Tuesday's Overlooked Film: A Public Ransom (dir. Pablo D'Stair, 2014)

Pablo D'Stair's micro-budget, monochromatic, minimalist neo-noir (how's that for some abstract descriptors?) is more rewarding to watch and think about than many a conventional mainstream film, and I heartily recommend it to the adventurous. To maximize your adventure, I'm going to say as little as possible about the movie's plot, in which there are very few definites beyond the fact that we see certain things and hear certain things. Oh wait, isn't that actually true of all movies? Well yes, but few movies or narratives of any kind advertise the fact that they are partial information systems. This one, you couldn't help but notice it.

I spotted points of contact with Travis Mills' first two features, The Big Something and The Detective's Lover, although the two directors may not know each other's work. Both are operating out of small-city America (D'Stair - Gaithersburg, Maryland, Mills - Tempe, Arizona) and have an eye for the particular scale and atmosphere of these places which film-makers typically ignore, although so many people make their lives in them. Both directors seem to call out a certain deadpan quality in their actors - Goodloe Byron's Bryant in A Public Ransom is distinctly reminiscent of supporting male characters in the two Mills features. Both directors draw attention to their framing in a way that that commercial film-makers try to avoid; among D'Stair's a priori decisions for A Public Ransom were to shoot everything from stationary camera positions and to hold those positions for fairly long scenes, which naturally throws a focus on the unmoving edge of the frame.

D'Stair has promoted his film energetically to bloggers; that is how I first found out about it. The strategy was successful in generating blog reviews; currently there are 38 "critic" reviews at the IMDB and only one "user" review (mine, which I suppose counts as a critic review too, really). Looking at all those reviews, I notice that even a few of the film's champions get some key points wrong. They almost uniformly note that the film is dense in dialogue, which D'Stair in interviews has acknowledged was very precisely written - no improv here, thanks - but then some of the reviewers seem not to have paid as careful attention to that dialogue as they might.

Specifically, in a film with only three on-screen characters, they bobble their descriptions of the key relationship between Carlyle Edwards' Steven and Helen Bonaparte's Rene, his good friend. The two are NEVER romantically or sexually involved; instead, Steven cheats on his unseen wife Lisa with another unseen woman, Deb - he has multiple phone conversations with both of them, and in the last scene Rene explicitly says that there is no way she ever would have become involved with Steven. I thought I'd clear this up because, as you will see if you watch the film, these issues are pretty pertinent to any meaningful understanding of the story (such as the "story" is). (By the way, "Carlyle Edwards" is D'Stair himself, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Goodloe Byron" and "Helen Bonaparte" are assumed names also, because Carlyle-Byron-Bonaparte, it's just too perfect.)

Anyway, the dense dialogue is worth engaging with, the mildewed (but curiously suggestive) images are worth absorbing, and the movie as a whole has a mesmeric middle-of-the-night quality (as also noted by the fine film critic John Grant at his blog Noirish). The meta-fictional angles are involving, too, since what we have here is a story about not one but two writers who are "collaborating" (sort of) on a story that is partly appropriated from real events that may or may not have been set in motion by the active member of the pair (like Strangers on a Train with scribes).

In the end it's the passive one who seems to come in for harsher moral judgment - but is the character who expresses that judgment standing in for the director? and is the audience meant to share that judgment? Most of the reviewers take it that the answer to both questions is "Yes"; I am not sure, but in any case I did not share the stringent view of the passive writer's inaction. The movie ends on a question mark; each viewer needs to work out his or her own answer.

A Public Ransom can be viewed for free at Vimeo:

A Public Ransom

Information about all of D'Stair's projects - like Travis Mills, he is prolific! - can be found here:

"...Old Fleas, New Dogs..." the films of writer/director Pablo D'Stair

Birthday: Caspar Wolf (1735-1783)

The Swiss painter Caspar Wolf was one of the first artists in the West to capture or, indeed, notice, the sublimity of mountains (which had always been celebrated in the East). The time was right for this. British travelers in the Alps a generation before Wolf's birth - men such as Joseph Addison, John Dennis, and the Earl of Shaftesbury - had been deeply affected by their experiences, and had begun to develop an aesthetic-philosophical notion of "the sublime" which was later given fuller body by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), the publication of which happened to coincide with the start of Caspar Wolf's painting career.

