout for me was Burden, Richard Dewey's and Timothy Marrinan's 2016 documentary about the late conceptual and performance artist, engineer and sculptor, Chris Burden (1946-2015). Perhaps best known for his controversial 1971 performance, Shoot, in which he arranged for a fellow artist to shoot him with .22 rifle from 16 ft. Utterly simple, utterly dangerous, and thus quite innovative as this art act was, it constituted only one of many such groundbreaking interventions by Burden, beginning when he was still an art student at the then very new University of California, Irvine. The film canvassed his entire career, cutting between past highlights that included his notorious grad school stunt Five Day Locker Piece, which brought him immediate notoriety, and 1974's Trans-fixed, in which he nailed himself to a VW Bug and had it travel in and out of a garage, and contemporary moments with the artist, who kept striking out for new territory--though leaving corporeal performance behind--right up until his death from melanoma a year ago.

Along the way, Burden showed how his work from the beginning often involved taking a very simple idea to its logical, or illogical extreme, as well as his intrinsic merging of the visual, the sculptural, the bodily, and engineering; how integral his wives were to his career, with his first wife, Barbara Burden, supporting him financially by working a full-time job and even stepping in when no one else would participate in what were at times quite scary performances; how gallerists, peers and audiences found themselves continually astonished, and times terrified, of what Burden imagined and then realized as art; how crazed drugs and fame made him at one point; and how he embodied one of the principle insights of many great careers in art, which is never to lose the playfulness and wonderment of childhood, though doing so may create a personal hell for those close to you.

While the filmmakers were too coy about his background and the social capital it provided him, they thankfully did not hesitate show the complexities of his personality and behavior, including one of his ugliest moments, when he angrily struck out, with racist and misogynistic epithets, at his second ex-wife and the art dealer she was seeing, after she'd fled him. Nor did they fail to note the irony that when one of Burden's students brings a loaded gun to class, perhaps in echo and tribute to Burden's earlier landmark piece, the artist complained to the school, and then retired. Imitation in such cases is not flattery but possibly the prelude to real danger. (A second irony is that as a young man, Burden actually said on camera, "Everybody fantasizes about being shot," though this is not true and also must be understood within the specific context in which Burden was creating art.) The film ended on a bittersweet note; shortly before Burden passes away, he completes one of his most beautiful and lyrical pieces, the inflated, self-guiding mini-dirigible that he envisioned as a tribute to the great Brazilian aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932). Though he does not live to see the piece's début, it embodies in compelling material fashion the spirit of his later work, and his overall vision.

Photos in front of the Palace Theater

Brooklyn-based actor
Antonio Garcia Jr. 

Peering into Arcade 

When the Marfa Film Festival concluded, I felt glad that I had been able to catch more than a few of its films. One thing I noted throughout the festival was how few filmmakers of color were involved; even films with subject matter that explored the lives and concerns of people who were not white were mostly the product of white filmmakers. The festival's organizers clearly tried to schedule a range of films, for which I give them tremendous credit, so the issue is less the festival itself, but rather the film industry, including indie filmmaking, which I imagine still presents a number of challenges, primarily financial, to transforming creative visions into cinema reality. I also give the filmmakers themselves credit for attempting to stretch their perspectives and to a degree cast a wider net, particularly compared to the Hollywood mainstream, in terms of the subjects they seek to explore, the characters they write, and so forth. Yet I wonder whether a woman director, particularly a queer filmmaker of color, would ever have written, let alone filmed, a movie like Brix and the Bitch. Perhaps yes, though I doubt it. All of this also underlined for me one of the challenges Hollywood faces; it's one thing to add diverse faces to the Academy's rolls, and another to change the system that keeps a wide array of talented people from making films that reflect the rich diversity of lives and experiences in the US and across the globe.

At El Cósmico, where Belladonna
of Sadness screened

A still from Belladonna of Sadness

Another still from Belladonna of Sadness

Farewell to the Clocktower Gallery

In 1972, New York was a very different city than today. (It was even quite different as recently as 2002.) Less populous, far poorer, much grittier. The City was only a few years from near-bankruptcy, and decades into its ongoing economic decline. Yet 1970s New York was also experiencing one of its great moments of creative ferment, as artists old and young were developing new artistic forms as well as venues to perform and display them. The Clocktower Gallery, which Alanna Heiss established in the upper reaches of a beautiful 1894 Mead, McKim and White building in lower Manhattan, became one of the important sites for downtown avant-gardists, as well as one of several spaces operating under the larger framework of the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, which produced experimental works in under-used spots, among them 10 Bleecker Street, the Coney Island Sculpture Museum, the Idea Warehouse, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), all over the city. As a result Clocktower was the oldest continuous space for alternative art in New York.

