Author: David Ross

The Best Documentaries of the Decade

By David Ross. Documentary film seems to shift between nature puffery with a rueful environmental subtext, vaguely condescending anthropological examinations of red state weirdos, and aggressive leftwing political polemics. As usual, conservatives have ceded the field without much of a fight. I am not in favor of conservatives answering leftwing polemics with rightwing polemics. I am in favor of conservatives answering clichés with non-clichés, answering tendentious narratives with non-tendentious narratives. With this mind – and with the caveat that my documentary viewing has been far from encyclopedic over the last ten years – let me offer my list of the decade’s best documentaries. Please note that ‘best’ in this case is a cinematic assessment; it has nothing to do with political point of view.

• Jazz (2000, Ken Burns).

• Mark Twain (2000, Ken Burns).

• Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002) is the surprisingly interesting story of the birth of skateboarding. You will come to view the annoying punks who nearly run you down on the sidewalk with a new respect.

• Stone Reader (2002) chronicles the search for the forgotten novelist Robert Stone.

• The Art of Piano: Great Pianists of the 20th Century (2002) is like a Pharaonic tomb in its wealth of archival footage: Horowitz upon his return to Carnegie Hall in 1965, Rubinstein in Moscow, etc.

• The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002, Robert Evans) is a lubricious exercise in autobiographical self-indulgence from film producer Robert Evans, a live wire even by Hollywood standards.

• Architectures (2003), a four-disc series, presents case studies in modern architecture, each about twenty-five minutes long. Much of the architecture is rebarbative, and the film itself may be a bit dry and technical for some tastes, but few films about art and culture are this detailed and intellectually serious.

• Deep Blue (2005) is underwater cinema at its most lush and exotic. The inevitable environmental message sneaks in at the end, but one can’t really call it gratuitous.

• Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog). Nutcase lives with the bears and gets eaten… – go figure. Even so, the film provides a compelling critique of a certain kind of romantic idealization of nature, which poses dangers for us all.

• Ballets Russes (2005) is a moving history of one of the twentieth century’s great ballet companies, featuring interviews with many of the dancers who made the company legendary. The film becomes an examination of – and finally a paean to – artistic dedication of the highest order.

• Into Great Silence (2005) is at once silent, static, and epic, a grand glimpse of life in a Carthusian monastery in the mountains of France. It is one of the more difficult and beautiful films ever made, and perhaps film’s most sincere and respectful attempt to portray the life of religious devotion.

• Encounters at the End of the World (2007, Werner Herzog) brings the Werneresque hermeneutical apparatus to bear on the McMurdo research station at the South Pole, with reflections on the soullessness of technology and the fate of humanity. This sounds deep – and in fact it is deep.

• Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 (2007, Ben Niles) chronicles the construction of a Steinway grand piano, from lumber yard to Carnegie Hall. It is fascinating study of engineering expertise, but even more an homage to old-fashioned ideals of hand-craftsmanship. I plan to show it to my writing students, in the hope that its implicit ethic of perfectionism will teach them a lesson.

• Ballerina (2009, Bertrand Normand) chronicles the trials and triumphs of a gaggle of Kirov ballerinas at different phases in their careers. Among the featured dancers is Svetlana Zakharova, perhaps the greatest ballerina of her generation, and not incidentally one of the most beautiful women in the world. Here she is: ethereal in Swan Lake; sultry in La Bayadère; smoldering in Carmen.

Here’s an instructive documentary double-bill: The Kid Stays in the Picture and Derrida (about the French literary theorist and progenitor of deconstruction). Evans is charming, scabrous, lewd, and hilarious; Derrida is evasive and more spiritually sterile than imaginably possible. Sure, you’d rather have a beer with Evans, but with whom would you rather discuss Proust or Heidegger? I’m tempted to say Evans again. Derrida may be a genius in the strict sense, but he is a guarded genius. Personality, one realizes, is not incidental to genius; it may even be the essence of true genius.

