A year ago I took a wonderful class, Jungian Concepts Illustrated by Animals in Fairy Tales. As part of the introduction each person was invited to say which animal “brought” him or her to class. I picked the fox. Foxes are common here in Boulder, Colorado but I still get a hit of excitement every time I see one (like the time this summer when I woke up before dawn and found one the garden nosing around the bees).
Neighborhood fox sunning itself in backyard, November 2009
Speaking of foxes, there are two films you need see if you’re as into foxy beauty as I am. They’re both about the yearning/harrowing relationships we humans have with wild things.
Fantastic Mr. Fox, out in theaters now, is a masterpiece. Seriously. More than any other recent film, it made me itch for the resources only Hollywood can bestow. Gorgeous, funny, tender and sweet.
The Fox and the Child, also wonderful, is a nature film hung on a narrative about a woodland girl’s friendship with the neighborhood fox which she tries to tame. Frightening, but beautiful, too.
Neighborhood fox in full yawn, November 2009
According to the Animals in Fairy Tales instructors, each person’s chosen animal represented how he or she wished to be seen. (Uh oh.) I love how in Jungian thought symbols, especially animals, are rich with meaning. Great for dreaming… and painting.
Here’s a piece of gorgeousness I thought you’d enjoy. Silver, a 10-minute experimental film by Takeshi Murata. The technique is called datamoshing and according to critic, Ed Halter, it’s poised to hit big.
Halter spoke at First Person Cinema in Boulder last week. His topic, new materialism, referred to recent video (post 1990) in which the physical properties of video media – pixillation, distortion, noise, etc. – are strongly present in how the viewer experiences the work. It’s a vein of imagemaking that harkens back to experimental filmmaking of the 1950′s through 70′s when artists like Stan Brackhage scratched, painted, eroded and collaged on emulsion to make handmade films analogous to abstract expressionist painting.
If the work of mid-century experimental filmmakers paralleled that of painters, is there a current materialist, painter analogy to make? While mid-century abstract painting placed importance on gesture and the mark of the individual artist, current abstraction has a more materialist feel in which the physical properties of paint – texture, transparency, hue, etc. – are strongly present. This is especially true if you look at what’s happening in the world of encaustic. Wax paint, prized for its surface qualities, is surging in popularity. Esteemed painters like Joanne Mattera, Laura Moriarty and Paula Roland are making works that revel in paint’s physicality.
The paintings Silver most reminds me of are Cecily Brown’s fleshy works in oil on linen. What links all these works, I think, is awareness of being present in a body that can perceive, see, sense, feel, hear and touch. There is joy in physicality, and wonderment at being alive.
Beeswax is a show stopper at our house. Whenever we’re watching a DVD we’ve got to stop, rewind and pause when beeswax candles come on the scene. Here are three films/TV shows where beeswax steals the show.
THE TUDORS – Season One
The ultimate beeswax show is the Showtime series The Tudors. Every interior scene in this sexed up epic about Henry the VIII’s court is lit with beeswax. According to TimesOnline “thousands of pounds were lavished on handmade double-wicked beeswax candles to provide authentic lighting for the interior spaces.” The results are stunning, and boggling… just thinking of the time & expense.
TIMELINE
The time travel movie Timeline has a single shot that just slays me. When the time travelers are crashing their way through a medieval French marketplace there’s a stall full of beeswax candles in a corner of the scene. (Blink & you miss it.) There are dozens of hanging candles there, all perfectly, perfectly golden. It’s the platonic ideal of a beekeepers market booth and what I aspire to (and, alas, fall short of) when we sell honey & candles at our local market in the fall.
THE DUCHESS
It was fun to see The Duchess win an Oscar for best costume design this year. Should it have won for art direction too? This is a film that used massive amounts of candles in a stylized way to frame the Duchess of Devonshire’s face & upper body. In reality, royal candles would have beeswax back then, but hard to say if the production used beeswax or another wax for the film (some of those candles looked whitish to me). Beautiful nonetheless.
Do you have a favorite beeswax film to add to the list? Please do! I’d love to know about it.
One of the cool things about being a beekeeper is that people know you go for stuff like this.
Our friend Judy found this gorgeous wasps’ nest in the tree by her front door in Boulder last year. She was kind enough not to poison it and let it hang outside as hair-raising entertainment all summer long. (Brave woman!) We collected it after the wasps died naturally in the fall.
My first impulse, once we got it home, was to cut it open! (I’m terribly curious to see what it looks like inside. Aren’t you?) But the wavy patterns in the paper, and the inclusion of twigs and leaves into the body of the nest are so beautifully made, I’ve yet to bring myself to take it apart.
In the BBC costume drama Wives and Daughters there’s a scene where the romantic lead, a budding naturalist, brings a wasps’ nest home to his steadfast love interest Molly. It’s a powerful image, the empty paper nest. A gray vessel; round, rattling; full of phantom stings.
UPDATE 3/4/09
These are most likely bald faced hornets, not paper wasps. Have changed title accordingly.
