I was absolutely stunned to return home to New York tonight from a wedding in Massachusetts and read online that one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, died this weekend in Claremont, California.
Wallace's novels include Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, and he is the author of several excellent books of essays, including A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster.
From the obituary in the L.A. Times:
Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.
"What was a party is now a wake," Ulin said as the news of Wallace's death circulated. "People were speechless and just blown away.
"He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years," Ulin said.
"He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late '80s and early 1990s," Ulin said. "And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything."
Mr. Wallace burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s with a style variously described as “pyrotechnic” and incomprehensible, and it was compared to those of writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
His opus, Infinite Jest, published by Little, Brown & Company in 1996, is set in the near future, in a time called the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and is, roughly, about addiction and how the need for pleasure and entertainment can interfere with human connection.
In a New York Times review of the book, Jay McInerney wrote that the novel’s “skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail.”
“The overall effect.” Mr. McInerney continued, “is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola.”
Wallace's blend of extreme wit, irreverence, curiosity, humor and, finally, generosity was completely unique in contemporary literature. This is very, very sad.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/14/2008 02:05:00 AM
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Monday, August 18, 2008
MANNY FARBER, 1917 - 2008
Celebrated and influential film critic Manny Farber died yesterday at the age of 91. At Movie City Indie Ray Pride has a lovely, well-linked remembrance, which opens like this:
Manny Farber, painter, brilliant writer, indelible critic and all-round original whom some aped and few grazed, died in his sleep last night at the age of 91. He had retired from writing and teacher and devoted himself to painting and drawing. To cite Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, which early Preston Sturges savant Farber would likely not frown upon, "What a life!"
Glenn Kenny also has a long piece on Farber. An excerpt:
If you've never read Farber, just stop here and get to it. His collected criticism, in a volume called Negative Space, is one of the touchstone texts of film writing—tough-minded, sharp-eyed, idiosyncratic, often wildly funny, and with a bedrock integrity and aesthetic acuity that even best best of contemporary film critics are hard-pressed to approach, let alone match. He is most often cited for coining the phrases "termite art" and "white-elephant art," two opposed categories. What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle.
GreenCine has a comprehensive round-up here, and Karina Longworth has discovered some more Farber internet resources at Spout.
Three years ago Filmmaker published Barbara Schock's piece on studying with Farber. We'll have that piece up on the website later in the week.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/18/2008 11:42:00 PM
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Monday, July 07, 2008
THOMAS M. DISCH, R.I.P.
i was saddened to read today that writer and poet Tom Disch committed suicide in his New York apartment on July 4th. I've always been a big fan of Disch's classic intellectual science-fiction novels of the 1970s: the amazing Camp Concentration, 334, and On Wings of Song, as well as his great collections of short fiction, Getting into Death and Fundamental Disch. Following my teenage years, when I read a lot of science fiction, Disch was one of the few writers, along with J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Stanislaw Lem, who retained a space on my bookshelf. I met him briefly once, when my friend Mark Binder and I invited him to speak at Columbia when we were students there. I remember him as a witty, commanding and slightly intimidating figure.
Most people reading this will probably remember a Disch story, The Brave Little Toaster, that was turned into a Disney animated film, but he was a very prolific writer whose work spanned genres. His stories were often poetic but always fiercely interrogative of power, government, authority and convention.
A number of writers and bloggers have posted remembrances. In his, Scott Edelman quotes John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:
Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distant mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fine cruelty of his wit, Thomas M. Disch has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers.
I certainly read him; his SF novels of the 1960s and 70s, particularly Camp Concentration and 334, had an enormous impact on me. But “least read” may be true: according to publishing legend, his SF masterpiece On Wings of Song had a 90% return rate in its 1980 Bantam paperback edition. Despite that, he went on to hit bestseller lists with his 1991 horror novel The M.D. Just as unexpectedly, his children’s book The Brave Little Toaster was adapted into a popular Disney cartoon.
He could be hard to take, both in person and in his public interactions with the SF world. He played the game of literary politics hard, and sometimes lost badly. He frequently seemed to have no patience for his allies, much less his enemies. Of his other career, as noted poet Tom Disch, I can’t say much, except that to my mind the poetry was often good. In his later years he wrote a blog; after he began to post frequently on the depravity of Muslims and immigrants, I became unable to keep reading it.
The Disch I prefer to remember was no nicer than that, but much smarter: a brittle and brilliant ironist with a bright wit and no optimism whatsoever. Here are the concluding lines of his 1965 SF novel The Genocides, a book wedged forever up the nose of overweening skiffy can-do-ism:
"Nature is prodigal. Of a hundred seedlings only one or two would survive; of a hundred species, only one or two. Not, however, man."
Disch had apparently been depressed over health issues, the death of his partner from cancer three years earlier, and attempts by his landlord to evict him from his rent-controlled apartment (Disch's partner, Charles Naylor, had the name on the lease). The saddest post is over at the Daily Kos, in which Eric S. writes about his own relationship with Disch as well as some of these things Disch was battling.
After reading all of this, if you're not familiar with Disch, I recommend starting with Camp Concentration. His latest novel, The Word of God, will be published this summer.
But it was as an exemplar of a generation of more sophisticated, better-educated science-fiction writers who emerged in the 1960s that Mr. Disch first stood out. His dark themes, disturbing plots, corrosive social commentary and sheer unpredictability made him a leader of what was called “the new wave” of science fiction writers, those who consciously wrote literature rather than disposable pulp entertainment.
“You could finally write for grownups!” Mr. Disch said in 2001 in an interview with Strange Horizons, an online speculative fiction magazine.
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a poet and critic, said Monday, “The reason his science fiction is important is that he combined a kind of really dark Swiftian satire with a modernist, really postmodernist sensibility.”
David Pringle, an editor and critic, most recently listed three novels by Mr. Disch on his list of the 100 best science fiction novels: “Camp Concentration” (1968), which tells of political prisoners who are being treated with a new drug that increases their intelligence, but also causes their early deaths; “334” (1972), which describes a New York City housing project that has sunk to depressing depths in 2023; and “On Wings of Song” (1979), which chronicles an Iowan who comes to New York and encounters a similar hell.
He was first published in the early 1970s, and over the next few decades he wrote fluidly and accessibly on a range of topics, notably avant-garde cinema but also film noir and documentary. His work appeared in publications including Artforum, Film Comment, Cineaste, The Village Voice and USA Today magazine. For several years starting in the mid-1980s he served on the board for two venerable avant-garde film institutions in New York: the Collective for Living Cinema, an adventurous screening space, now closed, and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, a nonprofit film-rental library.
Mr. Arthur also ventured behind the camera. In 1970 he began his first short, “Correspondences,” which he shot in 8-millimeter film and finished some five years later. He completed 14 other films, including a 1986 feature-length work called “(Late) of the Primate’s Palace,” which he described in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative catalog as an autobiographical travelogue and which was dedicated to his father.
Update: Arthur's family has posted a lovely remembrance at the New York Times death notices section, and one of his former students, Ian Hill, posts in the comment section below this link to his own piece on Arthur, a long blog entry that captures the intelligence and passion of his teaching.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/22/2008 11:35:00 PM
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Sunday, December 16, 2007
ST. CLAIRE BOURNE, RIP
Sadly, this just in from Adrienne Jones, Treasurer and Membership Director of the Black Documentary Collective:
We regret to inform everyone that St Clair Bourne, our founder, has passed away.
Details of his passing will follow. Also, information about his memorial service will be sent as soon as we have it.
Members have expressed interest in making donations to the family. We would like to contribute money through our BDC/St Clair Bourne fund. If you wish to make a donation, please forward payment to:
BDC P.O. Box 610 Hamilton Grange Station New York, NY 10031.
In the memo line please write BDC/St Clair Bourne Fund.
