In a Lonely Place: Gregory Crewdson + CCP

 

Yesterday I took a long, slow walk along Smith Street and looked its great array of eclectic shops. I had a coffee and then walked to CCP – Centre for Contemporary Photography to see In a Lonely Place, the exhibition by Gregory Crewdson (USA). There were three exhibition spaces, showing Beneath the Roses – highly constructed, cinematic images, Sanctuary – images of decaying Cinecitta film studios in Rome and Fireflies – a reflection on photography itself through the tracery of fireflies on a summer evening and by nature, small, dark photographs with traces of light.

I must say that on viewing Beneath the Roses and having not yet read anything about this work I was asking myself what was awry with the imagery. The people inhabiting the somewhat expansive, lonely spaces seemed stilted, wooden, and although the scenes suggested film sets (apparently Crewdson shoots his images with the aid of a full film-crew), I initially felt that whilst seductive, that the divisiveness was more over-powering than the final images. However, after spending some time viewing these large-scale photographs I began to enjoy the association, or rather, the way that Crewdson photographs evoked certain films such as some of those made by David Lynch. All the time the powerful photographs of Cindy Sherman entered my mind for her particular and uncanny way of representing self-portrait, still frame images, suggestive of film scenes.

I found it enjoyable attempting to create a narrative from the information in the photographs, but always found more questions than answers, such as, why is the woman standing in the bathroom with that expression on her face?  Does the blood flowing from her genital area mean that she is menstruating or has she just been raped? Who is the pregnant woman waiting for as she crosses the road on a misty morn?  Is the partially naked woman, asleep or dead on the mattress and what is her relationship with the dark-skinned man, sitting with his back to her by the river? What holds the young boy’s gaze as he looks upwards?

The photographs I took depicted only small sections of Crewdson’s large ones, which includes objects of the everyday as well as these characters, which seemed to me to be too contrived, un-real, creating an anxiety about our place on the stage of life (a cliché perhaps). The images are interesting, sometimes utterly beautiful and disconcerting and certainly worth looking at. If you want to see this exhibition you had better get your skates on because it closes today (Sunday) at 5pm. CCP is located at 404 George Street, Fitzroy, and has free entry.

SHAME (Rated R): short film review

If you're a cinephile you would be aware of the 'say fuck me' line in David Lynch's 1990 film Wild at Heart and you would know that in this highly charged sexual encounter between Bobby Peru (Willem Defoe) and Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) Bobby attempts to seduce Lula, whilst simultaneously wanting her to beg for sex. It's a moment in which he needs to see that her vulnerability and desire is greater than his.

There's a similar scene in Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) in which Brandon (Michael Fassbinder) attempts to seduce Carly, a young woman in a bar. When she looks across at her boyfriend, Brandon says: What? Are you with someone? Does he go down on you? I do..That’s what I like to do..' He places his hand under her skirt and says: 'I like the way it feels. I like the way it’s just me and it... I wanna taste you. I'd like to slip my tongue inside you.' When her boyfriend approaches Brandon he tells the boyfriend: 'I was just telling your pretty girlfriend here, that I’d like to fuck her in that tight pussy of hers... I mean bone her real hard til she’s clawing up my back... After I fuck her hard up the ass, I put my balls in her mouth while I come on her face'. He then shoves his fingers, covered with the odor of Carly's vagina into the boyfriends face. Suffice to say that the boyfriend attacks him after wards outside the bar.

His blase description of his brief conversation with Carly and his obvious lack of concern for her feelings or that of her boyfriend, returns us to earlier scene in which Brandon's confiscated office computer, now returned, was according to his coworker David - 'filthy...I mean, it is, it is, dirty. I’m talking like hoes, sluts, anal, double anal, penetration, inter racial facial, man. Cream pie. I don’t even know what that is'. He later tells Brandon that 'It takes a really really sick fuck to spend all day on that shit'. Michael may or may not be considered a 'sick fuck' for many people spend much of their leisure time trawling pornography sites and interacting sexually with others on line. I'm not sure if part of the message of the film was that face to face personal relationship may be destroyed by this kind of detached activity in which pleasuring yourself with or without the presence of another can be a lonely and soul destroying pursuit, however Michael does has an obsessive sexual addiction fed in part by magazines, computers and social network sites. He has an inability to become close to anyone. His sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) appears to have the same affliction and they share some deep and dark past that is hinted at, but never really revealed. Indeed the scene in which Sissy sings 'New York, New York' is hauntingly beautiful and the connection between her and her brother's pain is revealed in one tear that rolls down Brandon's cheek as she sings. I was reminded of Rebekah del Rio's powerful Capella version of 'Llorando' - Roy Orbison's "Crying" in Spanish at the Cafe Silencio in Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) and Isabella Rossellini's rendition of 'Blue Velvet' in the film of the same name (David Lynch,1986). In all these scenes the songs are related to sexual desire. This is a beautiful if not painful film with superb acting from all cast members. I saw it this morning at the Kino Cinema in Melbourne. A must see, not because of the vivid sex scenes, but because it acutely displays the anxieties experienced by those who are addicted to sex and feel the shame.

