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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Touching the Void (SPOILERS): This is a documentary about mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates. Lot's of things go wrong, and at one point Simon is forced to cut the rope, dropping the dangling Joe off the edge of a cliff. The big question of the movie: why does this guy stay alive? My favourite part is when the rope has been cut, and Simpson has fallen partway into the crevasse. He is sitting at the top of an open, gaping, black void. Rather than spend the next 4 days sitting there slowly dying, he decides to lower himself into the blackness. How great is that!? Down he goes, and sure enough there is a way out once he gets to the bottom. It's much too symbolically tidy to actually be a true story! Which brings me to the other thing I liked about the film...its very well crafted narrative. The re-enactments by the actor/climbers were sewn in tightly with the voice-over of the real climbers - there was no duplication of information, and a seamless emotional tone. I became aware of the fact that this story has been told many many times. The guys themselves must be constructing it in their memories, and the book, the lecture circuit, the film, all help to mold into its current, iconic shape.
Kevin Macdonald made the movie. As it went on, it became more mannered. Normally I'd be uncomfortable with that (as with Erroll Morris and his slo-mo coffee cups) but in this case it worked out just fine. I loved the final scenes where Simpson is losing his mind and can't get Boney M out of his head. The film and audio became fragmented, broken and chaotic and it was great. Another powerful visual moment was the closeup of his mouth sucking water from the rock. Sex, death, human in an environment where he does not belong. Sucking up a small muddly water puddle like he was going down on pussy.
One night towards the end he is lying on his back staring up at the stars. He begins to feel as if he has been there for millenia, as if he is part of the rock.
You could tell instantly from their faces which guy (Simon Yates) had cut the rope (and never forgiven himself), and which (Joe Simpson) had miraculously survived (and forgiven his friend for cutting the rope). Simon had darkness in his face and Joe had light (too perky by half).
Curator and international art collector Ydessa Hendeles is blowing me away these days. The quotes below are from a CBC broadcast of her presentation at Making History, a recent symposium in Toronto about Canadian art and its role on the international stage. I put up an mp3 of the broacast here. (Thanks for the recording, J!)
It is not only possible, but critical for Canadians to build relationships with artists and curators outside our national borders. It is the nature of expression to have urgency, and seek out as large an audience as possible. [...] I don't mean that artists should look for their audience in a careerist, strategic way. [...] Relationships work best when works are authentic expressions that are not made for strategic purposes of capitalising on already existing subjects of discourse.
[...] Museums in each country should not all have the same art in them.
[...] Some collecting museums, to resolve the issue of timeliness, have resorted to showing prominent private collections. But this has recently backfired. Indeed, the collecting museum's authority can easily be corrupted by the marketplace. For example, the display of the Saatchi collection of the show Sensation resulted in a scandal at the Brooklyn museum. [...] The persistent controversial issue is the commerical gain later won by the collector, as his works were subsequently put up for sale and made huge profits. The trustees of the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Gallery, both major collecting museums, responded by taking the position that they will not show a private collector's art collection. [...] Like the separation of church and state, there is, and should be, a boundary between commerce and art. Neither a collector, nor a corporation should be able to capitalize financially from the sale of a collection that comes directly from being promoted by a public museum.
 Image by Michael Breslin of the UofT Varsity, taken from here |
The death of activist Tooker Gomberg is a huge loss. His inspirational drive, imagination, and natural leadership accomplished a great deal for environmental activism and social justice. The shallow coverage in today's Globe and Mail is indicative of the fact that Gomberg knew how to get under the mainstream media's skin. Tooker was all justice all the time, and his media "stunts" raised awarness about poverty, smog, cycling, and political representation, as well as massively important global environmental issues. He will be badly missed. |
In a current spate of A-bomb research, I watched both Dr. Strangelove and a documentary called Atomic Filmmakers, Behind the Scenes.
Dr. Strangelove is an irksome film. When I first saw it I was too young and too scared of the bomb to get the humour. This time I did not find myself laughing either, but at least I saw it as subversive rather than oppressive. When I was a child I wondered, "How could this be?" and I guess I still kind of wonder the same thing. I like the chilling P.O.V. shots on the ground when General Jack T. Ripper's stockaded base is invaded (on orders from the president) by a neighbouring military unit. Americans, shot by Americans, lie dying on the dusty ground. The footage reminds me of Kent State, and also the part in Catch-22 when Milo Minderbinder strafes his own base as part of some black market deal he made for 'the syndicate" (because what's good for the syndicate is good for us all). There are similarities to Catch-22 but the humour here is much colder and less humanistic. It's a different kind of war, I guess. Still, it's interesting that the technology (big knobs and switches on the airplane consoles, survival kits and bomber jackets, etc.) of Dr. Strangelove looks much more like WW II than like our present day remote control death networks. I am pretty sure that the overabundance of chewing gum in the film was hyper-ironic reference to a nostalgia for a more individualistic, Johnny-get-your-gun, kind of war.
The Atomic Filmmakers doc (1997) was about a bunch of guys who documented the A-bomb tests in Nevada and at Bikini Atoll. The film was highly unsubversive, the interviews were conducted passively, and the tone was true to the ethos of the era: there's a decent, American job to be done here: heck, them-there A-bombs ain't gonna document themselves!
One good anecdote was from a guy who sat with his cameras in the nose (gunner-bay, I guess) of a plane that followed the plane that dropped a bomb, so he was right above the blast when it went off. He had goggles to shield his eyes but they broke as he was pulling them on. He (in a state of panic, sure he'd go blind) put his hands across his tightly closed eyes. He didn't go blind, but he did see the bones of his fingers in the flash.
There was a whole secret film lab called Lookout Mountain. These guys documented everything: they made 6500 films! One them had an aunt and uncle killed at Nagasaki. He said they lived in the country and made the "unfortunate" decision to go into the city to market that day. He said that in one of the Nevada tests he filmed, pigs and monkeys were tied up in the bomb area with their eyes propped (what-the? Like in Clockwork Orange? whY? ) open. He said that made him think "This is how it would be for people who had a bomb dropped on them."
The film ended with a montage of incredibly magnificent footage of big blasts and mushroom clouds. I stared at the TV screen trying to understand what I was seeing, but it just kept looking like really nice pictures.