If I had to give a decadal Academy Award, I would be deeply torn between Encounters at the End of the World, Note by Note, and Into Great Silence. The first is a film of intellect; the second a film of heart; the third a film of spirit. The latter must take the laurels, if only because its beauty is so unusual, its method so simple and yet so ambitious. Nearly three hours long, the film does not merely depict the lives of the monks, but attempts to induce in the viewer a sense of the monastic rhythm, the slowness and ceaselessness of the monks’ simple acts of toil and devotion. There seems to me a deep and central question in this, having nothing to do with matters of faith and observance. Breadth and depth exist always in opposition. Our culture has become a veritable cult of breadth, a crab-dance of scuttling lateral movement. The web is world-wide, but what remains world-deep?

Posted on August 31st, 2010 at 9:33am.

The Cinema of Forgery

By David Ross. Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? (2006) is a lively little documentary about Teri Horton, a feisty, gravel-voiced grandma who embodies every red state stereotype. She purchased a large drip painting for $5 in a thrift shop in San Bernardino. Somebody naturally mentioned Jackson Pollock, of whom she had never heard, and she took it into her head that she’d purchased a lost masterpiece worth tens of millions. There ensued an epic battle as Horton pestered the skeptical and obnoxiously condescending mandarins of the art world, demanding the canonization of her painting. The whole business might have been filed under the heading “crank makes a pest of herself,” except that Horton had an ace up her sleeve: the forensic art expert Peter Paul Biro claimed to have found a fingerprint on Horton’s painting that matched a fingerprint he had lifted from Pollock’s studio. At this point the controversy becomes fascinating, as it pitches curatorial instinct against forensic evidence and raises basic questions about art authentication and even more basic questions about epistemology. The film, of course, is interested in none of this, at least not in a serious way; it unhesitatingly sides with the feisty granny against the insufferable Ivy League boors, liking the entertainment value of its own populist narrative.

Having watched the film and weighed its evidence, I was torn and confused. A fingerprint is a fingerprint. On the other hand, I’ve spent time among collectors, curators, and scholars, and I know that the aesthetic eye is not a myth; what seem like snap or arbitrary judgments are a matter of the brain instantly acting on tens of thousands of hours of looking and thinking and comparing. There really are experts in this sense. Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum, is an example. He appears in the film as the chief witness for the prosecution, calling Horton’s painting laughable and ridiculing Horton’s right even to hold an opinion on the matter, in what must be one of the most uninhibited displays of pomposity ever captured on film. But Hoving’s personality does not, as the film seems to insinuate, invalidate his judgment. Nobody should doubt that a director of the Met knows incalculably more than a former truck driver, and that this knowledge is substantive and meaningful.

Oja Kodar, in Orson Welles' "F for Fake."

Like Hoving, I had the sense that the painting was off. I am not an expert on Pollock, but I know what one is supposed to feel in the presence of a great painter’s work – a certain flood of beauty and meaning, a sense of intricacy too great to be immediately digested. I was feeling none of it. The painting seemed to lack drama, presence, rhythm. It occurred to me that if the painting struck my dull eye as dubious, it must be very dubious indeed. Could the painting have been authentic, but for some reason botched? Could Pollock’s seminal energies have been dammed by a migraine or a hangover or a tiff with the wife? Perhaps he knew the painting stunk and dispatched it to the dump or gave it to the milkman. This would explain why the painting is unsigned, and begins to explain how it wound up in a thrift store in San Bernardino. In sum, I didn’t know what to think.

The New Yorker has thankfully rescued me from my uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. In a superb piece of investigative reporting (see here), David Grann brought a different kind of skepticism to the controversy, assailing the fingerprint evidence and finding plenty in Biro’s past to raise the possibility that he is an outright charlatan. The article does not merely supplement the film, but supersedes it entirely. Skip the film – read the article.

Those who enjoy the whodunit aspect of art authentication should have a look at Hoving’s False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes (1997). Hoving’s brashness plays better on the page than it does on film, lending a humorous derision to his many anecdotes of stupidity, arrogance, and low cunning. The book is a very useful prophylactic; anybody who reads it will be cured of the fantasy of the lost masterpiece. You can take it for granted that the thing’s a fake.