Among the artists who exhibited at the Clocktower Gallery are names now burned into the annals of late 20th century art: Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Richard Artschwager, Lydia Benglis, Gordon Matta-Clark, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pat Steir, and Richard Tuttle. Matta-Clark even famously soaped up and showered on on the actual external clock's hands! Some 30 years later, in 2003, the building began housing the online radio station and audio archive Artists International Radio (www.ARTonAIR.org). In keeping with contemporary New York reality, developers have purchased the building and plan to transform it into…you know what's coming: luxury condominiums and retail space. Because there cannot ever be enough housing for the superrich, or spaces for national and global chain stores or restaurants and service outlets for the global élite!

This past Saturday the Clocktower Gallery was shuttering its final exhibit, Dale Henry: The Artist Who Left New York, an amalgamation of a number of Henry's (1931-2011) prior New York shows, and last-day performances, so I made sure to stop by. The Clocktower Gallery was not just an exhibition space, but a hive of artists' studios, most of which had been almost completely packed up by this weekend. What I found once I had passed through the security gauntlet downstairs (after being singled out--I was the only brown-skinned person waiting to get in--by one of the guards, who demanded to know if I'd RSVP'ed, and even after I said I had and tried to explain the admissions procedures on the website, would not believe me, until someone from the gallery itself appeared and ushered me forward--WTF?) was that only traces of the once vibrant art-making atmosphere remained. Henry's show seemed a fitting analogue to the gallery's closure, however. He had left the city in the 1980s after growing increasingly disenchanted with the art world of that era (which of course is nothing like the international financial behemoth of today), and moved to a small town in Virginia, from which he stayed in contact with longtime friends and where he continued to create new work. At his death, he left his art to gallery founder Heiss, with the proviso that it not be parceled off and out to the same sort of wealthy speculators involved in the gallery's closure.

The security gauntlet downstairs

At the gallery's entrance

Performing on the gallery's final day was Min Tanaka, who danced a farewell to the space. I'd never seen any of his prior performances at Clocktower, but his history with the gallery and the New York artworld was a long one, and included a dance at the opening of PS 1 and a dance to commemorate author and critic Susan Sontag's death in 2005. Tanaka danced his slow, almost dirgeful piece on a roof facing east, with a backdrop of skyscrapers worthy of Joseph Stella and a sky that Van Gogh might have dreamt of unfurling behind him, amid winds that made clear that winter was starting to settle in. A mourning, yes, but also a celebration of all the years that the Clocktower had brought so much new art to the city and the world. Now it searches for a new home, though it will lodge temporarily at Neuehouse, contributing to that space's programming; Heiss will be Curator in Residence. In 2014 the gallery will head to Brooklyn, now another global brand, to collaborate with Pioneer Works, Center for Art and Innovation, staging a new presentation of Henry's works and staying for a year's residency. As a result, Clocktower will live on beyond the archives, physical and memorial.  Below are some photos from the space.

Entering the Clocktower Gallery space

The hallway off which studios once bustled;
Mary Heilman's Two-Lane Highway is
visible on the floor

One of the former studios

Part of Dale Henry's Continuous Lineage Drawings
and Prosody Drawings, originally exhibited in 1973

One of the evacuated studios

The roofs cape of lower Manhattan

In another of the former studios

Another of the former galleries

$3 glasses of red and white wine

One of the stairwells to the upper floors

Henry's Camera Obscura, 1996

In the main gallery, with several different
series of Henry's paintings

A ceiling-mounted painting
from Henry's Wet Grounds, 1971
(I love the idea of this; why don't
more artists try this?)

A closeup of one of the pieces from
Henry's Primer Sets Installation, 1972

Some of the rows of paintings from
Henry's Primer Sets Installation, 1972

A closeup of several of the paintings from
Henry's Primer Sets Installation, 1972

Henry's Body of Work, 1976

The original announcements for Henry's
shows, as well as a 1970s guide
to New York's art galleries

Some of Henry's Stretcher Bar Series, 1976
works (all made from wooden stretchers)

Waiting for the performance to begin

The spiral stairwell to the clock tower itself
(it was roped off)

People gathering for Tanaka's performance

One of the gallery attendants, adorning
the spiral staircase

Onto the roof below the clock
(The Woolworth Building in the rear)

More (including Min Tanaka) after the jump!

Jamal Cyrus & Benjamin Patterson @ Performa 13 (High Line, NYC)

Benjamin Patterson, attaching
my thought headband

This year's November in New York has brought many things, not least among them Performa 13, the biennial event-filled celebration of live, inventive performance in and around the city. Many of the events, like Rashid Johnson's staging of Amiri Baraka's landmark play Dutchman in an East Village bathhouse have been sold out since they were announced (or mentioned on nytimes.com or in The New Yorker), but one aspect of Performa that deserves unending praise are the public, free pieces that occur in large enough spaces that anyone who can get herself or himself there will be able to enjoy and participate in them.