Ooh! There’s a new film out that I can hardly wait to see. It’s called Who Does She Think She Is? and it’s about work/life balance told through the stories of five women artists. I just spent the last half hour browsing the film’s site & blog and came away feeling inspired but also struck as the filmmakers’ experience – early rejections from big festivals followed by exhilarating success with independent screenings – reminds me of my own with Sister Bee. I think there’s pent up demand for this type of filmmaking – films by and about women made for broad audiences – that just isn’t being met.
Thanks to Alyson Stanfield and her wonderful ArtBizBlog for the heads up.
Ah, dear readers. Have you seen Man on Wire yet? It’s a wonderful documentary about the magical power of art and tells the story of Philippe Petiit’s death-defying tightrope walk between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. It’s not just a daredevil story. Petit’s a true artist and the years of dreaming, scheming and planning that went into pulling off his mind-bending performance are an inspiration. It’s also a poignant coda to the horrors of 9/11.
A new discovery! PBS has a show called How Art Made the World that links artmaking to human evolution and it’s fascinating. A wonderful blend of soft and hard; art and science; anthropology, biology, history and archeology… And the suspense! (It’s got a heckofabunch for an art history show.) Enjoy.
It’s Spirit Awards season. As a voter this means I’m cramming on the nominees – watching as many films as I can before the voting deadline in February.
Julian Schnabel’s new film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (nominated for best feature, director, screenplay and cinematography) has been on my wanna-see list for awhile. I finally checked it out this weekend. Dear readers, it is stunning. Heartbreaking. Beautiful in every way. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, it tells the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor who wrote a memoir by blinking his eye after suffering a massive stroke and paralysis at age 43. It’s also a film about the redemptive power of art.
“It was as if some, I don’t know, God or whoever said: ‘You can be a great artist and have no body or you can be a perfectly healthy and normal but you’ll be an ordinary person: Which one would you like to be?’”
Good films about artists and artmaking are a rare treat. So I feel compelled to point them out whenever I find them.
Have you seen The Science of Sleep? It’s beautiful! Starring Gael Garcia Bernal as an aspiring disastrology calendar designer who has a hard time telling the difference between his waking life and sleep. (What’s disastrology you ask? Well, dear readers, you’ll have to check out the movie to see.)
It’s a love story. But very much about dreams, unrequited yearning and creative process too. The love interest is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg as a sculptor who crafts symbolic objects (birds, boats, trees…) of paper and felt. The art direction and stop motion animation are top notch. I loved this film. Hope you get a chance to love it too.
Ooh! One of the unexpected bennies of joining the IFP this year to promote SISTER BEE was receiving an invitation to vote on the 2007 Spirit Awards. Fun project. I confess… I didn’t get to view all the nominees but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Andy and I spent the last three weeks studying up – watching a nominee a night – trying to cram them all in. I won’t bore you with a blow by blow of each film. But thought I’d pass the word along about some stellar films you may not yet have had a chance to see.
MOST CHARMING
Had to be WRISTCUTTERS. A romantic comedy in the vein of “Harold and Maude,” WRISTCUTTERS features the surreal yet banal adventures of a motley group of suicides as they navigate the afterworld in search of love and hope. Quirky story. Great cast (Tom Waits, Patrick Fugit). Wistful. Strangely uplifting. Don’t let the title turn you off.
MOST HIP FOUR EYED MONSTERS. Hmm… how to describe this innovative film? Two young artists (a filmmaker and a painter) meet online and carry out an experimental courtship in which they choose not to speak. They communicate by scrawling post-its, tapping out email, IM’s and making video blogs and collaborative drawings. It’s a semi-autobiographical film with a documentary feel. I didn’t make a love connection with either of the principal characters but had a blast watching them play at making art out of bits and bytes. Beautifully shot. Absolutely worth a look-see.
MOST ARTFUL FREAK SHOW
In the mood for something a different? Check out BROTHERS OF THE HEAD. Another feature-shot-like-a-documentary about a set of conjoined twins – teenage brothers who become punk stars after an ambitious music promoter whisks them away from their childhood home and teaches them how to play guitar. BROTHERS OF THE HEAD offers a punk-poetic exploration of celebrity, individuality, brotherhood and privacy. Creepy-beautiful.
MOST THRILLING
I don’t want to give away any plot points for SORRY, HATERS (which, by the way, turned out NOT to be the sensitive, character-driven film about race relations in post 9-11 New York I thought it was going to be). Let’s just say that Robin Wright Penn’s portrayal of a New York career woman who takes a fateful cab ride rivals Glenn Close’s performance in FATAL ATTRACTION for most hair raising. SORRY, HATERS is an uncompromising thriller that left my jaw hanging. If you get a chance to see it, drop me a line. I’d love to hear what you think.
BEST PERFORMANCE
Ryan Gosling garnered an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a drug-addicted school teacher in HALF NELSON. Light on plot but heavy on character and atmosphere I appreciated this film’s slowness which seemed about love to me.
there’s a scene where the romantic lead, a budding naturalist, brings a wasps’ nest home to his steadfast love interest Molly. It’s a powerful image, the empty paper nest. A gray vessel; round, rattling; full of phantom stings.