O'Toole & Hepburn in "How to Steal a Million."

While on the subject of art authentication, let me note the documentary F for Fake (1973), Orson Welles’ last and least celebrated directorial effort, and by far the strangest and most problematic of his films.  It is a postmodern phantasmagoria on the theme of fakery, centered – precariously – on the activities of the Elmyr de Hory (see here), one of the premier art forgers of twentieth century, and his equally shady biographer Clifford Irving, author of a fraudulent autobiography of Howard Hughes (see here). Elmyr is a whirl of joie de vivre as he whips up Matisses and airs his laissez-faire philosophy (“I don’t feel bad for Modigliani – I feel good for me”), but the interesting question is why Welles felt drawn to his subject matter. Does the great director conceive the great forger as a fellow illusionist or as an object lesson in the temptation of shortcuts, partial mastery, pastiche? Or is the motive ironic – a commentary on the world’s tendency to muff the distinction between true art and fake art, with the implication that Welles himself has been the victim of this incompetence? Students of Welles will find much to consider in this barmy, brilliant experiment in documentary, as well as much to enjoy: particularly a lascivious segment that provides more than an eyeful of Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover for the last twenty-four years of his life and a woman clearly born to be a Bond girl.

Finally, let us not forget William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million (1966), starring Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn, a heist/forgery flick that has the distinction of being the least gritty crime film ever made. If any film is made of spun-sugar and Givenchy finery, this is it. It includes several charming witticisms on the subject of forgery:

Charles Bonnet: Don’t you know that in his lifetime Van Gogh only sold one painting? While I, in loving memory of his tragic genius, have already sold two.

And:

Charles Bonnet: I doubt very much if Van Gogh himself would have gone through so much trouble.
Nicole Bonnet: He didn’t have to. He was Van Gogh!

And:

Charles Bonnet: What have I done? I’ve given the world a precious opportunity of studying and viewing the Cellini Venus.
Nicole Bonnet: Which is not by Cellini!
Charles Bonnet: Ahh, labels, labels. It’s working with the Americans that’s given you this obsession with labels and brand names.

It’s interesting that all of these films and books slip into a kind of merriment. Forgery, it seems, is very close to comedy and the carnivalesque. It makes asses of those in authority, jumbles categories, upends assumptions. The forger is very much like the court jester or the Shakesperean fool, and even those like Hoving, who have millions of dollars at stake, cannot help but smile.

Posted on August 17th, 2010 at 10:36am.

Modern Art

Jeff Koons' "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey," at The Whitney Museum.

By David Ross. The more I am immersed in the study of art, the more I am appalled by what now passes as art … viscerally, even angrily appalled … and amazed that our culture – the culture of Palladio, Vermeer, what have you – sold its birthright for a mess of pottage that was not even tolerably good pottage. I recall an instructive day of cultural tourism in New York. My wife and I spent the morning at the Whitney, where we joined a sparse gaggle of pierced and alienated art-student types. We could not help noticing the mood of sour dutifulness that seemed to prevail. Nobody was enjoying and nobody was there to enjoy; the purpose was to symbolize one’s commitment to the modern, and to demonstrate one’s figurative manning of the barricades in the war against the bourgeois. After a while, I said to my wife, “Let’s get the hell out of this morgue.” We tried a palette cleanser of French pastry at Payard (see our wedding cake here), but the rancid taste was still in our mouths, and we felt the need for the stronger mouthwash of the Met. We wound up looking at Georgian furniture. Amid the gracefully tapering forms and magnificent burnishes, the public mood was all delight. Vacationing soccer moms stood before an impossibly lovely escritoire or settee and exclaimed, “How pretty! Kids, look at this one! Ooh, wow!”

From Marcus Harvey's "White Riot."

The problem, just to be clear, is not modern art, but art that has abandoned the refinement of the hand and eye that marks the aesthetic. The problem is art’s increasing identification with aims that are not aesthetic at all, but political, sociological, commercial, sensational, and self-promotional, with impulses that are subversive but not beautiful in their subversion (as say Baudelaire and Toulouse-Lautrec were beautiful in their subversion). Turner has much in common with moderns like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko; he has nothing in common with a postmodern like Damien Hirst.

