Last night the MoMA showed "Outstanding Films from International Festivals." One of the most original was Volker Shreiner's "Counter," in which we count down to 1 from, I think it was something like 275. For each number, we see a split-second from a familiar movie in which that number appears. It might be on a hotel-room door or a calendar behind the hero or the back of a bus, and so on. Fudging a little, the director starts with an actual countdown timer reading out the 275 (or whatever) number, and when he wasn't able to find a clip for a number he will go back to the countdown timer. But not that often.

Doing this says things about film. The countdown is a plot but not a story, engaging in a way that we don't usually think of film as engaging us. Hitchcock said that every movie is a chase, because the film goes into the projector and out of the projector in one long sequence. On the same reasoning, every movie is a countdown, and part of our sense of anticipation is for the closure at the end.

Another really good film shown last night was Toby MacDonald's "Heavy Metal Drummer," about a Moroccan boy who plays in a band with two friends and loves heavy metal. Trouble is, neither his two friends nor anyone in the family or neighborhood has anything but disdain for this heavy metal kind of drumming. It's a short film, and it concludes at a gig where the band is playing people-pleaser stuff and suddenly the boy breaks out into this tremendous loud riff that just stuns everyone. Very charming.

Also some science-fictiony stuff of no value whatever. Science fiction is to film as acid is to milk. Let in one drop, and you need to throw the whole thing out.

Browsing the Chelsea Galleries: Nicole Eisenman, Mamma Andersson, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Richard Serra

Yesterday I visited a number of galleries in Chelsea and had a look at the latest work of Nicole Eisenman, Mamma Andersson, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Richard Serra. Also a group show curated by Bob Nickas and some old de Kooning sketches.

Nicole Eisenman's work is at the Leo Koenig gallery. The heart of the show is a pair of enormous mural-style canvases displayed side by side. Both are remarkably violent, with hunks of paint in some cases seemingly smashed onto the canvas and innumerable images of violence and futility. The right canvas repeats images of birthing -- spread-legged women birthing odd babies into a rushing river, from which they are fished and hooked by menacing figures on the shore. One of the birthers has just been shot in the forehead by one of the many rifle-armed women who inhabit various parts of the canvas. Even the mountains in the background are involved, one of them taking the shape of these spread-legged women and birthing the river itself. The only moment of what might be calm or dignity is a girl who stands in a swimsuit on the shore of the ocean fed by the awful river, a parent figure standing reassuringly behind her, as one might stand to encourage a kid on his first summer foray into the water.

But in the left canvas, that same sea is revealed in its own violence and futility. Most of the canvas is a ramshackle house on a boat in this violent sea. In the house, surrounded by chaotic heaps of stuff, an artist quietly draws a landscape on a sketchpad, using a quill pen. The left canvas is crowded with signifiers: a traffic sign with an arrow on it, two Café Bustelo cans holding brushes, a Swiss flag imprinted with the phrase "Nuke the Swiss," etc. I suppose this complements the kind of detail on the right canvas, where the images are more natural (birth, sex, killing) or less mediate (some sort of auction, flying Big Mac-style hamburgers).

I can't tell whether the image of the artist in the left canvas is supposed to be a positive statement. He or she (gender is concealed) is engrossed in the drawing, unheedful of the violence beyond the sketchpad. The sketch itself is calm and classical, austere in black and white. Is this the still, calm world that art can find when it turns away from the futile cycle of signifiers and signifieds? Is art like the yogic practice that the Bhagavad Gita says can free people from the futile cycles of action and inaction? Or are we to see the artist in the canvas as an example of the falsifying that goes under the name of art?

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is 180 degrees different. A fact sheet distributed at the Gray Kapernekas Gallery show quotes him: "Brutality and argument tend to be contemporary signs for the serious." So in reaction his work is about beauty -- harmonious plays of color on square canvases, more pretty than beautiful, and a good deal more likely to end up above someone's sofa.

