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Tag: tarkovsky

Published January 4, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Wondrous Horrors — Ariella Budick on the centenary of the 1913 Armory Show in New York, for the Financial Times:

Critics did not reject every European innovation. They nodded at the impressionists, puzzled respectfully over Cézanne, and tolerated Gauguin. But cubism blew their minds. The impact was not merely aesthetic. American writers perceived a defiant rejection of rules and a contempt for tradition – qualities they associated with violent political movements. Painters who blasted convention with their brushes gave comfort to bomb-throwing subversives. When critics invoked anarchy, it was not just a figure of speech.
See also: Rethinking the Armory in the New York Times:
New York viewers, including artists, to some degree knew what they were in for. Pictures of avant-garde art had been included, often with mocking commentary, in New York newspapers and magazines for years. And by no means were all Armory reviews pans; one critic wrote that he was grateful for “these shocks to our aesthetic sense.” Others were glad for a certain perspective the show offered: compared with avant-garde work from Europe, American art looked sane.
Making It Up — William Deresiewicz on the work of Geoff Dyer, for The New Republic:
Freedom from conventional and institutional expectations—freedom even from his audience—means that Dyer is also free to make it up, like jazz, as he goes along. Every book is different, and every book is different from everybody else’s books. Zona is a running commentary, almost shot-by-shot, on a single film. But Beautiful consists of a series of quasi-imagined episodes—vivid, textured, saturated with feeling—from the lives of the jazz greats. Out of Sheer Rage is memoir, travelogue, criticism—“about” Lawrence in the physical sense of the word: spinning around and around him with a manic, comic, centrifugal energy. The Ongoing Moment makes a poem of the history of photography by considering not artists or schools, technics or techniques, but, improbably, subjects (hats, benches, stairs): a ridiculous idea, it seems, until you figure out that Dyer’s real quarry is the relationships we have with those quotidian objects, the way they can be made to stand for the lives that move among them. “Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations,” he writes in Out of Sheer Rage, “and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.”
See also: Rose Mclaren on Zona for The White Review:
[Dyer] claims, ‘if I had not seen Stalker in my early twenties my responsiveness to the world would have been radically diminished’. He shares with his idol an artistic ideal of awareness, describing Tarkovsky’s aesthetic as a length of take demanding ‘a special intensity of attention’. The inverse dominates much contemporary culture where, ‘a lot of what’s being shown on the world’s screens is fit only for morons’ with the result that ‘there are more and more things from which one has to avert one’s ears and eyes’. Rubbish art that warrants ignorance. A bit broad-brush and heavy-handed, but its Dyer’s reason for writing. Against a social dystopia of willed numbness, Zona documents a profound engagement with an artwork. It is not so much homage to the film alone, but to the dialogue it inspires.

And finally…

What Is This Shit? — Brian Dillon interviews photographer and filmmaker William Klein:

I didn’t know how to do a book. I was just discovering photography and once I had all these pictures, I showed them to editors in New York and nobody thought it was worthwhile to do a book with these photographs. They said, “What is this shit?” I came back to Paris and discovered there was a series of travel books called Petite Planète. I called them up and got an appointment and I went to this office which looked like NASA. Chris Marker was there with a laser gun in his belt, and he saw the photographs and said, “We’ll do a book!” In fact he said, “We’ll do a book or I quit!”

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Published June 29, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Commercial Indifference — Geoff Dyer’s Zona reviewed at the LA Review of Books:

[Dyer] followed a book of eccentric travel writing with a book on photography, and then in 2009 served up a couple of loosely-linked novellas under the, let’s face it, terrible title of Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi. Add in Dyer’s pre-2000 offerings on jazz, D.H. Lawrence, and World War I, along with several novels, and you have an oeuvre that resembles a messy and ever-expanding Venn diagram of the author’s obsessions. Even so, a 200-page book about a Russian film from 1979 takes commercial indifference to heroic lengths.

(And much as I love you and your recent redesign LARB, could we get simple RSS feed please?)

