Art...on the March! (a visual mixtape)

Favorite paintings, drawings, etc (of the moment): a slideshow and a visual list - years later, the slideshow no longer works and has been removed

Just for the fun of it, at the end of this post (after displaying 90 favorites) I've embedded a slideshow featuring some of my favorite paintings (drawings, etchings, etc.), from all eras, all artists, and in all styles. Last summer I spent weeks searching favorite artists and/or works on the internet - while I may have dropped the ball in a few cases (cropped images, even imitations) most of the selections are quality images. As you'll see, my taste is fairly eclectic; using lists assembled from art books and museum visits I googled all the artists whose work personally struck me (a very, very subjective barometer) and the result leaps from wildly avant-garde abstractions to hyperrealistic academic paintings to unconsciously bizarre medeival holy works to delightful 18th century portraits to impressionistic dreamviews to surrealistic nuggets of subversion. Although the image size is rather too small and the slideshow moves a bit too fast (couldn't figure out how to slow it down), I enjoy the wild juxtapositions. (Fair warning: the slide show won't play on an iPhone, though the 90 images above it will be fine.)

And below, as a bonus I've included a chronological illustrated list of 90 artworks that, at this very moment, I wanted to include. No other criterion applied. Hope you enjoy them as much as me...

The muddled message of The Dark Knight Rises

This piece, not a review proper but an examination of the film's themes, contains spoilers and is designed for those who have already seen the movie.

Four years ago, when this blog was in its infancy, I offered no less than four pieces touching on The Dark Knight. I was fascinated by the cultural phenomenon it represented, so rare these days. (I don't think even Avatar transcended the cinematic ghetto to the same extent; probably no other film since Titanic has, unless you discount the subsequent disappointment and include The Phantom Menace for its anticipatory buildup.) But I was also compelled by the film itself, which proved a sort of golden exception to my 00s blockbuster aversion. Aesthetically, The Dark Knight shared many of the flaws that turn me off from contemporary popcorn movies (which often seem to be either ashamed of the taste of popcorn or overly enamored of synthetic CGI butter). It took itself and its themes rather seriously; it preferred a muddy, gritty look to visual clarity and beauty; it seemed determined to make a comic-book world "realistic." Yet, in spite of these potential drawbacks, I was fascinated by the tragic, tightly divergent world it drew, as well as by the iconic performance of Heath Ledger as Joker. Even though I did not care for Batman Begins, I was converted to the Nolan Dark Knight camp, and eagerly awaited the next entry in the series. And here it is, cloaked in death like the first movie (following, rather than spurring the hype this time) - and thus assured of notoriety, however undesired by its creators.

Spade & Marlowe, Private Eyes (The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, on page and screen)

Who is Sam Spade? Who is Philip Marlowe?

Well, for many film buffs, Bogie will always be Bogie. Granted, there's plenty of wiggle room within the Humphrey Bogart persona: the paranoia of Fred C. Dobbs, Dixon Steele, or Captain Queeg; the ruthlessness of those many gangster roles; the lovable grunginess of his turn in The African Queen. But when he dons his detective's fedora and lights his cigarette, there's an iconic continuity to the look, the mannerisms, the speech. One could justifiably assume that Bogart's iconic screen presence eclipses any individual character tics, whether he's supposed to be playing San Francisco sleuth Sam Spade (in John Huston's 1941 The Maltese Falcon) or L.A. dick Philip Marlowe (in Howard Hawks' 1946 The Big Sleep). Yet at root, Spade and Marlowe are very different people - one might even say fundamentally so, despite the superficial similarities and notable overlap. Within the hardboiled detective persona, they represent different motivations and actions - at least as originally conceived.

Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. II

Short thoughts on: The deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni • The Wild One • The Virgin Spring • The Departed and Infernal Affairs • Bus 174 • Pan's Labyrinth and The Spirit of the Beehive • John Cassevetes and Noah Baumbach • The Stranger • Benito Mussolini's weenie

A year and a half ago, I transferred ten of my old comments from the Internet Movie Database to The Dancing Image, in a post called "Fragments of Cinephilia". This here is the follow-up: ten further memoirs of my pre-blogging days, in this case recycled from the summer of 2007 and including some great quotations from others. The topics range from heady to trivial: we start on a silent Olympus and end with a castrated dictator. Feel free to leave your own musings below - one of the pleasures of my old hunting ground (the IMDb) was the give-and-take, and I'd love to see it continue here. Enjoy.