Some years ago, the scholar Fred Moten gave a brilliant talk at Northwestern University on Fluxus pioneer and music innovator Benjamin Patterson (b. 1934-). Fred's descriptions of Patterson's work deeply intrigued me, and so when some of his compositions and other creations appeared at the Studio Museum in Harlem not long after that, I hightailed it up the island to see them. But viewing a conceptual and performance artist's works in a museum, enriching and inspiring though this may be, does not compare with witnessing the work being performed live, especially by the artist herself or himself, nor, better yet, with being an active participant oneself.

The High Line announcement
of the afternoon's events

As part of Performa 13 and in conjunction with the Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and presented in two parts, at New York University and at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Patterson was scheduled to perform a number of his works, both in gallery and performance spaces, and in public. Several of these events, like Pond, at NYU's Grey Art Gallery, quickly sold out, or, like Action as Composition: A Retrospective Concert, occurred on a night (and in Brooklyn) when I had to be on campus. But I did see--thank you, Performa 13!--that Patterson and a few other artists would be offering free public performances on the High Line, I vowed to take a break from my herculean grading duties and other pressing responsibilities (galley editing, etc.) and be there.

Originally I had also planned to see Jamal Cyrus's Texas Fried Tenor, a piece he developed in 2012 in which he fries a tenor saxophone, with a poem, and mixed and live instrumental soundtrack as part of the experience, but my lunch companion, Dorothy Wang, and I were running a little behind, so I figured I'd missed it. My friend also thought it sounded like avant-garde hijinks taken a bit too far, but the idea of frying not just anything, but everything, especially a saxophone, struck me as a particularly apt gesture for our contemporary culture, as well as a fitting tribute to Texas, African American, jazz, and black Texas musical culture. Rather than installing it in a museum, why not drop it all in burning oil? And, perhaps with a bit of Beuys behind the ears, there was no way anyone could directly consume it, except ephemerally, in the moment, or in documented form. No hardened arteries from this indelible inedible.

Yet when we reached the High Line at 14th Street, we could smell something burning, and lo, a crowd was gathered around a column of smoke, amplified crackling sounds were audible, and I spotted a brother dressed in all white that I figured must be Cyrus. It was he, and while we missed his recitation of a poem based on the tenor sax tradition, we did see his event's denouement, with incense, a bell, and a very different mode of saxophony than I'd ever witnessed before. That scorched instrument, lying in a metal trough, was playing itself something ferocious. Texas fried saxophone, in New York, indeed. The clips at the bottom of this page below the jump should give a sense of what it all looked and sounded like.

Jamal Cyrus, at his mixing board

Jamal Cyrus placing the fried saxophone
in an amped trough

Cyrus, mixing away

At a certain point, as Cyrus's performance was approaching its conclusion and in my search for a better vantage to photograph him, I happened upon an elderly gentleman sitting at a table with a flipboard sign announcing his event, "Penny for Your Thoughts," and just from his face alone I recognized him as Benjamin Patterson. I introduced myself and he invited me to have a seat, as I would be the first to participate in his performance. I wanted to let my friend know that I'd seen him, so I went over to where she'd sequestered away, to make headway into her own stack of student work, and led her to where Patterson was. By the time we'd returned, someone else, a scholar I know from the New York Public Library and an old friend of Patterson's, had taken a seat in preparation for the start of his performance, so I gladly decided to go second.

Benjamin Patterson, before his event

His idea was simple enough, but fascinating nevertheless. For 1¢ (a penny) he would buy thoughts from participants, which we would write down on a sheet of paper (I wrote 6, though it looked like 5), and then we could buy thoughts, also for 1¢ from him. I bought 10 cents' worth, which he deposited in his piggy bank. A mini-market for a neoliberal artworld and society, no? As a token of our exchange and purchase, we received a headband with new thoughts, culled from various magazines and newspapers Patterson had brought with him. He created it on the spot, using pink ribbon, strips of paper and staples, and then attached it to our heads.

He read the ideas we contributed, but diced them up into thin strips, which he may or may not have reused at some point. I wondered about that, though I was delighted to be able to think on the spot and let him know some of what was in my mind at the time. We kept up a sotto voce patter the whole time, and when I had received my headband and was walking away, several people stopped me to inquire what we were talking about. One person may even have jotted down my name and what I said; I should have asked where that was going, but perhaps onto another blog like this one.

I wore my headband for a little while, and the feeling of delight--and new thoughts--didn't wear off even after I'd taken it off, nor did the realization that I had an opportunity not just to meet one of the most original and still living figures in the Fluxus movement, but that I'd been fortunate enough to participate in one of his performances. For a free afternoon, that was invaluable. There's still two more weeks worth of Performa 13 performances, so catch them if you can!

My thoughts

My payment for the thoughts

Patterson making the headband

The two of us, chatting as he
makes one for the first participant

Receiving my thought headband

The next vendor of
her thoughts

Videos after the jump!