Sunday, September 7, The New York Times. Design: Chris Jones, Wexner Center.

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Unspoken

First, what the heck happened in the ‘Shoe yesterday? Sheesh.

I saw four films yesterday, two by directors who have visited the Wexner, one by a director whose work we’ve shown somewhat recently, and one starring a French national treasure (in my opinion).

Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is in the same key as her recent acclaimed film Old Joy and stars Michelle Williams from Brokeback Mountain and Kelly’s dog Lucy. The director who brought us The Long Day Closes and The House of Mirth, Terence Davies, now gives us Of Time and the City, his elegiac ode to his hometown of Liverpool. Chris reminded me that someone in a recent issue of Sight & Sound said it would make a great double-feature with Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and they’re right.

Our Daily Bread director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 7915 KM is a documentary on the path of the famous Dakar Rally off-road race that spans the titular distance across Africa. The filmmaker interviews individuals who live in towns and villages passed by the race but as the film progresses the subjects refer to the race less and less and the film finally becomes a statement on post-colonial Africa, the world economy, and the dire choices often faced by the people who live there.

I was looking forward to Fien Troch’s new film Unspoken as her Someone Else’s Happiness was one of my favorites at the Karlovy Vary festival two years ago. It is a serviceable drama about a couple struggling to cope with themselves and each other four years after the disappearance of their young daughter. The plot is immaterial as the film stars Emmanuelle Devos of Kings and Queen and also this festival’s A Christmas Tale. Emmanuelle Devos crying is a movie. Emmanuelle Devos laughing is a movie. There is no other actress like her on the planet.

Looking back at the schedule each day one can imagine a completely different day and even festival depending on one’s choice of films. By seeing Wendy and Lucy I missed the Dardenne brothers’ new film. By seeing Of Time and the City I missed Michael Winterbottom’s new film. Such abundance can be frustrating. C’est la vie de festival (or something like that).

- Dave Filipi, Curator, Film/Video

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and I intended to write extended capsules about all of the films I’ve seen in Toronto but scheduling and lack of sleep are conspiring to prevent that. Hopefully I’m not headed to hell and I will be able to provide a more thorough summary at the end of the fest.

Ari Forman’s Waltz with Bashir is a deeply personal animated film about the filmmaker’s attempts to come to grips with his memories of his role in the massacre of innocents in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The animation is limited (Doug Wildey’s highly graphic style for the old Jonny Quest cartoons – but with more depth of field – is a crude point of comparison) but it fits perfectly with the gripping content. The film was created in a similar manner to Richard Linkater’s Waking Life and Scanner Darkly – animation over live action footage.

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It always takes a bit of time to adjust to the schedule and self-contained world of a film festival. Yesterday was the first day of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and, although I attended many festival films that day, I still had one foot in the normal rhythms of living. Yesterday, external issues were the main topic of conversation. Before every screening, most of the conversations revolved around Sarah Palin and the Republican National Convention. The front page story and photo on all of the Toronto newspapers resembled an actual news story (Palin again – front page news even in Canada).

That all changed pretty quickly as I, and everyone else around me, seem to be in full festival mode today. The front page of the papers all featured photos and accounts of the previous evening’s celebrity-driven gala screening as the festival pushes news stories off the front page for the next week or two. As could only happen at a film festival, I found myself not skipping a beat as I ran from a 9:45 am screening of a cartoon about repressed memories of the 1982 Lebanon war (Waltz with Bashir – which is being billed as “the first animated documentary,” a debatable and gimmicky conceit) to a showing of a manic Korean Western comedy (The Good, the Bad, and the Weird). And today all the pre-screening conversations revolved around the perennial festival questions, “What have you seen?” or “Have you seen anything good?”

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35 Rhums

Day one of my festival got off to a good start with two good films and one great one with plenty of time left over to catch up with friends and colleagues from around the country (mostly NYC, if truth be told).

Liverpool is the latest film from Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, who also made Los Muertos. The film follows a laborer on a freighter who receives permission to visit his aging mother when his ship docks in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in South America. The film is shot in a very minimalist style allowing Alonso to dwell on every tick and twitch (and gulp of vodka) by lead Juan Fernandez in order to convey his loneliness and dread of returning home. Once there, he is essentially treated like an outcast but the reaction of the handful of locals is subtle. He sees his daughter and leaves her with a small amount of money. The film is understated in both style and story, to the point that we’re not quite sure exactly what has happened in the characters’ collective past and for me to say more would give away too much of what plot there is.

