[This is the second entry in my week-long "series" of arts-themed documentaries.]
In his capsule review for The New York Times Stephen Holden calls New York in the 50’s (Blankenbaker, USA, 2000) a “documentary scrapbook,” and that’s a neat way of summing up both the appeal and the limitations of this brief, CliffsNotes-like introduction to the New York City/Greenwich Village arts and culture scene during the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Writer Dan Wakefield is extended screenplay credit, and the film is based on his book by the same name, though it’s unclear how much of the film is actually based on the book (which I have not read, but is characterized as a memoir featuring firsthand accounts from others). Wakefield is the most regular interviewee among what seem to be a bevy of his personal friends and acquaintances who end up serving as a collection of chatty talking heads, including but not limited to Joan Didion (who, unsurprisingly, provides several of the film’s sharpest and most memorable anecdotes), Gay Talese, John Gregory Dunne, Robert Redford, David Amram, Bruce Jay Friedman, and a number of others, all whose testimony and remembrances more or less comprise the bulk of the running time as well as provide the chief pleasures of the film. Because there’s scant else to it, and the distinct lack of archival footage makes New York in the 50’s come off as a nostalgia act simply coasting on the strength of the interview footage. Quite honestly, it feels and plays like a program that one would expect to find broadcast on PBS as filler for a slow weekend afternoon. It’s fine for what it is, I suppose, but it’s basically a rather forgettable treatment of a memorable topic.
Availability: Netflix Instant
On the one hand Alice Neel commemorates the great accomplishments of the eponymous artist; on the other it traces at what personal costs those same accomplishments entailed. We become acquainted with the headstrong young woman who eschewed traditional gender roles to devote her life to art and who defied the post-War ascension of Abstract expressionism and continued her exploration of figural painting and portraiture. As is noted in the film, this essentially amounted to “career suicide,” as her work systematically ignored until “rediscovered” by the feminist movement of the 1960′s and 70′s and rightly proclaimed as a pioneering feminist icon, which in turn flowered into a flurry of late-life fame (including several major retrospectives, honorary doctorates, college lecture tours, initiation into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, memorable appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, etc, etc) before she passed away in 1984. But we also get to know the woman who ceded complete custody of her first daughter to her first husband’s affluent Cuban family, and who could be justly accused of devoting more attention to her art than to her family’s financial or emotional stability. A complicated portrait of a complex woman and an equally complex family situation quickly emerges.
and admissions revealed in the film make clear this was not intended as some kind of a rhetorical statement. Another sequence turns tense when a conversation between Neel and his father, Alice’s other son, begin to argue over certain painful questions; the camera is averted but the audio is covertly allowed to continue rolling, and the ensuing exchange is as poignant as it is revealing. In other words, what initially seems like Neel’s tremendous advantage in making this film suddenly threatens to become a huge liability as his proximity to the subjects threatens to derail–or at least overshadow–the life and the art the film is ostensibly supposed to be about.
Magic Mike (Soderbergh, USA, 2012) – AMC Century; Digital Projection
There’s a wonderful, extended sequence early on involving Colin, where, alone his bedroom, a despondent feeling of restlessness slowly gives way to a spontaneous, ebullient catharsis as he tentatively begins to dance to a record of The Animals’s rollicking “Hey Gyp.” Mumbling along with a few English phrases, epileptically keeping time to the beat, it’s the type of private moment usually experienced alone behind locked doors, which makes it all the more remarkable to witness on a screen (also, one can’t help but feel the enigmatic conclusion to Beau Travail starting to germinate here).
And while I’m not exactly sure what the exact circumstances are that have has made this film so completely unavailable, it wouldn’t surprise me if the soundtrack, which is chock full of English language music from the period (not just The Animals, but Nico, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Prince Buster, among others), poses substantial rights issues. Which is unfortunate, because it really is itself an important rite of passage exercise in Denis’s overall filmmaking trajectory; admirable on its own, but even more impressive when considered within the context of her ever-expanding body of work.
