we are not what we seem

– words inscribed in the bottom of DeFeo's painter's stool

A mathematics focused movie for National Mathematics Day, India.

 

Mahagonny is filmmaker, artist, musicologist, and alchemist Harry Smith's mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even], aka Le Grand Verre [The Large Glass], which was completed in 1923. It is set to Brecht and Weill's opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny] from 1930, which was an opera Smith was obsessed with while living in New York's Chelsea Hotel.

“My cinematic excreta is of four varieties:–batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and they should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever—they made me gray.”

– Harry Smith, via

Read an interview with Jonas Mekas about Harry Smith and his Mahagonny.

Commissioned for a West-German TV series called Kunstgeschichten (litt. both “art stories” and “#art histories”), filmmaker Harun Farocki visits artist Sarah Schumann in her #Berlin studio.

“An diesem Tag war das Bild, drei Monate nach Beginn und 67 Arbeitstagen fertig.”

– narrator

The resulting documentary shows the process of creating one art piece over the course of nine weeks. Schumann's work in that period consists of collage portraits of women important in her life.

A Bigger Splash is the name of one of painter David Hockney's best known works and part of a series of pool portraits of the artist's close friends, one of them his lover Peter Schlesinger, an artist in his own right. When in the early 1970s the relationship between the two men started to unravel it affected #Hockney so much it almost rendered him incapable of working.

“I paint what I like when I like, and where I like.”

– David Hockney

While going through Polaroids he found that two of the shots, one of a man #swimming underwater, the other of a man standing on a poolside, fell into the composition he was looking for. The resulting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) – where an unknown man can be seen swimming towards Hockney's fully-dressed former lover – bears similarities to Renaissance paintings where the composition of human figures, landscape, and perspective culminate in proto-cinematic storytelling.

 

Cinematographer and filmmaker Jack Hazan juxtaposes David Hockney working on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) with speculative scenes about the creation of the work and the disintegration of Hockney's and Schlesinger's relationship. It did create a splash, in particular in its ordinary depiction of a homosexual relationship.

 

A Bigger Splash is of course not the only (pseudo) documentary about an artist and his or her life, but one of the very few honest ones. The struggle to create is not romanticised, nor is the intimate relationship between artist and muse a playground of lazy, perverse speculation. As Hockney creates, destroys, and recreates his Pool, so we all destroy our lovers to bloom again.

Commissioned by the #PanAfrican literary magazine Présence Africaine to make a short film about African art, Chris Marker and his collaborator Alain Resnais – the latter still emboldened by his Van Gogh (1948) – were struck that unlike the Dutch painter's work, this #art was not on display in the Louvre or a similar cultural temple, but in the ethnological Musée de l'Homme.

“An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send black things: to the museum.”

– narrator

These works of “Negro” art that embody such a deep cultural and artistic significance for the creators and the people they are part of, were, within the boundaries of Western civilisation, merely things. The editing (Alain Resnais), photography (Ghislain Cloquet) and dialogue (Chris Marker) bring life to these works. Through these voices they speak to the viewer, escaping the institutes' walls.

 

This voice was enough for the CNC to censor Les statues meurent aussi; only the first third of the film, the segment that's not blatantly #AntiColonial, was to be watched. And to this day, the documentary still has not seen a restored, digital release.

Part of the never-realised #SuperStar-studded The Poor Little Rich Girl Saga, #Warhol's Afternoon documents a day in the life of doomed socialite Edie Sedgwick. Miss Sedgwick and her entourage (Ondine, Dorothy Dean, Arthur Loeb, and Donald Lyons) spend an afternoon at #Edie's place. The superstars, the bored and the beautiful, chat, drink and do drugs.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we can be just friends?”

Vérités et Mensonges is what it's actually called, but you may know it as F for Fake. Orson Welles and three uncredited fellow conspirators – Gary Graver, Oja Kodar, and François Reichenbach – delve into the world of #art forger Elmyr de Hory by way of his biographer Clifford Irving.

“Back to the old tricks.”

– Orson Welles

Welles et al free-associate with concepts of art, lies, #deception, and #authenticity. #Houdin, Welles, #Picasso and Hughes, hoaxers, hucksters and artists in their own right. And then it's over: this work of art, this sleight of hand, this demonstration of factuality, an exposé.