I can’t say what my colleagues’ catch phrase is for Andreas Dresen’s Cloud 9 in a family newspaper. A woman in her mid-60s begins to have an affair with a man she meets after doing some garment alteration for him. Dresen depicts their unfolding love affair in an uncommonly graphic manner for love scenes featuring characters beyond their 30s. The woman can’t stop seeing her new love but she is also burdened by the guilt of hurting her husband of 30 years. The film is refreshing in that it does focus on older characters – far too rare in film. The film is shot in a very intimate, minimal, hand-held style that nicely complements the content.

The best film of my day (and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be the best of my festival) is Claire Denis’s 35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum). The film centers on a working class father and adult daughter who live together and who rely on each other for comfort. Both are the objects of the attention of two people that live in the same apartment building. I could go on and on about the film but with time an issue I’ll focus on one interlude in bar with all of the main characters. The four characters are on their way to a concert but when their car breaks down are forced to seek shelter from the rain in a bar that remains open after hours just for them and another couple. The characters drink and dance and exchange glances that speak volumes. As in past films like Beau Travail and Friday Night, Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard celebrate the characters’ bodies and interacting physicality. With (The Commodores’) Night Shift playing on the soundtrack and Godard’s camera swirling around the beautiful actors it makes for an intoxicating scene. I ran into a colleague later in the evening and we both agreed it gave us goose bumps it was so beautiful. That’s the reaction I hope to have at least once a festival and it happened on the first day.

- Dave Filipi, Curator, Film/Video

Self-Portraits

Personality represents itself through enduring patterns that emerge across an individual’s diverse personal and social contexts and experiences. Andy Warhol’s many and varied self-portraits seem to cultivate a personality focused on concealment and revelation: fear, bravura, aesthetics, and eccentricities come together in his dramatic presentation of self in the world. Through the self-portraits, Warhol traces a meandering but constructive effort to define a self and also marks his artistic progression, a journey that continually returns to the self.

The earlier portraits offer us concealment, invisibility. In even the most straightforward images, Warhol is consciously, constantly inscrutable. In later photographs and prints, he moves beyond inscrutability to surround himself in mystery, costume, and camouflage. The self-images become more variable, posed, and dramatic. In them we see the self he has constructed as a master self-promoter and marketer: successful, powerful, dynamic—but always elusive.

Joan Simon
Assistant Professor–Clinical, Family Medicine
The Ohio State University

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Silver Clouds

The Wexner Center exhibited Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds once before, in an exhibition titled Shiny in the fall of 2006.

The range of visitors’ interaction with Warhol’s creation offered a wonderful lesson in human behavior during the three months the installation was on view. As guests moved between the gallery spaces as they approached this whimsical display, you could instantly see how it transformed their experiences. Adults seamlessly regressed back to their childhood, when balloons were valued attractions of amusement and reflective material invoked imagination. For the truly young, Silver Clouds instilled in their minds an awareness that art can combine the adult minds and childhood values.

Silver Clouds represents what art can be when it touches thoughts and hearts in a diverse group of visitors. Its reappearance in the galleries will be a welcome sight.

Douglas McGrew
Security Manager, Security & Protective Services
The Ohio State University

In conjunction with the printed Gallery Guide that will be on hand for visitors to our Other Voices, Other Rooms exhibition, from time to time we’ll be posting written or spoken takes on Andy Warhol in a blog area we’ll call More Voices. Warhol inspired a host of opinions, and we’ll be collecting some of them here, and we’d encourage you (via the comments space below) to leave your own comments. (We can’t guarantee we can post everything, but we will try.) Check back often.

It’s at the corner of State and 3rd, it’s caddycorner to Ohio’s venerable state capitol, and, at 13 stories high, it can be read by aircraft on approach to Port Columbus International. It’s the first of several banners to be seen in the next week or so splashing Other Voices, Other Rooms around Columbus, thanks to our friends at Orange Barrel Media. This was dropped this past Thursday night, right before the last Wex Drive-In on the Statehouse lawn (which was big fun with 500 of our closest friends), just across the way. Short North, you’re next.

If you weren’t around for Martin Scorsese’s visit to the Wexner Center in February 1997 to accept the Wexner Prize - or you would like to relive it - the University of Chicago Press has just released Scorsese by Ebert, a collection of the prolific critic’s writing on one of our era’s greatest filmmakers. The collection includes the transcript of Ebert’s two-hour interview with Scorsese on the Mershon Auditorium stage before a packed house and, at roughly 50 pages, is easily the longest piece in the book. (Ebert even notes that he was surprised at the length of the interview in preparing it for publication.) It is a wonderful, free-flowing conversation between Scorsese and one of his greatest admirers.

- Dave Filipi, Curator, Film/Video

You have until September 2 to submit your video for our Warhol Youtube Video Contest. A quick recap: submit a 15 second commercial about the exhibition and win fabulous prizes, including having your commercial seen on NBC4! Complete rules and prize information can be found here.

Here’s one of the recent entries: