It was real. (w/UPDATE)

Ben Shahn Allegory (American 1948)

Over the weekend, in a crowded theater in the Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Screening Room, I saw the premiere of Carl Cimini's documentary, Dancing in Amdo. I had certain expectations, primarily because, apart from a warm acquaintance with Carl, one of my closest friends, Todd, joined the filmmaking journey to India to record the audio tracks. I have been relayed enough anecdotes and unfilmable moments from the voyage that the movie itself had come to feel like a mere index, something useful in cementing the free-floating pieces of a journey into a conventional narrative form, but in and of itself secondary.

The look and sound were very much what I'd hoped for, which is to say gritty, and not so different from the way we remember travel:  arrested pictures of a moving world, and then rambling attempts to catch hold of it again.  It is something I grew to love in Harmony Korine's movies--maybe the best of this generation.

My big question at the premier, which went unasked, though not unanswered exactly, was how this was supposed to appeal as a work of art?  Was he happy with the pictures and sounds they collected? Is the skin of political and religious purposes a red herring?  Now, in my defense I don't go around asking "is it art?" every time I'm forced to wear a button-down Oxford outside the office, but personal relationships being what they are I couldn't help it.  I wanted to connect the dots between the movie and the aspirations.

It's not that I was scared to ask the "art" question--though phrasing it tactfully is seldom easy.  As time went on, both in viewing, and in the ensuing q&a, the consensus was that artistic merits had limited space in the discussion--though in plugging another movie culled from the same voyage, Carl distinctly tipped his hat.  The audience had political questions, religious questions.  Fine, fine.  

Carl opened the night by congratulating the audience for being among the enlightened one percentile of moviegoers willing to see either a documentary or a subtitled movie, noting with wry pride that Dancing was both.  I imagine most of the folks in attendance would've contended that the lively discussion that followed testified to the success of the film-as-art--though as much of that discussion emanated from globetrotting bloviators and trust fund bleeding hearts.  The lot of them reminded me of one of my first masters lit classroom discussions.  The short story was Andre Dubus' "The Fat Girl".  It was about a fat girl, and all anyone could say was gee, fat girls have it rough.  And God, people can be so cruel.  

The reason this question of art ran so contrary to the heart of the audience's discussion is that, contrary to surface appearances, Dancing in Amdo is not a political movie.  Nor is it a religious movie.  It is, quite purely, a document of curiosity. A manifestation of action and time spent.  Anything beyond that obscures the very real and rewarding story, a story that, I might add, is not the Dalai Lama's, nor the monks' in whose company he practices, nor the peoples' of India, nor the peoples' of Tibet.  

Perhaps it was the absence of a first person narration--the "traveler's voice".  Certainly it owed something to the distractingly large subject being sought:  call that the Dalai Lama, the essence of Tibetan Buddhism, or whatever you like.

Still, I found the most magnetic--the most instantly magnetic, quality of the film to be that engine of curiosity.  The movie is filled with new things.  Most of us had never seen the rituals, the art (how very much like western Modernism those young Tibetan paintings are) and walking-around lives of these places before.  It was a kind of coming alive.

I read something the late American artist, Ben Shahn, wrote in his essay, "The Biography of a Painting", which I thought lent itself nicely to the issues I faced in seeing this movie.  In it he described his reaction to a negative criticism he received for one of his paintings, at the hands of a close friend and critic, Henry McBride.  The story goes that after a long, almost predictably favorable, critical relationship with Shahn, McBride saw in 1948's Allegory, violent, politically charged elements which, he felt, disagreed with the temperament of the artist.  Shahn pored over the DNA of his work, examining it for any correlation to the points his friend made against it.  He found none.        

Instead the artist steeled himself with the words of another critic, Clive Bell:

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant.  For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.

Wasn't this what I'd just been thinking?   What Shahn then added, however, was that personal artistic confession.  Yes the external world is irrelevant to art, but no it cannot be excluded.  Shahn, rather than accepting this tenet quietly, named the historical, then autobiographical, and finally mythological symbolisms which might have informed Allegory.  He knew the irrelevance about which Bell spoke, but could find no comfort in it.  Nor could he resist succumbing to it.