The Great Unwashed — Julia Kingsford, writing at The Bookseller, on the cultural snobbery and clichés surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey  (h/t Don Linn):

Surely they can’t be ‘real’ readers whose papery passions have traditionally been our bread and butter and who shop in ‘real’ bookshops? No, these must be a different sort of reader, new and not as good, ‘silly’ and to be only temporarily humoured and nervously served before we gladly see them off as they return to whatever form of entertainment they normally enjoy. Far from intellectual snobbery about readers being the preserve of the book trade, it runs rife through everyday media and culture, constantly perpetuating the view that books are for the few.

Medium-Rare — Author Lev Grossman (The Magician King) on almost being a rare book collector, at Time:

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don’t buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. (In the rare book trade the little details that definitively identify a first edition are called “points.” My books are not strong on points.) It’s not glamorous, but it’s still satisfying, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.

And finally…

“New” — An archive interview with art director and pioneer of modern advertising Helmut Krone. There is so much good stuff in this… (via Coudal, naturally):

“New” is when you’ve never seen before what you’ve just put on a piece of paper. You haven’t seen it before and nobody else in the world has ever seen that thing that you’ve just put down on a piece of paper. And when a thing is new all you know about it is that it is brand new. It’s not related to anything that you’ve seen before in your life. And it’s very hard to judge the value of it. You distrust it, and everybody distrusts it. And very often it’s somebody else who has to tell you that that thing has merit, because you have no frame of reference, and you can’t relate it to anything that you or anybody else has ever done before.

(The going rate for Helmut Krone: The Book appears to be upwards of $80 on Abebooks. Time for a reprint?)

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Published May 4, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Cover illustration by Adrian Tomine for the Japanese edition of Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, published by Shinchosha Publishing.

The Darkness — Norwegian cartoonist Jason profiled in The National Post:

“A comedy that has some darkness, like The Apartment, is more appealing than if it’s just fluff. Ingmar Bergman’s best film, to me, is Fanny and Alexander, that is dark, like many of his early films, but there is a joy also, an affirmation of life,” he continues. “Darkness just for being dark doesn’t interest me that much. … I prefer the vitality of something that isn’t perfect.”

Jason will be at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this weekend, and you can read my Q & A with him here.

Bam… Bam… Bam… David L. Ulin, writing at the LA Times, on interviewing William S. Burroughs:

“Life is a cutup,” Burroughs says about halfway through his conversation with Ginsberg, referring to his technique of bisecting pieces of text and reconfiguring them as collages, letting the juxtapositions create a meaning that transcends traditional narrative. “And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply … not … true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.”

Yes, yes, I found myself thinking, not least because four years later, Burroughs had said virtually the same thing to me. “Life is a goddamn cutup,” is how he put it. “Every time you look out the window, or answer the phone, your consciousness is being cut by random factors. Walk down the street — bam, bam, bam…. And it’s closer to the facts of your own perception, that’s the point.”

Ulin is referring to a conversation between Allen Ginsburg and Burroughs recently published in Sensitive Skin magazine.

And finally…

A Deadman’s Masterpiece — Gabriel Winslow-Yost on Tarkovovsky’s movie Stalker, the Chernobyl disaster, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games, for the NYRB:

The Zone in the video games is a beautifully dangerous place, bigger and grimmer than Tarkovsky’s, but somehow still appropriate. There are plenty of long, tense walks through damp weather or empty, creaking tunnels. Packs of dogs wander the landscape, ruined farmhouses give shelter from the rain; here and there the ground ripples strangely. Stalkers gather around campfires, bandits take potshots at passersby, and a man lies wounded in a ditch, begging for help. Watching Stalker, one is occasionally brought up short by remembering that it was not filmed in Chernobyl, so perfect an analogue does that event seem for the film’s images of technology and nature, beauty and danger in strange alliance. The games, at their best, can seem like a sort of miracle: a dead man’s masterpiece, come home at last.

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Published March 14, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Obituary for artist Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius, in The Guardian:

Giraud… had an impact on the visual arts that went beyond comics. He was seen as a figurehead linking bandes dessinées with modernism and nouveau réalisme. As the co-creator of Métal Hurlant magazine, he took comics to an older, more literate audience. In cinema, his fans ranged from Federico Fellini to Hayao Miyazaki and his style influenced dozens of others, including Ridley Scott, George Lucas, James Cameron and Luc Besson.

