Tag Archives: Avant-garde

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

M22: THE MOZART OPERAS AT SALZBURG (2006): DON GIOVANNI

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* This review is part of a series on the 2006 Salzburg Festival, in which the 22 filmed operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were diversely and, sometimes, radically staged by the most innovative directors working in opera today. The results provoked wildly mixed reactions and controversy, proving that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart remains a vital voice in the world of 21st century music

Don Giovianni, Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s 1787 “dramma giosco,” became a favorite of the Romantics and it has been in the repertoire ever since.  The Don Juan narrative serves as as Mozartian self-portrait, for the composer knew of what he wrote.

Servant Leporello is waiting outside of Donna Annna’s house.  Anna is the daughter of the Commendatore.  Leporello’s masked master, Don Giovanni, has broken into the house to seduce Donna Anna.  However, Giovanni’s attempt is cut short when he’s confronted by the Commendatore.  A duel between the two men ends in the elder’s death. Anna does not know who the masked intruder was, but she makes Don Ottavio, her fiancee, swear revenge for the murder of the Commendatore.  Leporello and Giovanni move on to other conquests, namely Donna Elvira, who turns out to be one of Giovanni’s forgotten previous mistresses.  Still from Don Giovanni (M22) (2006)Barely evading the woman scorned (Elvira), Leporello and Giovanni move on to Zerlina.  Zerlina is engaged to Masetto, and Leporello is instructed to lure Masetto away.  Elvira, however, returns to level numerous accusations against Giovanni.  All of this is witnessed by Donna Anna, who now recognizes Giovanni as the voice of her father’s murderer.  Again, Anna passionately pleads with Ottavio to avenge her father.  At a masked ball, Giovanni attempts to rape Zerlina, but he is interrupted by the masked trio of Donna Elvira, Donna Continue reading M22: THE MOZART OPERAS AT SALZBURG (2006): DON GIOVANNI →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

M22: THE MOZART OPERAS AT SALZBURG (2006): LE NOZZE DE FIGARO

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* This is the first in a series on the 2006 Salzburg Festival, in which the 22 filmed operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were diversely and, sometimes, radically staged by the most innovative directors working in opera today. The results provoked wildly mixed reactions and controversy, proving that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart remains a vital voice in the world of 21st century music.

In 1786, Le nozze di Figaro, the first of Mozart’s operas with librettist Fr. Lorenzo Da Ponte, premiered in Vienna. Contrary to legend, the opera was a considerable success, with a libretto pre-approved by emperor Joseph II.  Arguably, it is the greatest of Mozart’s operas, although some musicologists give that honorary title to Don Giovanni (also written with Da Ponte). Still, the overall consensus is that Figaro is not only Mozart’s greatest opera, but it may very well be the greatest opera to date by any composer of any time, period.

The opera was based off of Pierre Beaumarchais’ play (one of three Figaro plays), which had a well-earned reputation as subversive and revolutionary (Beaumarchais was also Voltaire’s publisher).  That Joseph II approved Da Ponte’s libretto was a little short of miraculous.  While the heavier political implications were removed from the text, the defiant, satirical tone ridiculing the aristocracy was, of course, the meat of the plot (the servants eventually best their autocratic master).  The opera, like the play, resonated with the masses. With that in mind, a non-revolutionary Figaro seems an oxymoron.

Still from Le Nozze de Figaro (M22) (2006)Over two hundred years later, The Marriage of Figaro remains an extraordinarily three dimensional work, which does not flinch from portraying deeply flawed characters. Numerous filmed versions of the opera have been released on DVD, but the 2006 Salzburg entry may be the most uncompromising to date.  There is, of course, Peter Sellars’ mid-nineties version (which, aptly, takes place in Trump Tower), but the line-up of the 2006 Continue reading M22: THE MOZART OPERAS AT SALZBURG (2006): LE NOZZE DE FIGARO →

Canonically Weird (The List)

