Q&A

Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema at SF MoMA

As part of its 75th Anniversary celebrations, SF MoMA has commissioned three trios of programs surveying different eras of the museum’s history of film exhibition. The first of these considers the years of 1937-1960, though really we’re interested in 1945-1954, when Frank Stauffacher’s seminal Art in Cinema series hatched a Bay Area avant-garde. Filmmakers and critics are easily overlooked, but the programmer’s work is particularly subject to forgetting. In Stauffacher’s case this is most unfortunate, as his catalyzing work not only demonstrated the radical possibility of film as (local) art, but planted the seeds for a new, promiscuous way of seeing called cinephilia. When today’s enthusiasts dart between a Michael Mann blockbuster and a Ken Jacobs shoestring revolution, they are in Stauffacher’s republic. Art in Cinema took too much of Stauffacher—the series effectively ended when he died from a brain tumor in 1955—but his garden flourished well beyond those nine years.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, san francisco museum of modern art

Experience

William Kentridge, synthesizing, at SFMOMA

The films of William Kentridge make up a significant and absorbing part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s enthralling survey of recent work by the acclaimed South African artist, which opened March 14 and continues through May before embarking on a multi-city international tour. In fact, his animated narrative drawings are what originally drew international attention to Kentridge in the 1990s. A central part of the breadth of invention and media on display in William Kentridge: Five Themes, these film works (in four groupings, all featuring at least some animated dimension) represent culminating elements and interests along the path of a highly productive career, based (and, to a fair extent, rooted) in his home city of Johannesburg. Bridging the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, the films form a particularly dramatic gateway into the themes and concerns of an unrepentantly political artist, a white South African of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, on the move from the local to the universal.

As will be immediately apparent to any visitor to the exhibition, Kentridge is a supremely successful interdisciplinarian and synthesizer, versed in the graphic arts, theater and sculpture as well as film.

topics: actors, animation, art, art film, avant-garde, bay area, directors, san francisco museum of modern art

Experience

SFMOMA's "Nonwestern Westerns" series

Until they started falling out of fashion in the 1960s, Westerns were pretty much the bedrock of the American movie industry. Whole studios had been created to churn ‘em out like “Bronco Billy” Anderson’s in the East Bay. (Fremont’s Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum still shows silent films year-round in his honor.) The Great Train Robbery, considered the first real narrative movie using cross-cuts, close-ups and other then-innovative techniques, was a Western.

topics: asian cinema, genre films, italian cinema, reviews, san francisco museum of modern art, westerns

SFMOMA's Emile de Antonio series

Once in a while, history shuffles the deck of reputation and deals out a hand that revises the outcome of the game entirely. And if ever a filmmaker deserved a new deal, it’s the late great Emile de Antonio, whose documentary legacy has been unjustly overshadowed by current genre approaches. As an SFMOMA retrospective (opening on Jan. 5) makes clear, de Antonio’s documentaries are a different species entirely from the kind of celebrity-driven, headline (or animal) chasing theatricals now in favor.

topics: documentary, san francisco museum of modern art

Joseph Cornell at SFMOMA

There is a piece in the last room of SFMOMA’s “Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination” exhibit called “Untitled [Blue Sand Box with Starfish].” It is one of Cornell’s famous boxes, from 1952: blue sand, starfish, shells, and a coin in a single chamber, encased in glass painted to form a grid evoking ocean cartography. The piece lays on its back in MOMA, but movement is implied in the construction. Pick it up and the contents will shift, the sand splaying out as with the tide. Of all Cornell’s time machines, this is one of my favorites, its relatively unadorned arrangement gently illustrating the eternal in the ephemeral. Most artists deserve being revisited, but Cornell’s keepsakes practically cry out for it. Walking around the exhibit, we experience the quality of nostalgia rather than the thing itself: that conflation of perception and imagination, time and space.

After touring the Smithsonian and Peabody Essex Museums, “Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination” comes to San Francisco for the first major west-coast exhibition of the artist’s work in 40 years. Accompanying this retrospective (which runs through January 6th) will be three programs of Cornell’s film work in the museum’s Phyllis Wattis Theatre (the films will also be available on a general basis on video, but as works of collage, physicality is all, meaning that experiencing the prints is, in this case, a must).

Born in 1903 (on Christmas Eve, no less), Joseph Cornell was an artist very much of his time, his work suggesting a curious, gentle soul with one foot in the Victorian age (the collecting in little “school boy’s museums,” the fixation on natural history and antiquated toys) and another in the brave new world of records and movies, cafeterias and the subway (he frequently rode the lines back and forth from Manhattan to the Queens home where he looked after his mother and his brother, Robert, who lived with cerebral palsy). In one of his early scrapbooks, there’s a quotation from the critic Thomas Craven: “The idea that there is a center of culture which automatically exudes the flavour of art is a delusion and a snare. Art, on the contrary, is not produced by culture — is the child of new evaluations of common things.

topics: reviews, san francisco museum of modern art