Tom Spurgeon also has an in-depth obituary at The Comics Reporter:

Giraud would… describe the revolution driven by his work and others as one of creative choice rather than content, that the feeling of the artist inhabiting the work was more important than the kind of work being done. He drew a connection to the undergrounds and cartoonists like Robert Crumb, although he felt that the work of he and his peers existed in an entirely different cultural context.

See also: The comics industry remembers Moebius at Robot 6.

(I remember being very disappointed when I discovered that the drawing above was a standalone piece, and not a panel from a complete Batman story illustrated by Moebius. Heartbreak.)

Material Conversations — An interview with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, in The Evening Standard:

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but then the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable. The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring. There is an idea which is solitary, fragile and tentative and doesn’t have form. What we’ve found here is that it then becomes a conversation, although remains very fragile. When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you made a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes – the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.

And finally…

Boredom — Geoff Dyer, author Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, in conversation with Ethan Nosowsky at The Believer:

Boredom is often a side effect of something else. The apparent boredom inflicted by Stalker is actually the friction between the pace of the film and one’s expectations of how a film should proceed, so you just need to give yourself over to it. But then I think some so-called art films are irredeemably and inherently boring. As soon as I say that, though, I realize that the most boring films are the big, moronic action-blockbusters. They really bore the crap out of me. There’s an essential relationship between boring art films and moronic blockbusters because, as Ernst Fischer pointed out, any art form that glories in being understood only by a few—that worships at the altar of its own tedium, as it were—opens the floodgates for trash for the masses. At a certain point, as filmmakers got serious, they willingly took on a slowness that could easily become boring. But there was a long period before that when boredom was just inconceivable, not part of the equation.

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Published March 8, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

J. David Spurlock on the great Wally Wood at Imprint:

In nearly all of his work – no matter how overworked he was – even when he did risque material, there was always a charm, and he imbued the work with a purity of love for the medium.

And he was a master of every genre. That is one of the things that make him unique. Whether horror for EC, humor for Mad or Plop, war comics for DC or Gold Key, science fiction magazine illustrations, his Wizard King trilogy of fantasy graphic novels, superheroes for Marvel, cheesecake, romance, or westerns, whatever genre one picks, Wood’s contribution is among the finest ever.

Meditations — Dana Stevens on reading Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, while watching the movie:

[If] Zona goes off in a few too many directions, most of them are fascinating enough that we’re happy to zigzag along in the author’s wake. In addition to being a real-time explication of a single movie, Zona is a meditation on movies and time: the way movies change us, and change for us, as we return to them through our lives. Dyer reminisces about seeing Stalker in different decades, in different cities, with different girlfriends, as a young and then a middle-aged man… As he makes his way through Stalker scene by scene, Dyer’s account of what’s happening on screen is constantly being interrupted and informed by associations with the past as well as the present.

See also: Zona reviewed in the New York Times.

Also in the New York Times, author China Miéville on “Apocalyptic London“:

It used to be startling to see a fox in London — impossible not to feel that the city had slipped into a fable. Now you spot them on any late-night jog. In 2011, one of these agents of animal chaos infiltrated the Shard — at 32 London Bridge, the city’s unfinished tallest building — and climbed a thousand feet above the streets to live on builders’ scraps.

At dusk and dawn, green bolts shoot low, as flocks of feral parakeets set about bird business. Walking at dawn in the mud of Wormwood Scrubs, a rough, wild common next to the prison of the same name, we approach a screaming copse. Incredible flocks of these nonnatives preen and screechingly bicker, overlooking the glow of waking London.

And finally… A lovely piece the in The Daily Telegraph on Word on the Water, a Dutch barge selling second-hand books in London:

“We live in times where young people have Debussy moustaches, and listen to Sixties and Seventies music. They are interested in the past. I don’t remember there being a youth cult before where the past was so fascinating. There’s a hunger for authenticity … Younger people are becoming interested in things that machines can’t do: talent.”

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