Over the past 35 years, St. Clair Bourne has been the producer, director and writer of some forty-five film productions, including documentaries for HBO, PBS, NBC, BBC and National Geographic in addition to his own independent work. He has produced the feature-length documentary Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks for HBO. With actor Wesley Snipes as narrator and executive producer, Bourne directed John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk and also directed Paul Robeson: Here I Stand!, a two-hour documentary for the “American Masters” PBS series. He was also a co-producer on the HBO dramatic feature Rebound, the true story of playground basketball legend Earl “The Goat” Manigault as well as Woodie King’s independent theatrical feature The Long Night. Bourne is the executive producer for Visitors, Melis Birder’s documentary about the family and friends of the incarcerated and Filiberto: Dead or Alive about the Puerto Rican nationalist Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Bourne is currently shooting a film about veteran photographer Ernest Withers and a documentary series about the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party for PBS.
In a short piece by Chester Higgins in The New York Times, Bourne said about his work, "What I do is explain people's lifestyles and choices, and I show the consequences of those choices." Discussing his film on Paul Robeson, he says, "You get a portrait of an individual, but at the end of the two hours you end up knowing why Paul Robeson does all the things he does, even some of the things that are negative, and you can understand why he does them." The New York Times also produced a short video featuring Bourne discussing his work; it can be seen here, and he also maintained a blog, which be read here. And on his blog, Chuck Tryon has a comment.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 12/16/2007 02:38:00 PM
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007
MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI, 1912-2007
The great Michelangelo Antonioni, director of such films as L'Avventura, Red Desert, Blow-Up and The Passenger, died in Italy yesterday. He was 94.
The New York Times in its obituary quotes Jack Nicholson's remarks on the director when he presented him with a career Oscar:
'In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting."
Already the elements of this fastidious craftsman's style were locked in place: the awareness of landscapes, usually melancholy, the sense of people drifting through time and space, but held always under the tightest control, the persistence of vision. "I need to follow my characters beyond the moments conventionally considered important," he said, "to show them even when everything appears to have been said".
GreenCine's coverage is here, and one piece the site has linked to is this Michael Atkinson appreciation of Nuri Bilge Ceylan -- proof of the continuing influence of Antonioni on younger filmmakers. Indeed, while Antonioni hailed from an earlier conception of art cinema -- his films virtually demand to be seen not on video but on a movie screen, where their deliberate pacing, attention to sound design and precise framing evolve into a hypnotic critique of the modern world -- the questions he asked in his films are more relevant than ever.
If I had to name a single favorite film, it would most likely be his The Passenger, in which Jack Nicholson plays a reporter who impulsively assumes the identity of a similarly featured dead man -- a gun runner -- and allows that man's appointment book to dictate his drift through North Africa and Europe. The film was re-released last year by Sony Pictures Classics, and I hadn't seen it in years. My memory of the film was solid, but when I screened it at 20 years old I was compelled by its thinking about the ways in which the Western media represents the third world. The theorist and filmmaker Peter Wollen had co-written the screenplay, and embedded within its story and Antonioni's compositions was an essay on the ideologies of the narratives we create for ourselves. When I watched it again, so many years later, these ideas were all still there, of course. But I hadn't remembered how purely beautiful, emotional, and finally devastating the film is, from its carefree moments of abandon with Maria Schneider in a convertible to Nicholson's concluding, crushing monologue in which, clearly consumed by depression, he recounts the story of a blind man who, after suddenly regaining his sight, becomes disenchanted with the world around him. At the end of this film, Antonioni staged perhaps his most famous shot in which the camera departs the film's deceased protagonist, melts through a wall and, like our world, lives on.
Although crippled by a stroke and rendered aphasic, Antonioni, who began his career as a reporter, continued to make films throughout his years, sometimes with the help of supporters like Wim Wenders. (Wenders' book My Time with Antonioni is a curious, at times quite sad, but ultimately illuminating portrait of the filmmaking process.) If, by any chance, you are unfamiliar with his work, please take some time to discover them, starting with the titles I listed above.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/31/2007 10:26:00 AM
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Tuesday, June 19, 2007
DANIEL ROBERT EPSTEIN, R.I.P.
