Dienstag, 29. September 2009
Film review: Seraphine
Film review - Sandra Vaghe Stelle Dell' Orsa during a Luchino Visconti retrospective at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood
SANDRA
by SIMONE KUSSATZ
This is a film review I wrote about Luchino Visconti’s film Sandra (Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa...) from 1965, which I saw during a major Luchino Visconti retrospective hosted by the UCLA Film and Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood. After a brief scene of a party given by Sandra (Claudia Cardinale) and her husband Andrew (Michael Andrew), with an international crowd of people conversing in different languages and mingling in front of a grand piano played by a classical pianist, the viewer witnesses a long sequence of a fast ride in a convertible, traveling through Geneva, the Alps in northern Italy, Florence and Tuscany, and finally to the small city of Volterra. During the ride, the camera is positioned inside the car, so that we do not see the occupants, but only their view as they pass freeway signs, bridges, building facades, and everything else that surrounds them. Volterra is where Sandra grew up. It is the place where her childhood home stands, where her mother betrayed her father and later became mentally ill, where her father was taken by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, where he died, and where Sandra's husband Andrew discovers the incestuous relationship between Sandra and her brother Gianni. It is also Gianni's final destination, where he commits suicide, and the place where Sandra wishes to pay homage to her father through a bust placed in the garden. As much as the events in Sandra (1965) are gloomy and mysterious, so is the aesthetic of the film. Shot in black and white, many scenes take place at night or in dimly lit rooms. In one scene, for instance, Sandra walks alone through a completely dark garden on a windy night toward the bust of her father, which is covered with a white piece of cloth. As she embraces the bust and the white cloth rises into the air, one might think that she is embracing a ghost. The fast ride in the car toward Volterra seems symbolic. It is a journey from the present into the past, a dive into the subconscious, where the tragedy is imprinted in Sandra's mind. The reference to Sophocles' Electra is obvious, although slightly modified. There is Sandra as Electra, and Gianni as Orestes; their dead father evokes Sophocles' Agamemnon, who was killed by his wife's lover. Although Gianni, like Orestes, becomes mentally unstable, in Visconti's film, he does not kill his mother but himself. In Visconti's version of Electra, the Trojan War becomes World War II, and the ancient site of Delphi becomes Volterra. The film does not go into detail about World War II or Auschwitz. Therefore, it does not serve, as many war films do, as a means of confronting or overcoming a traumatic past. Instead, the war and the Holocaust provide the film with another layer of complexity and a particular perspective on the characters and their relationships. The interaction between the characters is more visual than verbal. Their eyes and body language tell us more than their words. Although furnished with antiques, Sandra's home seems to contain a void. The large rooms, which have remained unused for a long time, express a profound sense of loneliness. The monotonous sound of a ticking clock, interrupted only occasionally by classical piano music, such as a nocturne by César Franck, adds to the sadness that accompanies the characters' lives.
LARRY JOHNSON AT THE UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM
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Larry Johnson at the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Westwoodby Simone Kussatz
Celebrity culture is the main theme running through Larry Johnson’s retrospective exhibit. Johnson’s celebrities are faceless and shown to us in a most outré way. We see them through the eyes of their creators, the machinery of mass media, which not only profits from their early and tragic deaths, but, as the exhibit suggests, may have also caused them. This sinister and ironic view can be felt throughout the sixty-work show, organized by adjunct curator Russell Ferguson and spanning Johnson’s career since 1982.
The overview opens with Johnson’s reworking of a Paul Rand video in which the individual letters of the word “women” move up and down like the horses in a merry-go-round, accompanied by circus music. In the very next room, Johnson’s six-panel breakthrough work Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds) (1982/1984) is installed high up on the wall, showing a light blue sky with puffy clouds and actors’ names — Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo — superimposed on them. From one’s earthbound perspective the names have a god-like quality to them but at the same time remind us of their unhappy lives, cut shockingly short like Michael Jackson’s, who died five days after the exhibit opened.
Cartoon-style animals appear in subsequent works, including a goat and a donkey with a bee stinging its rear. The four panels comprising Untitled (Land w/o Bread) (1999–2000), are ironically named after Luis Buñuel’s sober 1933 documentary Land without Bread. Two of the photographs show Johnson’s finger in front of the camera’s lens, admitting to the artist’s technical and conceptual imperfections. Johnson’s goat images, as noted by Christopher Knight and others, relate to Greek mythology but also carry a gay subtext.
What stands out most in Johnson’s display are his text-based works. Some of them feature bright, multi-colored or constantly changing lettering on colorful backgrounds, rendering texts artful and decorative, similar in approach to Jenny Holzer but deliberately more tasteful. Johnson’s fragmented texts derive from different genres and sources (some he appropriated, others he wrote himself). Since celebrities are made and known through the media, words logically play a key role in Johnson’s approach. As Johnson put it himself, “To master celebrity is to master language.”
Edited by Peter Frank
Peter Frank is Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum and Associate Editor for Fabrik and The Magazine. He was born in 1950 in New York, where he served as art critic for The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News, and moved to Los Angeles in 1988.
Larry Johnson,
Untitled (Winter Me)
Color photograph
45 1⁄2 x 61 in. (115.6 x 154.9 cm)
1990
Edition of 3
Private collection
Astronaut Interview: Stephen K. Robinson
http://www.theworldly.org/ArticlesPages/Articles2005/October05Articles/Robinson.html
http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2009/astronaut.html
Quotes by Michael J. Massimino taken by Simone Kussatz July 14, 2009 at the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
"It's a chance of a lifetime to look at the world like that."
"There are no words to describe what it's like to be out in space. If you're in heaven that's the view, but it's more beautiful than heaven."
"Things go wrong. When it was dark, I broke the handrail off, which made me think of my uncle Frank and when I was 14 years old.......... but to overcome the obstacles that's the success. "
Full quote will come shortly.
http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2009/astronaut.html
Quotes by Michael J. Massimino taken by Simone Kussatz July 14, 2009 at the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
"It's a chance of a lifetime to look at the world like that."
"There are no words to describe what it's like to be out in space. If you're in heaven that's the view, but it's more beautiful than heaven."
"Things go wrong. When it was dark, I broke the handrail off, which made me think of my uncle Frank and when I was 14 years old.......... but to overcome the obstacles that's the success. "
Full quote will come shortly.
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Über mich
- Simone Kussatz
- Simone Kussatz is a Los Angeles-based writer. She has written numerous articles in the field of the arts for international and national newspapers and magazines in Germany, China, Switzerland and Iceland. She was also a special to the Los Angeles Times. Kussatz was born in Asperg, Germany and holds a Master's degree in American Studies, journalism and psychology. After she graduated from the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free Universiy of Berlin, she did an internship at the American Academy in Berlin, where she assisted the Berlin Prize Fellows 2000 in their research and writing. Aside from that she has taught German and English as a Second Language and served at Xiamen University in China, as well as EC Language Center in London...