I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO (2016)
2016 James Baldwin biopic / documentary
File Under: Documentary, Black Power, Civil Rights, Literary Cinema.
“I Am Not Your Negro" is a fitting meditation on MLK Day. Raoul Peck adapts the novel James Baldwin never completed, “Remember This House", into a film discourse, focusing the lens on the history of race in America via assassinations of key civil rights leaders (Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin), the impact of racist cinematic imagery, and the continuation of the black struggle in the 21st century. The exacting words of James Baldwin narrated by Samuel L. Jackson sit heavily, a vivid reminder that the work is far from over.
"I Am Not Your Negro", Raoul Peck. 2016, USA-France.
Running Time: 93 Minutes. English-French.
Available for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and YouTube
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (2022)
2022 sardonic comedy
Ruben Östlund’s caustic satireTriangle of Sadness takes a wrecking ball to the excesses of wealth, privilege, and social hierarchies. Split into three acts, the film moves from the sterile artifice of the fashion industry to the grotesque opulence of a luxury cruise and finally lands in the chaos of survival, where the power dynamics flip entirely.
File Under: Satire, Social Commentary, Modern Dark Comedy, Class Critique.
Östlund, fresh from his success with Force Majeure, turns his lens to despicable characters representative of the worst of capitalism: vapid influencers, bored billionaires, and inept authority figures. Among them is Carl (Harris Dickinson), a male model grappling with his fragile ego, and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), his influencer girlfriend, in a deeply transactional relationship. Their luxury cruise—captained by an alcoholic and unhinged Marxist drunkard (played by the brilliant Woody Harrelson)—descends into chaos. Vomit fountains, dysfunction, and primal absurdity reveal that, when stripped of wealth and privilege, humanity’s most grotesque instincts emerge.
The cinematography embraces clean, hyper-realistic frames that accentuate the emptiness of wealth. The score crescendos to add a perverse sense of beauty to the film’s most unsettling moments. Östlund builds tension by letting his camera linger, allowing discomfort to marinate into black humor.
Awarded the 2022 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Triangle of Sadness’s blunt-force satire struck a nerve, with critics debating whether it skewers capitalism effectively or simply revels in its own shock value. But that seems to be precisely Östlund’s point: there’s no clean moral takeaway here.
A perfect counter-programming for those tired of the saccharine Triangle of Sadness is Ruben Östlund having fun with a cinematic shipwreck you can’t ignore.
"Triangle of Sadness", Ruben Östlund. 2022, Sweden-France.
Running Time: 147 Minutes. English-Swedish.
Available for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Vudu.
ROUGE
1994 french romantic mystery from tres coleurs series
Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Rouge” is the third film of his Trois Coleurs series. A chance encounter between a Geneva model named Valentine, played by the ravishing beauty Irene Jacob, and an off-putting retired judge, played by French legend Jean-Louis Trintignant, becomes a metaphysical exploration of the bonds of human relationships, the ethics of surveillance and personal privacy, and how each action in life is beautifully and frighteningly out of our control.
“This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information.”-Krzysztof Kieślowski
BACURAU
2022 Sci-fi weirdo Brazilian western.
Brazilian writers / directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Filho take on race and class in their 2019 bizarro sci-fi Western flick “Bacurau”. The film bends genres and realities whilst following a small town and eccentric set of characters in the Brazilian outback; the town’s inner quarrels are exploded by an insidious existential threat. For sure, a heavy dose of psychedelic storytelling layered with criticism of Brazilian politics and Western economic imperialism. Available on prime video premium and other platforms if you’re willing to pay a small fee. 🇧🇷
VIDEODROME
1983 psyche-fururistic-sleaze-scifi-thriller
David Cronenberg’s 1983 psychotronic, psychotropic fringe film starring James Woods as a sleazy TV station manager and Debby Harry as his sadomasochistic girlfriend, explores Marshall McClaren’s maxim “The Medium is the Message” in a frightening (albeit low tech) vision of television as a drug that blends into and transforms reality - an erotic pilot program turns out to be a snuff production; and so goes the film, ... caustic energy and bizarre sequences, frenzied sardonic sci-fi, a critique of our relationship with media prophesizing future dilemmas of the technological media age.
“The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an existence totally different from the one you are living… if you accept at least on some level the Freudian dictum that civilization is repression, than imagination and unrepressed creativity is very dangerous to civilization.” - David Cronenberg
THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS
1971 Japanese experimental meditation
Shuji Terayama’s avant-garde film critiques American & Japanese materialism through the narrative of a poor young man trying to make himself a life in a capitalist society with a dysfunctional family. The imagery is psychedelic/ surreal, soundtrack is punk singalong, the cinematography experimental, a script chock full of symbolism and social commentary. Teryama in 1971, a master at work.
Adam Pendleton
re contextualizing language and history
Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021, Silkscreen ink on canvas
This week’s art selection features the work of Adam Pendleton. Adam’s work uses text and images to examine the glut of codes we negotiate and the hierarchies of power embedded in them.
“Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist (whose) work centers on an engagement with language, in both the figurative and literal senses, and the recontextualization of history through appropriated imagery to establish alternative interpretations of the present and, as the artist has explained, “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist.””