Richard Serra's works in "Rolled and Forged" at the Gagosian gallery escape from all this palaver about art by being massively themselves, not signifiers and resistant to signification. The largest of them, "Amongst Elevations," comprises 16 enormous plates of weatherproof steel, in 4 different sizes, arranged in 6 very long lines so that one can walk between them or around them. The walking is the experience of the art. Each is rusted and scratched in different ways, so that one experiences them differently as one walks. It is an awesome experience, maybe a little humbling, and definitely worth the visit.

Over in the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mark di Suvero has another exercise in enormous steel work, a 27 foot tall structure made of I-beams enclosing a kind of stylized globe. Like that thing that Picasso gave Chicago, but more aggressive. Walking around and under it is nothing like the experience of walking among Serra's work.

Mamma Andersson has a number of excellent paintings at the David Zwirmer Gallery, under the title Rooms Under the Influence. One of the most delightful aspects of medieval and primitive art is its way of presenting a story in a smooth flow of episodes featuring the same actor. Andersson sometimes approaches this kind of style. In "Leftovers" one woman is in the shower of a small flat while another bends over the sink and yet another stands outside the door and a fourth remains in the rumpled bed. The women are a little different from each other, and yet they seem to mark off the phases of getting-up-and-off in a narrative kind of way. In a similar gambit, "Gone for Good" represents a preternaturally cozy den, with one big easy chair and another smaller one, both angled toward the TV, which has a flower vase on top. Not many books in the bookcase, and just a couple of pictures on the wall. Really down home, except a fire is breaking into the room from the far corner and black smoke fills rushes along the entire ceiling. So you get to see two parts of time: the good, and the gone.

We get a similar effect in "About a Girl," with eight twenty-something women gathered around a coffee table. Most wear similar schoolgirl-like outfits, as if they were all graduates of the same convent school, and most have the exact same unnatural shade of eyes (think baby blue, but more vivid). On one wall, above four of them, are ranged unframed pictures of geishas, and above those an unframed print or magazine page of Disney's Snow White. The girls smoke and drink coffee and look a little worn -- again that way of collocating things to suggest narrative time. They're not Snow White any more, and when were they geishas?

de Kooning's sketches, at Matthew Marks, show how much you can do with line -- in this case, with a lot of line. The sketches are remarkably nervous, movemented, figures emerging from the nervous lines rather than simply being shaped by them.

Utterly puerile is the Nickas show, "An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery." All the pieces in it, by various artists, are red. That's it. That's why they are in the show. They are red. And why did Nickas do this? Because he did an all-red show 20 years ago, he says, inspired by a Donald Barthelme story about an all-one-color art show. How long will this go on? When Nickas dies, will everyone wear red to the funeral? Will they think they are still just as clever as Barthelme?

Hitchcock's "The Birds"

A friend asked me about the ending of "The Birds" today so I sent her the following thoughts:

Glad you got to see The Birds at last. That ending is really something. I think it works on a number of levels, on two of which I will now provide a brilliant commentary.

In the 1950s especially, Hitchcock cultivated an image in the mass media as a "master of suspense." He told a lot of interviewers that he would love to invent some kind of direct fear-stimulator that would make the audience scared as soon as they sit down, and with writers from film journals he liked to discuss the pretty slick methods he used to get eye-popping shots that would make people jump, scream, etc. So on that level you can say that the final scene is another case of his putting his filmic skills to work on making you really frightened.

It had been a convention of cheap horror movies to conclude with a scene that restores order and logic to the world that had been threatened by the scary monster. A scientist type would explain the whole chain of events in a way that reassured us by making sense of what had happened (or as much sense as you're going to get in a B-movie about a monster). This device made it possible for people to go home and get a good night's sleep. Hitchcock parodied it in Psycho: after what should be the final scene, where a reassuring psychiatrist explains Norman's psychosis, we get one last look at Norman himself, still mad as a hatter and scary as can be.