I didn't know Daniel Robert Epstein personally, but I read and admired the smart, cinephilic and always entertaining interviews he'd do with film directors over at the Suicide Girls site and would often link to them here. Now, Epstein is reportedly dead at 31. There are few details, but click on the link for some remembrances from Missy Suicide and, at current count, over 300 other posters.
Epstein: El Topo became a seminal movie after its release in the United States. What were your expectations when you finished the film?
Jodorowsky: I never in my life have expectations. I only live. I was very surprised one day, when I was invited to New York for a Bangladesh concert. Ok, I came and a limousine was waiting for me. It was the first time in my life I was in a limousine and I was with a very beautiful Hindu secretary. I came to the first row for the Bangladesh concert and then they took me to a restaurant with all the musicians there. I was astonished. It was almost like a dream. I never expected nothing.
DRE: A big part of the experience of seeing your movies was being on psychedelics and other drugs, were you ever into drugs?
AJ: No, no, for me it wasn’t my reality. At that time, in New York if you don’t take drugs or smoke marijuana or cocaine, you were an idiot person. The first time I smoked a marijuana cigarette I was 40 years old in order to sell the picture. I did it because nobody would take me seriously if I had never smoked. When I went to a party here in New York I had to go to a window with a little hole to breathe because all the smoke from the marijuana was killing me.
DRE: What was your mindset when you were making the films?
AJ: I have a monstrous imagination. I am like a monster, more than Dali, more than Salvador Dali. I have an enormous imagination and all my life I was like that. It is something I do naturally.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 6/19/2007 12:49:00 AM
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Tuesday, November 21, 2006
ROBERT ALTMAN, R.I.P.
As various news sites, including Reuters, are reporting, Robert Altman died last night in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 81.
There are many ways to eulogize this remarkable director, a true maverick who never relinquished his own very personal idea of independence over many decades of work. For now, I'm just going to point you to Matthew Ross's cover story on Altman in our Spring, 2006 issue. At the time he had just finished A Prarie Home Companion which Ross called "a triumphant new chapter in Altman's body of work." In the article, Altman noted that since receiving the heart transplant he talked about on stage after winning an honorary Academy Award this Spring he completed five features. And while many younger directors complain about the inequities of Hollyood and their inability to get their movies movie, Altman remained both philosophical and wiley, committed to testing the boundaries of both the system and society with his sly, fast-footed dramas.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/21/2006 12:21:00 PM
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Thursday, November 02, 2006
ADRIENNE SHELLY, R.I.P.
A friend emailed me this afternoon about the sudden passing of actress and director Adrienne Shelly, who was found dead in her office yesterday. This Newsday article has a few more details, but the cause of death is unknown.
As an actress Shelly is best known for her work in Hal Hartley's first two features, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust. A true original in the world of American independent film, she projected a fascinating, low-key charisma on screen and, in Hartley's work in particular, captured the essence of a brainy and slightly lost young generation trying its hardest to figure out the mysteries of life. She went on to act in many other movies, including this summer's Factotum, and as well as to direct two features. Suddenly, Manhattan was completed in 1997 and, according to the Newsday piece, she had just sent her most recent film, Waitress, off to the Sundance selection committee.
# posted by Matthew Ross @ 12/10/2005 05:34:00 PM
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Monday, January 03, 2005
ARTIST/FILMMAKER GRETCHEN BENDER DIES AT 53
I learned over the holidays that artist Gretchen Bender, whose intelligent, visually seductive work crossed lines between visual art and film, sculpture and video, died in New York on Sunday, December 18 of cancer. She was 53.
Bender, who, early in her career exhibited at the East Village Nature Morte Gallery and later Metro Pictures, created conceptually concise and elegant work that often critiqued mainstream media and the power imbalances contained within its representations. And while many artists at this time were working with appropriation and engaging in similar sorts of critique, Bender's work always cunningly embodied within itself a kernel of that which she was attacking. There was a cold beauty to much of her work, and its allure to the viewer was very much a part of its oppositional strategy. "If Darth Vader made art, it might look like this," wrote New York Times critic Roberta Smith of one Bender exhibition in 1986.