Photo Credit:
Pace Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together
Elephant Art, Pope L. and Adam Pendleton, Art Can Mobilize Your Body
Idea Stream, Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” at MOCA
Art Forum, The Parallax View: The Art of Adam Pendleton
Moma, History Is Never Finished: An Interview with Adam Pendleton
Galerie Eva Prenhauser, Adam Pendleton
Portrait Credit: New York Times, Adam Pendleton is Rethinking the Museum
Christian Boltanski
meditations on memory
This week’s art post features the work of French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021). Boltanski’s work has a contemplative, poetic, ethnological quality. Absence, the remains and impact of war, the silenced subject, and the power of memory all are investigated, as is a quiet celebration of the dignity and poetics inherent in the mundane.
“His work was rich in visual and aural impact, and open-ended in its invitation to the viewer to contemplate the past and partake in the present moment — for what has been lost and what endures.”
Photo Credit:
MetaLocus, BOLTANSKI AT IVAM: DÉPART - ARRIVÉE
Jupiter Art, CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI:THEATRE D'OMBRES
Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Art Review, The Spectres of Christian Boltanski
Nowness Asia, Everyone and No One, The Art of Christian Boltanski
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Depart-Arrive
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Christian Boltanski Selected Works
Portrait Credit: Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Shirin Aliabadi
iranian subversion
This week’s art post features the work of Shirin Aliabadi (1973-2018). Aliabadi’s work focused on Iranian women and their unique relationship to Western culture. Not singularly a critique of Western capitalism, the work explores secular transgression, body image and female identity under a repressive religious regime.
“Shirin will always be remembered for her kind soul, the depth of her work and the mark she left on the world. The female protagonists of her best-known series presented themselves as a radical counter-design to the officially propagated image of women, and displayed a young generation’s ways of breaking free from regulations.””
Photo Credit:
Universes Art, Operation Supermarket
Phillips.com, Shirin Aliabadi
Art Fund, Shirin Aliabadi
Aperture, She captured the modern face of Iran
Portrait: The Art Newspaper, Shirin Aliabadi, known for depicting rebellious Iranian women, has died
Annette Lemieux
ideological minimalism
This week’s art post features the great work of Annette Lemieux. She works in a variety of media and works in a theater of memory, examining aporias in accepted, dominant narratives. Check her work at her website.
“She’s looked at archetypical images from art — 20th century art history, but also film — and edited them and tweaked them to give them new meaning, whether that’s cheeky or critical, She’s always taking something from the world and turning it on its head to give it new meaning.”
Photo Credit:
Mitchell Inns & Nash, Annette Lemieux
Whitney Museum, Annette Lemieux
Quote and Portrait Credit: WBUR, Annette Lemieux, Whose Art Addresses History And Politics, Wins MFA’s $10K Prize
Charles Gaines
aesthetics, politics and philosophy
This week’s art selection features the work on noted conceptual artist and teacher Charles Gaines. Gainses’s work engages formulas that interrogate relationships between objective and subjective realms. Using many forms - photography, musical composition, sculpture, video, etc. - Gaines examines identity and power and the fault lines of capital’s utopia. His is some of the most engaged and ambitious work being made today.
“His work belongs to a branch of conceptual art concerned with processes and systems. The aim was to remove subjectivity from art by following self-determined rules and procedures. His breakthrough came in 1973, with his “Regression” series, in which he wrote sequential numbers in the squares of a hand-drawn grid to generate an amorphous form that grows from drawing to drawing, each generating the next. ‘One of the joys was the fact that I could experience things that I couldn’t predict, that I couldn’t anticipate.’”
Photo Credit:
Colossal,Through Monumental Sculpture of Moving Chains, Artist Charles Gaines Confronts the Enduring Legacy of American Slavery
Paula Cooper Gallery, Charles Gaines
ARTFORUM, Differing Equations: The Art of Charles Gaines
LA Times, How the dense grids of artist Charles Gaines took the ego out of art, Carolina A. Miranda
Jonathon Griffin, Charles Gaines
Wade Guyton
digital inkjet abstractions
This week’s art selection features the untitled works of Wade Guyton. Guyton uses an inkjet printer for his large paintings, letting the printers mistakes and inconsistencies arise. Initially his work was geometric, minimal and abstract; more recent offerings focus on the mundane: his studio, the daily paper, the incidental, juxtapositions of the everyday. Printed out in variations, a feedback loop that frames the process of absorbing images into the mind, examining what constitutes “representation” in our digital reality.
“Digital technology and indistinct copy-right laws have set off avalanches of artistic appropriation. But amongst bouts of nostalgia, bland remakes, reenactments, and reconstructions that mindlessly rehash old formulas and found objects, Guyton’s work stands out as a subtle reminder of the complexities and uncertainties of our time.”
Photo Credit:
Matthew Marks Gallery, Wade Guyton
Artnet, Wade Guyton
Emergent Mag, Reena Spaulings, New York City
Whitney Museum of American Art, Wade Guyton, New York City
Warwick Collection, Wade Guyton
Zabludowicz Collection, Wade Guyton
Ignant Magazine, The Work Of Art In The Age Of Compulsive Reproduction: Two Decades In The Oeuvre Of Wade Guyton, Thomas Pirot, Anna Sinofzik