I constantly search for a definitive diagnosis of what’s gone wrong. Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) is lucid and amusing, but even better, because more pissed off, is Theodore Dalrymple’s essay “Trash, Violence, and Versace: But is it Art?” (see here), a review of a 1998 exhibition called “Sensation.”  The Royal Academy of Art, historically a bastion of the staid, was the offender in this case, which suggests how strangely and thoroughly the cultural life of the West has been perverted. Dalrymple is particularly roused by the vapid amorality of Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the mass-child-murderer Myra Hindley. The portrait is rendered in children’s handprints, and the parents of the murdered children naturally protested (not that anyone cared). Dalrymple comments: Continue reading Modern Art

Sabrina & Capitalism

By David Ross. My wife and I rewatched Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954) with our five-year-old daughter. I must be growing old and stodgy, because Audrey Hepburn’s pixie beauty excited me less than the film’s burble of conservative – or at least capitalist – sentiment.

Humphrey Bogart plays Linus Larrabee, an industrialist whose various empire-building activities the film seems more or less to endorse. His latest brainchild is an indestructible sugar-based plastic. In the interest of vertical integration, he’s arranged for his playboy brother David (William Holden) to marry a sugar heiress, setting the stage for the following exchange:

David: You’ve got all the money in the world.

Linus: What’s money got to do with it? If money were all there was to it, it’d hardly be worthwhile going to the office. Money is a by-product.

David: What’s the main objective, power?

Linus: Ah, that’s become a dirty word.

David: Well, then, what’s the urge? You’re going into plastics now. What will that prove?

Linus: Prove? Nothing much. A new product has been found, something of use to the world, and so a new industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines are brought in, a harbor is dug, and you’re in business. It’s purely coincidental of course that people who never saw a dime before suddenly have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their teeth fixed and their faces washed. What’s wrong with a kind of an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds, and movies on a Saturday night?

Throwback.

It’s true enough that Linus bolts from the boardroom to catch the steamer that’s conveying Sabrina (i.e. Audrey) to Paris, but there’s no suggestion that he repudiates his former life. He loves Sabrina; Paris is incidental. He will presumably return and resume his role as an Atlas – or at least chess master – of industrialism, without apologies.

The great figure of the film, however, is Linus’ father Oliver Larrabee (Walter Hampden). He’s a reactionary of the nineteenth century, an unrepentant, cigar-sneaking, Martini-swilling robber baron, in comparison to whom the sniveling, canoodling modern (David) and the Ivy League bean-counter (Linus) are wan indeed; in the end, the film’s particular affection is for the salty throwback.

When David announces that he’s in love with Sabrina, the chauffeur’s daughter, Linus temporizes, “This is the 20th century.” Mr. Larrabee responds with one of the great reactionary bons mots:

“The 20th century? Why, I could pick a century out of hat blindfolded and come up with a better one.”

Who knows whether this line conveys genuine ire, or whether it’s meant merely in fun. What impresses me is its mere awareness that history is a dodgy business, with the implication that those who believe ‘we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for’ must at least argue their point.

Posted on August 6th, 2010 at 7:23am.

Arguing the World and ‘Neo-Conservatism’

Irving Kristol in 1976.

By David Ross. The word “neo-conservatism” suffered a wild and unfortunate distortion during the last nine years, coming to mean something like “the neo-fascist philosophy of George W. Bush and his Satanic cohort,” or even more simply, “the wicked tendency to invade other countries.”

Given this slippage of meaning, I cannot recommend highly enough Joseph Dorman’s documentary Arguing the World (1998), which provides a thoughtful and accurate account of neo-conservatism as it traces the careers of literary critic Irving Howe, political thinker Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Columbia/Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, and Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer. The story will be familiar to conservatives who know their own lineage: bookish, Jewish New Yorkers arrive at City College; fall under the spell of Trotsky; revolt against the murderous tyranny of Stalin; begin to qualify their leftism; cast their lot with the high modernism of Partisan Review; found Commentary; begin to take seriously the Soviet threat; increasingly recognize the perverse incentives and disincentives created by LBJ’s Great Society; recoil from the brainless nonsense of the counter-culture; begin creating the intellectual foundations of modern conservatism in a series of groundbreaking books and articles; preside over conservatism’s return to power on the back of their own ideas.