This is Not a Film & Venom and Eternity

A few months ago, I saw This is Not a Film for the first time. I had just arrived in Los Angeles and it seemed somehow appropriate to view Jafar Panahi's documentary about his own house arrest (and his desire to make a film despite the Iranian regime's ban on that activity for him, following his support of a protest movement) on the outskirts of Hollywood. After all, This is Not a Film (smuggled into the 2011 Cannes Film Festival in a cake) represents a challenge and a question, or several questions, to conventional assumptions about cinema. Is the film(?)'s title true? Is it a film - or to raise the stakes even higher, a movie? What is a movie? Is it simply pointing a camera - film, video, whatever - and shooting something?

That question seems a perfect set-up for an authoritative "no" followed by a discourse on how the simple act of photography-in-motion is not sufficient, and filmmakers need one or more of the following to create a real movie: actors, a story, multiple shots, editing, creative use of the frame, etc etc. Even Jafar Panahi himself seems to hold to this theory at times, bemoaning that his discussion of what he would shoot, if he could, can't hold a candle to the actual result itself. "If the script was the movie," he sighs, "then I wouldn't need to shoot the movie." But, in fact, my answer to the question is "yes" - whether the end result is a sloppy home movie, an experimental art film, a big-budget blockbuster, or test footage for technical purposes the end result is, in an essential sense, a movie.

The Long Goodbye

This review contains spoilers about the book and the film.

One of the most unique neo-noirs of the seventies, The Long Goodbye displays both the advantages and pitfalls of free-association adaptation. Both critics and defenders of the film tend to miss the point. Goodbye boosters point to Altman's rich invention and thought-provoking subversion of genre tropes, but tend to take for granted the conventionality of the source - Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Marlowe had become in '73 and remains today a cultural icon as the prototypical private eye thanks to Chandler's series of detective stories and novels spanning the thirties and forties and (especially pertinent here) the films based on this material. Meanwhile, the film's critics notice what Gould's and Altman's Marlowe is missing but don't seem to appreciate what is added to, or even improved upon, from the book. The latter group have become more obsolete these days, as the distance from Chandler's era increases and the movie becomes more and more a part of the cinematic firmament it once seemed to subvert - a fixture rather than an outlier. In the mean time, I sense, less and less people commenting on the film have actually read the book it's based on, or realize how much the film's sense of subversion, disappointment, and distance shares with the novel itself - and what the film misses in some of its broader departures.

Ben-Hur

Around 1991, when I kicked off ;my video collection in earnest (the few kids' films I owned up to that point didn't really count towards a self-conscious canon), Ben-Hur was one of the first VHS tapes I purchased - or that my father purchased for me anyway; at 7, I didn't have much in the way of a disposable income. I remember seeing the case in a video store somewhere in Boston - around Easter, I think. I was impressed by the grandeur of that iconic poster on the cover, with the title chiseled out of the hard rock of a canyon face, against which a Roman statue leaned while tiny chariots raced around the huge letters. I was spurred on too by the bulk of the video package - remember that at this time, long films got two cassettes, creating a hefty physical size to match the scope of the movie within.

What are 100 (of Your) Favorite Movies?

An Open Question for Bloggers, Lurkers, and Stumblers

Call it a meme if you like, though I think the term's gone out of fashion. Anyway, I'm not setting any rules or regulations, and I'm not tagging anyone - just asking a question that I'd love to see answered. The "(of Your)" part of the title is essential; these lists need not be definitive in any way. They should just represent movies you want to highlight at this particular moment to express your taste or amuse yourself and others. If a hundred titles are too many, or too few, pick another number. Feel free to include pictures and brief explanations (that was the most fun part for me) - or not. You can respond in the comments below or on your own blog; you can tag others or follow my lead and just ask everyone. And of course you could snicker at the question and say, huffily (as a fellow in a Joy Division shirt recently sneered at me when I asked his favorite of their albums), "I hate those stupid questions!" But where's the fun in that?

Here's my own list, from last December (already there's a bunch of stuff I would change around): 100 of My Favorite Movies

Enjoy yourselves. I'm really interested to see who picks what.

Lost and Found - and Back in Action

In which The Dancing Image is removed, restored, and - as of today - reactivated

I thought it was all over.