93. TRASH HUMPERS (2009)

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Beware

“Why castigate these creatures
Whose angelic features
Are bumping and grinding on trash?
Are they not spawned by our greed?
Are they not our true seed?
Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash?”–poem from Trash Humpers

DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine

FEATURING: , Harmony Korine, Brian Kotzur, Travis Nicholson

PLOT: Four rednecks in wrinkled geriatric masks wander around nearly deserted streets drinking wine, demolishing abandoned television sets, tormenting the bizarre outcasts they come across in their wanderings, and humping trash. One of the humpers explains to the camera that, unlike the suburbanites sleeping in their homes, they “choose to live like free people.” By the end of the video the focus shifts to a single humper who may be having doubts about the trashy lifestyle.
Still from Trash Humpers (2010)

BACKGROUND:

  • Trash Humpers was basically unscripted, although the characters and aesthetic had been thought out beforehand. According to Korine, the cast wandered through Nashville for a few weeks, sleeping outdoors, and filmed their in-character improvisations; the most interesting bits were edited into the final product.
  • Korine assembled this film quickly in reaction to his negative experiences making his third feature film, the relatively big-budget Mr. Lonely; he found the bureaucracy surrounding that production creatively stifling.
  • Trash Humpers is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film.  Their other 2009 release, Vernon Chatman’s absurdist Final Flesh, was previously inducted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies Ever Made.
  • American DVD-by-mail rental giant Netflix originally declined to stock copies of Trash Humpers. Drag City circulated a press release suggesting that the movie was refused because of its provocative content, and pointing out other controversial movies the company stocked. Trash Humpers was accepted into the rental program soon after the press release.
  • Trash Humpers was one of two winners of the second “reader’s choice” poll asking 366 Weird Movies’ readership to select films that had been reviewed but passed over for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It seems impossible to think of the title without immediately calling up the mental picture of actors in creepy geriatric masks in an alley grinding their groins against garbage bags.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look like escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive has weirdness in its corner.


Trailer for Trash Humpers

COMMENTS: Weirdness obviously counts for a lot. For a movie that goes so far out of its way Continue reading 93. TRASH HUMPERS (2009) →

Miscellanea

366 UNDERGROUND: WRISTS (2010)

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366 Underground is an occasional feature that looks at the weird world of contemporary low- and micro-budget cinema, the underbelly of independent film.

DIRECTED BY: John Bradburn

FEATURING: Heather Darcy, Mish Boyko, Dave Rowland, Nicola Hardman, Ellie Clemments, Rhian Green, Sean Harris, Aidan Keenan

PLOT: A woman moves in to an idyllic country house to recover from a traumatic event. One

Still from Wrists (2011)

day she rescues a man from crashing his motorbike. She becomes obsessed with him and is slowly drawn into his world in an experimental narrative that flows through reality, fantasy, fear and imagination along different streams of consciousness.

COMMENTS:  Wrists (official site) is more successful in the experimental realm, in communicating mood, than it is in the narrative, which is pared down to the bare minimum.  There’s not much dialog to clue one in on what’s happening; the first spoken word isn’t heard until 14 minutes into the film.  It’s a novel way to immediately involve the spectator by forcing him to construct what’s going on, but it could take several viewings to get the picture.  In my own case, I was fairly certain for the first 20 or so minutes that some artsy apocalyptic disaster had occurred and that the two main characters would be the only ones in the narrative… until the first car and other character appeared.

While providing a minimum of information to allow the audience to work out things for themselves can be stimulating, it only went so far with Wrists.  Combined with its languid pace, the film was very good at inducing a nap midway through the running time.  Twice.  Your own experience may vary.

That said, I do appreciate the approach that the filmmakers took. I probably would have had a greater love for this film had it been half the length (it’s 86 minutes), or if the director had pandered more to my need for more clues to the concrete narrative, such that provided in the official synopsis below:

Wrists follows Julie as she recovers in an isolated rural cottage. Bored she wanders the countryside and tries to waste time. Hearing a noise outside she rescues a mysterious young man – Clark – from a motorcycle accident.