While remaining strictly neutral and objective, Arguing the World explains these weighty developments in American political and intellectual history and rescues an important tradition from cartoonish caricature.

Posted on July 27th, 2010 at 10:11am.

Pride and Prejudice: 1995 vs. 2005

From the 1995 BBC version of "Pride and Prejudice."

By David Ross. I have previously commented on film’s mismanagement of the lives of authors (see here). Film does somewhat better with the works of authors, and indeed regularly eclipses its source texts. Who recalls that The African Queen was a 1935 novel by C.S. Forrester? Or that Rear Window began as a 1942 short story by one Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), a second-tier crime novelist in the Hammett/Chandler mode? Or that Vertigo was a 1954 novel by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud, writing under the pen name “Boileau-Narcejac”? Or that Psycho was a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch?

Jennifer Ehle as the perfect Elizabeth Bennett.

Upstart movies supplant even relatively good novels. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 come to mind. Between them, James Ivory and David Lean gave E.M. Forster a run for his money no less than four times. Poor James M. Cain, a gritty crime novelist of no mean talent, gave film a bountiful gift of storylines and wound up rendering his own works nearly irrelevant. Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) were all adaptations of his largely forgotten novels. Even Ernest Hemingway has been outdone. Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944) – the first film to pair Bogart and Bacall – turned Hemingway’s mediocre novel of 1937 into a kind of Caribbean Casablanca. As far as I know, nobody has read Hemingway’s novel since. Hemingway himself hated the novel, so we can hardly blame ourselves for ignoring it.

Truly great literature is typically too dense, intricate, linguistic, and interior to be anything but a celluloid fiasco. Melville, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce – they’ve all been made ridiculous by directors who believed they were up to the challenge of world-historical storytelling. Orson Welles tried to match wits with Kafka’s Trial (1962), but even he should have known better. Martin Scorsese brought the eye of a Dutch master to the period detail of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1993), but in the end his film is undone per Hollywood formula: too much eye candy (Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder), not enough theatrical competence. John Woo, best known for realizing that tough guys look twice as cool with a gun in each hand, recently tried to bring the greatest of all Chinese novels, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, to the big screen. The resulting epic, Red Cliff, crams several thousand pages into three hours of film, a good two hours of which are devoted to shots of arrows whizzing in thick bunches. Those training to be Olympic archers will love it; students of Chinese literature not so much.

Lyme Park, Cheshire.

The only major author to emerge smelling something like roses is Jane Austen. While no film is likely to rival her novels, which may be the greatest – and are certainly the most charming – ever written, the BBC’s 1995 miniseries is a marvelous effort, perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a canonical literary work in the history of film. Jennifer Ehle (a North Carolinian no less) is the perfect Elizabeth Bennett. She shifts with liquid ease between sense and sensibility without upsetting the comfortable equilibrium of Elizabeth’s personality. This is indeed the trick: Elizabeth must be dual without being divided; her different sides must be integrated and seamless; she must be both things at once. In terms of craft, Ehle, who was then twenty-six, throws looks like some character actress of the 1930s cannily drawing on the stage experience of six decades. Her every shift of expression has logic and purpose; this is not method acting, but something like sculptural creation, each gesture like the tap of the chisel. It’s a testament to Ehle’s performance that her looks grow upon us just as they are supposed to grow upon Mr. Darcy. We begin by overlooking her unassuming loveliness; by the end, her dark ringlets and mischievous smile have thoroughly captured our attention. If there is a quibble to be made, it’s only that Ehle is likely to invade our mind’s eye next time we read Pride and Prejudice. Continue reading Pride and Prejudice: 1995 vs. 2005