In The Birds, instead of parody Hitchcock simply jettisoned the conventional ending so that people really won't be able to go home and sleep. (A friend of mine saw it in college when it first came out, and the next day she told me she had been up all night; then dawn came and a bird started twittering and she was really creeped out.)

So basically the ending scared people successfully because it broke with convention. Everyone was expecting an expert in horn-rimmed glasses to provide closure, but there wasn't any closure, and the only bird expert was the silly woman in the restaurant who had claimed that birds were incapable of joining forces against us. So at the end the birds are again gathering their forces and your scary night is only beginning.

Also, even if the characters driving away in the car can escape the birds for good, they're driving away from the camera -- that is, from us -- so we're left in the middle of them.

So that's an explanation on the technical level, but much more interesting is how the movie's ending relates to the architecture of the typical Hitchcock film and to its typical ending. Maybe the best comparison is with North by Northwest. I hope you haven't seen it, because I'm now going to tell you about the ending, although there's never a moment in the movie when you doubt it will end this way: Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, adversaries in most of the movie, are now on a train on their honeymoon. He pulls her up into his bunk in their bedroom compartment, and Hitchcock cuts to a final shot of the train entering a tunnel. A number of critics call that tunnel shot arch, unsubtle, excessively cute. But they're so stuck on the phallic symbolism that they miss the larger meaning of the shot. Where are the two characters going? Into the dark. Will they come out the other end? The picture will never tell.

Northwest by Northwest is what Hitchcock called "a Hitchcock picture," which not all of his films were. A "Hitchcock picture" takes an ordinary person out of his ordinary life and saves his soul by inducing him to make dangerous moral choices. And I really mean the soul is saved. In Northwest by Northwest, Cary Grant starts the story as an advertising executive with two ex-wives who handles personal relationships with the same cheerful manipulativeness he uses in his profession. His character's name is Roger O. Thornhill, and he says the O stands for "Nothing." (And the monogram on his matchbook is ROT.) The Eva Marie Saint character has a similar background, recruited into meaningful but perilous work from an empty jet-set life very much like the previous life of the Tippi Hedren character in The Birds. The two Northwest by Northwest characters learn that life truly does have meaning if you swallow hard and accept the risk that comes with making moral choices. And that just happens to be pretty well what getting married is all about, so that final, um, entry into the tunnel is a beautiful metaphor for the whole leap of faith they are making.

So a few years later Hitchcock makes The Birds and his concluding shot is now much darker in outlook, yet beneath the darkness and the scariness it is essentially the same as in Northwest by Northwest. Where the earlier film shows two lovers steaming away from us in a train, the later one shows two lovers driving away in a car, also into darkness. Most important, both pairs of lovers have lost forever their smug way of living on the surface.

Hitchcock was a Catholic, and I think it's meaningful that the American writer who is most like him is the Catholic Flannery O'Connor. A great many of her stories are really "Hitchcock films" in miniature. I'm thinking of the woman in "Revelation" who sits in the doctor's waiting room and quietly contemplates how superior she is to the others. One of them suddenly throws a book at her and calls her a "wart hog from hell." In the final scene she looks up into the sky and sees a vast rainbow with people making their way to Heaven -- the "colored" singing and dancing first, then the "white trash," and then finally the "decent" people: "and all their virtues were being burned away."

Catholics don't only give you that one extra chance to get scrubbed up in Purgatory, they know that the "virtues" of the Protestant Ethic are really venial sins that are going to take a heap of scrubbing because there is no place for them in Heaven. You can't be good, you can't be truly human let alone an adopted child of God, if you don't actually choose the good and the perils that it entails.