Bender worked extensively in film, video and theater, creating backdrops for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company and two large-scale multimedia exhibitions, Dumping Core and Total Recall, the latter of which I produced for The Kitchen when I was Programming Director there in the late '80s. The pieces used multiple video monitors and, in the case of Total Recall, multiple film screens against loud electronic rock scores to confront viewers with an intense barrages of imagery, creating visually thrilling experiences out of sometimes troubling source material. This work lead to her working in music video (she directed videos for Babes in Toyland, among others, and edited clips by Robert Longo for REM, New Order and Megadeth), and she also edited opening credit material for America's Most Wanted.
Said Bender in a 1991 interview with Peter Doreshenko, "Given material that is violent, racist, and sexist, I try to make it a little less violent, less racist, and less sexist. I'm still involved in a kind of questionable propaganda, but one small step makes a difference. At first, I turned down that work because of all the complications and all the incredible decisions you have to make about what you're promoting. But I decided to do it because I had a way to do what I considered socially positive propaganda."
I remember Bender as smart, charming and intellectually inquisitive, someone who from the beginning had her finger on the complex issues related to artmaking in a media-saturated world. As she said in an interview with artist Cindy Sherman, "The only constant to the style you develop is the necessity to change it. Style gets absorbed really fast by the culture, basically by absorbing the formal elements or the structure and then subverting the content...It's constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength...Accepting the fact that your work is going to become neutralized -- faster than you ever dreamed...I don't think the media is something that listens in the way we're talking about. I think of the media as a cannibalistic river. A flow or a current that absorbs everything. It's not "about." There is no consciousness or mind. It's about absorbing and converting..."
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/03/2005 01:02:00 AM
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Tuesday, December 28, 2004
SUSAN SONTAG, 1933 - 2004
Susan Sontag, author, activist, and critic, died in New York today at 71.
A tremendously influential figure in post-war American culture, and one of the last remaining people for whom the term "public intellectual" might apply, Sontag had a special relationship with cinema, occasionally directing experimental films but more often influencing films, filmmakers and other critics with her writing. Essays such as "Notes on Camp," which found an alternative and politically transgressive means of valuing culture through gay aesthetics, "Against Interpretation," which argued against the critical reduction of art to easily identifiable themes and messages, and "On Photography" which examined how the medium of photography and its particular poetics affects the way we look at a picture ("All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.") were major cultural statements that artists in all disciplines reacted in some way too.
A major supporter of European and Asian art cinema, Sontag wrote, in 1995, an essay, "The Decay of Cinema," in which she bemoaned the passing of what she dubbed "cinephelia": "Cinephelia is the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other; quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time."
Arguing that globalization was destroying the values of cinema as art, Sontag went on to write that great films could only be "heroic violations of the norms and practices which now govern movie-making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world -- which is to say, everywhere". She particularly supported the work of Bela Tarr, helping organize screenings of his The Werckmeister Harmonies to garner stateside interest, and over the years wrote provocatively about the work of, among many others, Robert Bresson ("He has worked out a form that perfectly expresses and accompanies what he wants to say. In fact, it is what he wants to say."), Chris Marker, Jack Smith, and, more negatively, Leni Riefenstahl, who, in "Fascinating Fascism," she argued was a propagandist, not a documentarian.
Her own films include Brother Carl, Duet for Cannibals, and Promised Land.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 12/28/2004 07:35:00 PM
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Tuesday, September 21, 2004
RUSS MEYER, R.I.P.
While surfing Ain't It Cool News I came across this sad news that the great exploitation and proto-independent filmmaker Russ Meyer has passed away at the age of 82. Known for outrageous, violent, and flamboyantly pop white-trash epics like Vixen, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (with a screenplay by Roger Ebert) and the impossibly great Faster Pussycast, Kill, Kill!, Meyer made films with lust-crazed guys, massively endowed women and a purely American mixture of sex, violence, and pop culture. Click the link above for Harry Knowles' tribute to Meyer.
