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His Air was on Fire

I saw this show of paintings, sound installation, and short films by David Lynch in Paris in 2007, by far the most hilarious art show I’ve ever enjoyed:

Lynch started out as a painter at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art way back in 1966, and famously moved to making short abstract films, which he calls “moving paintings”, when he saw one of his canvases moving in the wind. With the money he made from his first private commission while still an art student, he bought a Bolex Super 8 camera.

Given the almost accidental nature of his move into film-making, would he ever have been satisfied had he remained a painter? “Oh yes,” he says, without hesitation, “for sure. That’s all I wanted to do for a long time. Just paint. But, suddenly, now there was film. This big thing.”

THE ground floor at the Fondation Cartier is devoted to Lynch’s paintings and drawings, the latter of which number in the region of 400, and some of which seem to date back to his college days.

“I hadn’t seen a lot of this stuff for a long, long time,” Lynch drawls, “and it made me realise that it’s actually a very good thing to see old work again. Some of the stuff that came out of storage really fired me up. I really don’t know where it will lead but it sure feels good.”

Over the last few years Lynch has been painting several series of nightmarish landscapes, each peopled with vague shapes in opaque, dusky landscapes. One such series is called the Mr Jim Series another, the Bob Series, perhaps inspired by his love for the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles where he used to breakfast daily on “four, five, six cups of coffee – with lots of sugar”. He’s since given up sugar as a creative catalyst but his vision remains somewhat frantic.

We both stare at a work called Bob Burns Tree. I ask him to talk me through its gestation.

“Well, it’s called Bob Burns Tree ,” he says, pointing to the Bob figure and then to the tree. “I knew from the start it was going be about, well, Bob burning a tree. I started with that idea and I kind of stayed with it. Yep.”

So good. Writing in paintings, normally abhorrent, sat with a kind of sang-froid alongside jeans that had been run over multiple times by a car, next to plaintive flat-space ear-marked for ill by the master with his own hand. I mean.

And then you would catch the sound loop running throughout the skeletoid building, akin to holding a stethoscope on the chest of gun factory.

Thank you and godspeed, sir.

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Seeing Green – the ‘color-blind’ age

Films – our most powerful cultural vehicle – are, like our decisions about climate justice and immigration cruelty, only as good as the people who are making them. For a long time, the film industry hid behind a financial rationale behind the dearth of black, Latinx and Native American directors. Then it had to get even more sophisticated.

The NYT takes us back to the 1990’s, when supposedly everything was changing:

But as the decade wore on, a wall was re-erected, black filmmakers now say, and many of the same people who had been held up as the faces of a changing industry watched as their careers ground slowly to a halt.

“I was told that I was in director’s jail,” said Matty Rich, whose emotionally incendiary 1991 debut film, “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Major film studios hailed him as a prodigy. But he’s made only one other film since — in 1994.

Darnell Martin, whose vibrant 1994 romantic comedy “I Like It Like That” was the first studio-produced film to be directed by an African-American woman (it won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best first feature), said she was later blacklisted in the industry for speaking out against racism and misogyny.

“You think, ‘It’s O.K. — you’re like every other filmmaker,’ but then you realize, ‘No,’” she said. “It’s like they set us up to fail — all they wanted was to be able to pat themselves on the back like they did something.”

The New York Times recently convened a discussion with six directors who were part of a wave of young black talent that surged 30 years ago this month — beginning with the success of “Do the Right Thing” in July 1989 — only to come crashing down, as Hollywood in the 1990s and 2000s reconstituted itself around films with white directors and white casts.

It may sound obvious – it is – but the way filmmakers speak with a forward voice and vision is of course connected to those individual filmmakers. Our tender baby steps on diversity are quietly arriving after a very extended epoch of everything-else-has-been-tried-to-prove-we-aren’t-racist. Some remain convinced that everything hasn’t been tried, but still… teeny, baby steps. For more on the racial politics of the movie industry,  see this interview with the author of The Hollywood Jim Crow.

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Giving Bad Names A Bad Name

The collection of misogynist, disjointed and just plain lame Super Bowl commercials on display last night were the saddest collection probably since… oh, I don’t know – last year’s edition. It’s like everything else that has gone meta in gorging on its own hype – SB commercials once stood out for audacity and creativity because they were so expensive and had so many eyeballs. Now the ads [seemingly] enjoy iconic status merely by being SB commercials – and hence can be as lame and offensive as any others.

But the steaming pile de la pile, especially around these parts, had to be this “green” one:

Who are these green police? And why buy the audi diesel if eco stormtroopers don’t exist? This was going to convince someone to buy the car or change bulbs or not use plastic or whatever?

Or have we entered the age of reverse advertising? If so, that’s my excuse for the coke trailer above.