The Tippi Hedren character is the one who gets the bigger book thrown at her, especially in that scene in the attic, but the Rod Stewart character was also Mr. Smug at the beginning, too. Like Roger O. Thornhill (and like Hitchcock himself) he makes his living in the media, as a reporter. Like the lady in "Revelation," he makes quick and easy judgments of people. Neither of them is ready for love, until the birds strip them of their smugness and leave them open to each other.

In other "Hitchcock films" this kind of salvation-of-fire is sometimes contrasted with easy but spurious avenues to salvation: in The Man Who Knew Too Much, it's the phony chapel. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, the hero at one point gives the cops the slip by marching in the Salvation Army parade -- not that the wonderful Salvation Army is itself spurious, but pretending to be in it is a pretty good metaphor for trying to sham your way through life instead of making a moral choice.

Well, that's one reason I like Hitchcock so much. He gives you a good scare for your money, and at the same time he points you on the path to where you'll never have to be afraid again.

Drummers Grove

On Sunday, June 11, I went to Prospect Park to watch the drummers in Drummers Grove. Each Sunday African drummers gather on a half-circle of stools and create music. Others join in by dancing. A woman who was selling fish sandwiches nearby spoke of the drumming as a spiritual experience, and indeed there is an altar in the middle of the half-circle. The woman said that on the previous day the drummers had been at Coney Island for a really big drumming experience and people made offerings on the altar. That's all I know about the religious aspect of the drumming.

Not all the African drummers were in fact African. A few were white, and from time to time white women would join in the dancing. The whole activity is very open. In addition to the seated drummers, bystanders would contribute to the music with rattles or western instruments. The western instruments (a flute, a sax) added improvised melodies that would glide for a while on top of the drums' rhythms.

At one point a guy who seemed to be in authority said something and the music wound down, but for the most part it continued uninterrupted for hours and there was little sense that this activity was controlled by anything but the music itself.

I had a digital camera with me, so I made three video clips of the event (I keep avoiding the word "performance," which would not be appropriate to the drummers' relationship to the others). The camera is basically built for stills, and I had never used the video feature before, so the clips are not at all professional.

Here is the first of them:



And here is the second:



And finally, here is the third:



If you had asked me if I would sit for a long time and listen to just drums, I would have said no thanks, I need more musical stimulation than that. But this music is very involving, and I enjoyed it very much.

Robert Gardner's "Forest of Bliss"

MoMA's blurb for this film quotes Seamus Heaney -- well, it quotes "Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney" -- to telegraph the particular sort of awe expected of us:

“When Ezra Pound commended the natural object as the adequate symbol, he might have been thinking about Forest of Bliss. Robert Gardner transmits the sensation of the deep and literate gaze, and does so with an intensity that passes from the documentary into the visionary.”

In other words this is the kind of documentary that Robert J. Flaherty was making 70 and 80 years ago (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), the kind that offers to get us in touch with Deep Reality by spending some unmediated time with Real People pursuing ancient ways of living.

But your time is not unmediated at all. You think it is at first, because there is no narrator and no one seems to be talking to the camera. But in Gardner just as much as in the much-debunked Flaherty, this is only a pose of diffidence. In fact, the directors show only careful selections from the broad reality they claim to present (Benares in this film, Ireland and "the North" in Flaherty's), and they weave those selections into a design that is really a work of their own imagination.

Gardner's design is about cycles, and it begins with a quotation from Yeats (who else?) that tells us what to think about them. In the film, people live and then they die -- see, a cycle. And their bodies are thrown into the river (no, really) and soon eaten by dogs. See? A cycle. Since there is no narrator to say it again and again, "cycle" is emphasized by reiterating motifs. Did you notice those dogs eating the corpse? Well, here are some other dogs eating another corpse. Oh, and have you seen the broad expanse of river lately? Let's take another look. Every boat that rows out onto the river is accompanied by the exact same squeak-squeak of the oars in the oarlocks. Those with less Depth than a Nobel laureate might call this repetitive and might question why every oarlock in town produces the same squeak, but you're missing the point. It's a way of expressing the cycles that life is all about.