***

The life of a movie is strange.  I remember a picture from one of Bob Dylan's Hollywood scrapbooks, it depicted a stirring crowd at the center of which was an aged Marlene Dietrich looking sad and confused.  The occasion was Gary Cooper's funeral.  What struck me about it was how Dietrich's iconographic aura broke down for me in that instant.  As if seeing her made her the human being I never knew in her movies.  Perhaps Dancing in Amdo worked on such a profound level for me for the exact opposite reason:  with the transgression of dragging the external world into art, I saw people I knew, or at least the traces of their story, as something devastatingly outside my world.  

UPDATE:  This is sorta sidetracking, but the fantastic Artblog by Bob has recently, coincidentally, chimed in on Ben Shahn.  As ever his clarity and incisiveness inspire me with due love (and envy).  What do they put in that Philadelphia water!?

I could press my hand on the door where you both were.

Andrew Wyeth Helga (American 1970?)

You'll have to pardon me. It's another Sunday morning, and I'm in the mood of solipsism and romance.

Andrew Wyeth, I learned yesterday, is a mild expletive in these parts, begrudged for the incident of his celebrity, and nipicked for his style and technique. At least among the circles I travel.

He provoked the Main Line Chernobyl incident of 1986. And by incident I mean: wild love; and by Main Line I mean:

I could press my hand on the door where you both were.

While pecking out the Jonathan Richman review I tried to think of an image that evoked the album title, Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild. My first flash thought was of Helga Testorf and Andrew Wyeth. Recently, my parents came to town to see a show, and I was beached for ideas on how to keep them entertained. I told my dad that the Society Hill towers were designed by I. M Pei, and that about five blocks from them was, in the lobby of an old office building, a sprawling mural by the Philadelphia-born artist, Maxfield Parrish, how it's like a great scare in a horror movie. No matter how many times you see it, and train your imagination to know its there, you simply cannot prevent the surprise. Since we didn't actually go see to see it, I'm sure the effect remains sadly unaccomplished in them both.

You can't get them to go goddamn anywhere.

I handed my mom a book of the Helga pictures. Her first response was that these people, the artist and model, were unmistakably in a kind of unhidden love. I didn't know the story. Yeah, probably.

Then this Raw and Wild thing happened, and I came across Bob's site, which is terrific. Great insights and choices. You can read his account there (just click on the name of the blog in he linked entry above to be redirected to his most recent post, which I also highly recommend), of the secret creative relationship carried on between Wyeth and Helga, whom he contracted as his nurse in 1971, and with whom he continued well into the 1980's. What struck me about the story itself, and by Bob's recapitulation was the--I think--noble desire to find shock in the human routine. And especially in creative affairs. Perhaps it is that moviemaking as an artform is graying, or that tabloids curdle our taste for banal sensations. We feel guilty, or somehow above this kind of investigation. But we ought not. This is, as Bob duly comments, a remarkable story.

I suppose it is also sort of timely just now, given the breaking news of John Edwards' affair with Rieile Hunter, a videographer he met while campaigning several years back. I've read the outrage of bloggers and in comments columns to the news stories. The reactions have been varied, and most often concern what this guy did to the Democratic Party and to his cancer-stricken wife. Not knowing those involved personally I can only say the truth of both impacts might be greater than I could imagine. Though I suspect it is far smaller. Or more accurately, greater only in the external soul that keeps it alive because there is a need for the warmth of our own mistakes, and when it is too awful or inconvenient to consider we look outside. I do genuinly hope, against the grain of our shared politics and all the good she's done, that when Arianna Huffington's own misdeeds come to light, there might be a force as meddlesome and petty as hers to burn a cross-shaped souvenir into her forehead. But I digress.

You see the idea is fascination, not purposeless snooping. Not sportsman's cruelty. Again, I digress.

Of course there is a fundamental difference between the two affairs, that being the progeny. For the Edwardses it must be a rancid comeuppance: all humiliation, pity, and scorn. The commentors and bloggers want to know how these enomous errors could have happened. Poor politicians, poor suicide monkeys.

With the Helga situation that question doesn't apply. There is an articulate. and moreover purposeful, asking at work in the paintings--over 200 of them in total. It is not to say an enormous error wasn't made, only that something full of living light and brown earthliness overgrew it.