Last week, I passed my blog on to a co-worker, thinking he would enjoy some of the features. When I came to work Monday, I was told the address didn't work. Thinking he must have typed it in wrong, I jumped on his smart phone to connect him directly. What I found when I reached thedancingimage.blogspot.com made my blood run cold..."This blog has been removed." No explanation of who/what/where/why/when just a simple message apparently sweeping away 4 years of dedication, passion, and organization - what (embarrassing as it may be to admit) was the work I valued most from the harried, often frustrating time known as my mid-twenties.

Explore The Dancing Image - TOP POSTS

This is a collection of my strongest work. It will top the blog as I take a break from the site. (If you want to see an updated version featuring a few more highlights from 2012, visit the "Top Posts" page.)
 
Welcome (or welcome back) to The Dancing Image. There are several ways to explore the site, beginning with the video clip series "32 Days of Movies." With selections from my collection, I created a tour through a century of cinema, from The Cameraman's Revenge (1912) to Antichrist (2009). Click on this icon to browse the films included, or visit the video gallery to peruse chapters.

As for the rest of the site, I can point you to the movie timeline for a chronological overview of all films covered on The Dancing Image, or the directory for an alphabetical archive of all my reviews and other miscellaneous pieces. You can also visit the picture gallery to scroll through great images from the past three years; click on any picture to visit the post in question. My annual blogger round-ups offer a wider view of the blogosphere, starting with the 2011 tribute. Finally, though it's linked below as well, I'll point you to one of my last posts of the year in case you missed it: a list of 100 of my favorite movies.

TOP POSTS

This post's primary purpose is to highlight some of my work, whether prose essays, image-only visual tributes, or even the occasional video piece. Before each description I've specified which of five categories a piece falls into ("Essay" - "Video" - "Mixed Media" - "Image" - "List"). This way, if you prefer certain approaches over others, you can pick and choose what to look at. Though I hope you'll check them all out eventually.

They advise saving the best for last but as a wise man once said, I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion...

____________

32 Days of Movies - "To Become Immortal, and Then, to Die."  •  "Reality Cinema"
video
Chapters 19 & 31 in video series - one closes off the 60s epoch with a bang (including a lightning fast montage featuring 60 years of cinema in 40 seconds) and the other scans the 00s, with its mixture of documentary and impressionism

100 of My Favorite Movies
list

One hundred films I love, with a picture and brief capsule for each

 Astaire and Rogers
video
Video clips of every single Fred & Ginger dance number

Boomer Baseball: Field of Dreams & the 60s
essay
Field of Dreams seen through a prism of 60s nostalgia and boomer mythology

Cities of the Imagination
mixed media
A prose/image reflection on city dreams, using Carl Jung, the Chinese film The World, Michel Gondry's music videos, and my own memories

Citizen Kane
essay

An analysis of how each narrator subtly shifts the tone and style, both cinematic and narrative, in this celebrated masterpiece

Civilisation in Pictures
image
Great works of Western art, in visual tribute to the wonderful British TV series

The Corruption of Michael Corleone
image
The descent of a character into darkness and evil, told using only images from the Godfather films

directed by Brian De Palma
video
A video tribute to the dark fusion of sex and violence in the director's cinema
(this is the one piece I am proudest of)

The Director's Chair
list
32 favorite directors, represented by evocative title cards & clips from their work

A dirty dozen
list
An imaginary lineup of double features, arranged thematically into six categories: 'Their Town,' 'Secret Societies,' 'She Did It Her Way,' 'Rising to the Top,' By Airplane or Submarine,' and 'Movement, Music, and Montage'

The Fall and Redemption of Anakin Skywalker
image
An image-only representation of Darth Vader's trip to the dark side

Flight of the Red Balloon
essay
A review of the French film, exploring its relationship to the earlier Red Balloon and the French New Wave, which kicked off my 'Best of the 21st Century?' series

The Great Movies
mixed media
A tribute to one of my favorite movie books, an obscure, out-of-print coffee table tome discovered in childhood and relished ever since; includes many scanned images from the book itself

Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard
essay
A review of Sunset Boulevard which concludes my series on early 50s films dishing the dirt on the film industry

In the Beginning...
image
Nine great 'opening' images from movies - meaning these are the very first visuals we see onscreen; this post also kicked off an active and lively 'picture gallery' meme, and the other entries are listed at the bottom

It's a Wonderful Life

essay
A re-examination of the holiday classic in light of its psychological darkness, political implications, and historical resonance

Just because you are a character, doesn't mean you have character... Part 1 • Part 2
list
Two posts, taken together comprising 100 favorite characters in film history, from Nosferatu to Kong to Mrs. Robinson to  E.T. to the Dude