Slowly she becomes obsessed with him and is drawn in to his dark world. He works in a city collecting debts. Clark has never really thought of escape. In meeting Julie he way have met his saviour.

Wrists is not really that weird—the most successful element is its atmosphere and mood, which is very dreamlike due to the lack of dialog.  It’s almost like being in the minds of the two main characters.  The thing is, the characters don’t really do very much, and what action there is was more conducive to going on the nod than to engaging fully with the film—in my case.

This is John Bradburn’s second feature. His first, Kyle (IMDB), about a young man’s attempt to fit back into society after being released from prison, screened in festivals and small venues, and Wrists will apparently follow the same strategy.

An interview with Bradburn looks in-depth into his aesthetic; he also shared his reactions to Kyle‘s reception at its premiere at the Seattle Film Festival in an article for Vertigo Magazine.

A DVD of Wrists, which comes paired with a zine about the production, is available here.

DISCLAIMER: A DVD copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

“CURRENTLY UNTITLED” AND THE AVANT-GARDE

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In the 1980s art scene, the fine arts were divided into camps. In one camp there was the dominating, self-proclaimed avant-garde, and in the other, smaller camps were the Surrealists, the expressionists, the pop artists, the hyper-realists, and the traditionalists.  I tended to pitch my tent with the expressionists and, with some reservations, the Surrealists and the pop artists as well. While I never gave much credence at all to the hyper-realists or the traditionalists who bored me to tears then (now I simply have succumbed to impatient avoidance and dismissal of that unimaginative, fundamentalist lot), I also have kept the self-proclaimed avant-garde at bay, possibly because I suspect, like the Dadaists and Surrealists suspected, that the avant-garde tends towards overt, dull academia and/or superficiality.

A few years ago I read a review of a Ken Russell film (unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to document the source); the critic essentially took Russell to task for being a failed avant-gardist who straddled the road between populist art and the avant-garde.  While the critic had some validity in his assessments of Russell’s work, I felt he missed the mark.  Russell was never a member of the avant-garde.  Rather, he was a hard school Surrealist whose work has been passionately  uneven.  Surrealism, of course, has as its vital focal point ordinary expressions, that are then blurred by dreams and imagination.  The imaginative dream realm would not exist without the warm-blooded center of reality.  Of course, bad Surrealism (or poor imitation of Surrealism) tends to look like the academia of the avante-garde when it loses that vital core, and perhaps that is why the “naïve surrealists” have been so rightly celebrated.

The avant-garde, on the other hand, has always promoted art for art sake.  It is an atheistic aesthetic of pure abstraction, and while it first produced a startling movement in many mediums, its tendency towards superficiality quickly took hold.  In painting, abstract expressionism became decorative works for the business office; in film, such experiments soon became tedious efforts which jettisoned any and all connections with humanity; and in music, post-Webern electronic experimentation became so disassociated that it made all-too valid Arnold Schoenberg’s question, “but, are they making music with it?” ((Schoenberg was the father of the twelve-tone method.  His pupil, Anton Webern, became a favorite influence among the disciples. Towards the end of his life Schoenberg was asked if he realized young musicians were copying his twelve tone method, to which he replied with the question above)).

Of course, this is an over simplified and somewhat idiosyncratic distinction, and to do it justice is beyond the scope or goal of this review, but this description can temporarily suffice.  Part of the problem in associating Ken Russell with the avant-garde is Russell’s  impetuous giddiness, his desire to be the eternal bad boy, which is filtered through consummate craftsmanship and even occasional sophistication underneath that rebel persona.  Russell’s work, while often deeply flawed, is seldom dull. The vitality of his Surrealist oeuvre (at least his strongest works) can be found in an idiosyncratic vision of  a journey through dramatic, personal, human experience.

Recently, I came across Indiana filmmaker’s Adam Cooley’s 2010 feature, Currently Untitled,


Part 1 of Currently Untitled (see director’s YouTube page for the other 4 installments)

Continue reading “CURRENTLY UNTITLED” AND THE AVANT-GARDE →