I remember reading one expostulation about Man of Aran to the effect that Flaherty was falsifying by editing out his subjects' religious expresssions. Gardner falsifies in the other direction: for his subjects, religious expression is all there is. Who built the large buildings they skitter around? Who grew, tended, and cut the trees whose sorry scraps we must see again and again? Where are the police and tax collectors?

Call this film a poem and I would say OK, but don't call it a documentary. Call the dogs and corpses and gnarly logs an adequate symbol, and you have certainly told the truth, because any child can see what they symbolized; but Ezra Pound it ain't.

Brooklyn Museum Exhibition: "Tree of Paradise"

The Brooklyn Museum is currently running an exhibition of "The Tree of Paradise," comprising its collection of 12 sections from a 6th century synagogue floor mosaic from Hammam Lif, Tunisia. At the time, Hammam Lif was called Naro and was part of the western Roman Empire. The town was mostly Christian but had a Jewish community of long standing. Other sections from the floor are in Tunisia, and still others have been lost. But for this exhibition the museum had a full-scale floor painted with the complete design and then placed its own panels where they belonged in the design.

The subject matter of the mosaics is Jewish: Creation, Paradise, and the assemblage of Jewish symbols that one sees in Jewish artifacts of the later Roman period (in a circle, a menorah surrounded by other smaller items from the Temple). The style is a very interesting variation on the style that obtained at the time in the Greek East and in Europe. Like the latter two areas, North African art was abstract and cerebral, with little interest in the naturalism that had characterized Roman art before the 3rd century (and that would appeal so strongly to people in the Renaissance). But, judging from these mosaics, which one curator says are quite typical of all North African art of the period, the style is calmer, less busy, content to say more with less.

Now, this judgment has to be provisional, because of the way the mosaics have been treated since their rediscovery in the mid-19th century. The menorah circles, for example, were "restored" by an inexpert hand some time after the rediscovery, so one cannot be sure if they really look as the artist intended. But if they do, they represent a remarkable example of stylizing -- unlike both the contemporary art of Europe and the East and the prevailing taste of nineteenth-century Europe. In other menorah circles, we find more or less realistic images of the "ethrog," a citron-like fruit with a nubbly skin. In these, the characteristic shape of the ethrog is expressed by a single curvy line, one tessera thick. Similarly, the circles include a one-curvy-line representation of a lulav, the palm branch used during the Sukkoth holiday.

This expressive simplicity characterizes other choices the artist made. He apparently chose to work with a restricted palette. (Again, this judgment is provisional, because an ill-considered effort at preserving the mosaics when the museum acquired them in 1905 has dulled their color. But even allowing for brighter colors, the colors seem to be in a narrow range.) Also, to represent the sea teeming with life that God created on the fifth day, the artist chose not a large number of fish but just two very large ones that fill most of the stylized "sea." Even though large, the fish are not fitted out with a lot of detail -- they're just big fish, creatures of a big God.

In the upper left of the Creation area of the mosaic is a simple jagged form that some scholars take to be a stylization of fingers -- in other words, the hand of God, rendered in a way that avoids anthropomorphizing. This stylistic device seems to be in tune with the other choices the artist has made, though once again one must be provisional because other scholars decline to interpret the form as fingers at all.

Thus we seem to have a style of art that shares its abstract, cerebral quality with the rest of the contemporary Mediterranean world but opts for a simplicity of line and statement more in tune with, say, Japanese prints and the western art they inspired. It is exciting that such a style should have taken hold in this one not-so-prominent corner of the Mediterranean world.

The museum's own web page on the mosaics is at the address: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/tree_of_paradise/

There is a picture of the Hammam Lif menorah circles at this address:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/romanempire/ss/paradise_2.htm


And here are two 4th-century menorah circles from a burial in Rome. They are in glass, much smaller than the circles at Hammam Lif and yet full of much more stuff.