Red and Blue...

It was one of those rare days yesterday where I was home in the early afternoon and watched the documentary Spielberg on Spielberg in which Steven Spielberg spoke about the numerous films he's written and directed. It was whilst watching the clips that accompanied his dialogue that I began to think about particular film segments that had a great impact on me over the years. More recently it was the first and last five minutes of Lars von Trier's The Anti-Christ in which von Trier uses slow-motion and black and white footage to create the most poetic, beautiful and poignant account of pain and anguish. Slow motion was a technique also employed by Spielberg in the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan (1998) and it was deployed in such as way as to depict the disorientation, anguish and strange sense of time that occurs when the mind is paralysed by fear. Who can forget that amazing scene in Schindler's List (1993) a predominantly black and white film, when Schinder, on viewing the Krakow ghetto from a nearby hill notices a little girl in a red coat walking amidst the Nazi troops and terrified people; or the red glow that emanates from ET's (ET: The Extraterrestial, 1982) chest, which reveals that he is alive! The red glowing tip of ET's finger as he tells Elliott at the end of the film 'I'll be right here' and the scene between the two when they point a finger to their heart and mouth and say 'ouch'. Perhaps I always like films that create certain emotions. I am consistency drawn to Spielberg's direction of J. G. Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun (1987, but that maybe because, like Ballard, I was separated from my parents when I was young. I cry often in this film, but particularly at the end when Jamie is re-united with his parents and we realise that he is no longer a child. Many of Spielberg's films appear to deal with a loss of innocence, difference, trauma and spirituality. Spielberg said (in the documentary) that ET was his most spiritual film, but I find a similar kind of spiritualism in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The one single scene that can induce a sense of great happiness in me is the one in Close Encounters in which thousands of Indian people are singing the five notes - B flat, C, A flat, (octave lower) A flat, E flat - the sounds used in the film for humans to make contact with the alien ship. I'm not talking here about amazing films, there are many of them, I'm attempting to flag moments that have made me forever different. David Lynch's films do that. I've returned over two dozen times to his film Blue Velvet (1986) and am fascinated by the confrontation scene between Frank (Dennis Hopper) and Kyle (Frank is breathing amyl nitrate, whilst a woman dances on the car). Frank and Kyle who appear early on as totally different individuals become like each other in this scene, not only by their desire for Dorothy, but because of their similar psychology. The Club Silencio scene in Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) will always haunt me for the exquisite sounds that emanate from the mouth of the female singer (although even this is an illusion) as will the ''say fuck me' scene in Wild At Heart (Lynch, 1990). I could go on forever, recalling great moments in film history, but I'm going to stop this stream-of-conscious piece of writing, because amidst all this emphasis on emotion and the colors red and blue, I suddenly recalled the destruction of the Twin Towers, which changed us all and whilst I was watching the television reports that day the emphasis appeared to be on whether the stock market would open. Amidst all the trauma and destruction the emphasis was still on money!

Doubly Monstrous: Female and Disabled

This article was published last year in 'Essays in Philosophy', Humboldt State University, California.

In the article I consider instances in visual culture in which artists and filmmakers aestheticize women with damaged, missing or anomalous limbs. I focus upon Joel Peter Witkin’s photomontage Las Meninas (1987), Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Alison Lapper Pregnant a statue by Marc Quinn, Mathew Barney’s film Cremaster (2002), David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Luis Buñuel’s Tristana (1970) and David Lynch’s short film The Amputee (1973). Although I do cite other films as well. I argue that although the artists and filmmakers reveal, rather than disguise the damaged, anomalous or missing limb(s) of the women, thus valorising their particular embodiment, these women are paradoxically still portrayed as deviant and monstrous.

http://www.humboldt.edu/~essays/clarkjj.html

I've posted this entry today because last night I attended a lecture delivered by Barbara Creed, in which she contextualised sexual displays and rituals by various bird species (footage gleaned from David Attenborough) alongside similar displays by women in Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s. Barbara argued that not only were women portrayed as beautiful, fecund and essential for propagating the human species (showing the influence of Darwinian thought on cinema), but were purposefully dressed or displayed (often in flower shapes, holding or wearing fruit, or as part of a interwoven pattern) so as to be perceived as part of the complexity of nature. I was interested in how in a number of instances women were augmented in such a way that they became icons of excess that bordered on the grotesque.

Barbara Creed's new book is entitled: Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (MUP Academic Monographs, 2009).