Lawrence of Arabia
essay
An essay on one of my favorite films, celebrating its expression of personal psychology through epic landscapes

Let Them All In... Let the Right One In Book/Movie/Remake
essay
History of all the different versions of Let the Right One In, a film about a teenage girl vampire and her strange friendship with a lonely little boy

The Magnificent Ambersons
essay
Observations on a massacred masterpiece, and how the studio's cuts actually reflect the very theme of the movie: the descent from elegance into the mundane




The Musical Countdown - 42nd Street • The Gay Divorcee
video • mixed media
Two offbeat entries in a musical countdown: 42nd Street leads with a 5-minute video examining the narrative & stylistic sweep of the Busby Berkeley classic, while The Gay Divorcee explores the "Night and Day" number through Arlene Croce's prose & images from the film

Reading the Movies
list
My ten favorite movie books, with the stories behind each one, fifteen runners-up, and an invitation for other bloggers to participate (they did)

Remembering the Movies, Dec. 3 - 9
mixed media
Probably the most interesting entry in my movie-history series, this covers a Siskel & Ebert conversation on Edward Scissorhands, two classic cartoons from Warners and Disney, my capsule on Flash Gordon, memories of films seen when I was 7 and 17, and extracts from a contentious debate between Pauline Kael and the Maysles Brothers on the truth of Gimme Shelter.

The Restoration: Glimpses of the Past - and Future?
image
A smorgasboard of screen-caps, stills, and posters from unavailable films, in tribute to the 'Film Restoration' blogathon

Shaking the Foundations
image
Enticing images from the fantastic Italian film Fists in the Pocket, a sixties touchstone about the ultimate dysfunctional family; the visual tribute concludes with one of my all-time favorite quotations, a profound statement on the film and its times

Shine on You Crazy Diamonds...
list
20 headshots of my 20 favorite actresses

The Singer Not the Song
image
Beautiful images captured from 'The Nightingale,' based on a Japanese fable, aired for Shelley Duvall's 1980s TV series 'Faerie Tale Theatre,' starring Mick Jagger

The Social Network
mixed media
Musings on The Social Network, presented in the form of a Facebook page

Summer Hours (Best of the 21st Century?)
essay
Review of the French film about a family letting go of their country home - maybe my strongest piece for the 'Best of the 21st Century?' series

The Sunday Matinee - Before the Revolution
essay
Bertolucci's hard-to-find classic, about a romantic young man who struggles with his Marxist beliefs and sleeps with his aunt, gets the 'Sunday Matinee' treatment, as part of my series on 60s New Wave cinema

Syndromes and a Century
image
Images of city and country, green and white, warm and cold, from great Thai film

They Once Were Coming Attractions... (memories of my movie past, 1988 - 1998)
image
Sheer nostalgia for my generation (born circa 1983), a lineup of movie posters from everything I saw in theaters between ages 4 - 15

This Sporting Life, Billy Liar, and the British New Wave
essay
Historical overview of British 'kitchen sink' films of the 1960s, focusing on two films which came out in 1963, representing a profound shift in the movement

Top of the World
image
A visual tribute to Rocky's triumphant morning run

Triumph of the Will
essay
Reflections on Leni Riefenstahl's powerful and disturbing Nazi propaganda doc

Twin Peaks: Lonely Souls • Beyond Life and Death
essay
Write-ups on two climactic 'Twin Peaks' episodes (the revelation of the killer, and the finale), entries in my series on the TV show

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
essay
After watching this movie (the prequel to the TV series), I was impressed, upset, and uneasy with what I'd seen, and I wrote this review

Two Things We Know About Pictures
mixed media
Impressionistic tribute to Pierrot le fou, using Godard's famous quote and images captured from the film

Waiting for the 25th Hour
essay
Seven years after the movie came out (and at the exact time the main character would be getting out of prison) I revisit Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of the few films to deal directly with 9/11, for the 'Counting Down the Zeroes' series

The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush
essay
Polemical response to Newsweek's shallow 'Art in the Bush Era' piece, reflecting on culture and politics of the 00s - this one came straight from the gut

The Wind in the Willows - Dulce Domum • Toad Hall
essay
Observations on Kenneth Grahame's classic book accompanied with images from film adaptations: 'Toad Hall' explores the setting in light of British social history; 'Dulce Domum' relates Grahame's personal biography to the book's theme of 'home'