“Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie, Little Fugitive.” 
This high praise comes from none other than Francois Truffaut himself, the noted director of early Nouveau Vague films, including 400 Blows. 
Film-goers owe a fundamental debt to Little Fugitive and the French New Wave. As much as these films may be artsy for many, in not entertaining with dynamic narrative, character and settings, they do offer a devotional to the image, revealing moments for meditation. It is films like these that relate to how we dream, that understand the stillness in how we remember. 
It is these films such as Little Fugitive that we need to see again and again.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Greenland Reading: Gretel Ehrlich’s “This Cold Heaven”
Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven provides a first-person account of life in the cold and dark of Greenland. 
She recounts the Early 20-Century explorations of Arctic ethnographer Knud Rasmussen as well as the painter Rockwell Kent’s year-long sojourn there in the 1930s, but most interesting of all are the details of her own travels, including her journey with hunters in the far north:
Ahead, the ice foot narrowed like a waist, then widened again. Snow turned to sun; we slid from winter into summer. 
A glittering lagoon of open water came into view, packed with seabirds, ice gulls, and eider ducks. We stopped an gaped. The pond was a living sapphire and the birds navigated through blue glint, bumping from one beveled iridescence to another. What were we seeing? (180)
Ehrlich does have a tendency to repeat herself and romanticize the harsh elements, but all is forgiven for her moments of insight and enduring adventurous spirit.
The Embarassing Supreme Cult of Ray Lewis
Ray Lewis is a good football player, focused and strong, a good tackler and all that; however his athleticism does not excuse him for his embarrassing antics in celebrating himself, strutting like a comic book character, weeping at The Star-Spangled Banner and wearing Jesus on his sleeve. 
Like many before him, Ray Lewis has fallen victim to the cult of his own personality. Vainglorious, exhaustedly so, he has come to believe that he is more than he is, like many a pharaoh, dictator, queen and pop star before him.
This could be amusing, but it’s not. Lewis is a severely flawed individual who needs the cameras off him. The father of six children by four women, worst of all, Lewis was involved in the stabbing deaths of two men 13 years ago, murders that remain ludicrously unsolved, murders for which Lewis has paid one family an undisclosed out-of-court settlement, murders that should haunt him for the rest of his life. 
Lewis is expected to stop playing football today, and hopefully it will be the last we are forced to endure his antics. To quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
Groundhog Day: Bill Murray’s Everyman Angst
Groundhog Day is a weird tradition to say the least. Cloudy skies on February 2 indicate a mild spring to come. Huh? The stupidity of it boggles. There is little wonder as to why Harold Remis chose it as the focal point for his film. 
Groundhog Day is that rare breed of comic film that digs into understanding the human experience: What would it be like to live the exact same day over and over again? Is this what it is to be immortal? Is this the true test of the human spirit? Is this the genesis of angst? Bill Murray delivers the performance of his life, an asinine everyman who is remarkably (and believably) humble in the end. 
As to the actual event itself of dragging out Punxsutawney Phil, I hope that the men in top hats might consider leaving him alone. 
Shadow or not, we don’t need a groundhog to tell us what we already know; we’ll be seeing a lot less of winter in the years to come.
New York Inspired V: Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors”
Ragnar Kjartansson’s new show The Visitors opened at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea last night. Hundreds of visitors – including Bjork, Antony, dozens of project participants, not to mention the artist himself – filled a space not made for such a crowd. And so it was hard to digest the work, a 53-film displayed on nine different screens, all of them surrounded. 
The title of the piece is derived from the 1981 album The Visitors by Abba, their final work together. 
The film opens with isolated people in different rooms – kitchen, living room, bathroom – connected to each other only by headphones, humming, strumming and singing lyrics from a poem by Ragnar’s former wife, Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir: Once again I fall into my feminine ways. 
The music is entrancing, the tone meditative, the desire to sing along hard to resist; it is at times ecstatic – Ragnar, in the bathtub, raising his guitar above his head, a wheel-less canon fired into the evening – and always inviting. Everyone eventually exits their disparate spaces to join together at the front porch of the house (Rokeby Farm), still singing, to walk down into the fields together.
I was tired when I arrived at the gallery, feeling the flu coming on, and the crowds didn’t help. I wanted to leave, come another time, but stayed and was, once again, enveloped by Kjartansson’s work. It was not only the music, but the hypnotic quiet, in spite of everything, my tired knees, the inability to see much of anything, missing screens, unable to move, the anxious pushing around me, the chic personages. Indeed, I was privileged in the end to meet and thank Kjartansson for his work and expect to return – a few times, I imagine – to see what it’s all really about. It’s Bliss all over again! 