Wolf may not have been directly affected by these Britons, although their ideas were in the Enlightenment air; but he was certainly influenced by his compatriot Albrecht von Haller's 1729 poem Die Alpen, and Haller in his turn became a great admirer of Wolf.

Wolf was commissioned in the mid-1770s by the Bernese publisher Abraham Wagner to create a comprehensive series of paintings of the Alps that would be accompanied by texts composed by natural historian Jacob Samuel Wyttenbach.

Wolf and Wyttenbach undertook extensive journeys in the high Alpine regions:

What resulted was a comprehensive picture cycle of the Swiss Alps. Working in his studio from the nature studies completed on location, Wolf created close to 200 paintings of imposing quality that bring together spontaneous observations and highly artistic formulations. Wolf devise[d] a captivating painterly vocabulary to depict mountain ranges and glaciers, waterfalls and caves, bridges and raging torrents, lakes and high plateaus, portraying them now in wide panoramas, now in close, claustrophobic compositions.

Caspar Wolf - and the Aesthetic Conquest of Nature

The subject was novel, but so was Wolf's dramatic way of handling it, which had an immense influence on many later painters: Caspar David Friedrich, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Nicholas Roerich, dozens of others.

Quotation of the Day

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet. - David Graeber

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

Graeber, an increasingly visible anthropologist and public intellectual (he might not like that phrase), re-visited this theme in a recent interview with The Guardian:

Academia was, he muses, once a haven for oddballs – it was one of the reasons he went into it. “It was a place of refuge. Not any more. Now, if you can’t act a little like a professional executive, you can kiss goodbye to the idea of an academic career.” 

Why is that so terrible? “It means we’re taking a very large percentage of the greatest creative talent in our society and telling them to go to hell … The eccentrics have been drummed out of all institutions.”

David Graeber Interview

I have spent enough time working in universities (not just in the United States) to endorse this analysis 100%. The academic eccentric is a figure of the past, and we are all the worse off for that. Much has been made lately of the difficulties that John Forbes Nash, Jr. and Alan Turing ran into because they were schizophrenic and homosexual, respectively. Today, all it would take for them to have their careers stall entirely would be to be as brilliant as they were, and just a little bit offbeat. They would be toast. We would never hear of them.

The Utopia of Rules (David Graeber)

Artist Retrospectives

I follow the news posts at ArtDaily carefully, and within the last few days I have noticed announcements of a number of retrospectives devoted to artists born in the 1920s and 1930s. Not the most famous ones, but rather, strong artists who are mainly known to aficionados rather than the general public. I am delighted to see them get attention.

Retrospective show of Italian artist Giuseppe Uncini opens at Cardi Gallery

Giuseppe Uncini (1929-2008), one of whose works is atop this post, was a sculptor who worked mainly in concrete and iron. He can be seen as a precursor to both the Arte Povera (Poor Art) movement of the 1960s, and developments in minimalist art around that same time. "Uncini" means "hooks" in Italian, and since many of his works feature little hooks, I wonder if he was making visual puns on his name by using them.

Exhibition of works by Luciano Fabro opens at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York

Luciano Fabro (1936-2007) was also associated with Arte Povera, and used a wide mixture of materials, both "poor" and "rich," in his sculpture: glass, cloth, gold, leather, wax, steel, newspaper.

One beautiful piece by Fabro that can't be included in the current exhibition is the 1964 Impronta, a thick glass disc with an image of the world at the center. This was completely destroyed when a drunken Swiss journalist, "tanked up on free cocktails," smashed into it at a gallery show in Lugano in September 2013.

Inebriated journalist dubbed 'Swiss Mr Bean' reaches for canapé and smashes priceless artwork

Espace Fondation EDF opens retrospective exhibition of the work of Pol Bury

The Belgian Pol Bury (1922-2005), also primarily a sculptor, was associated with the CoBrA movement (Copenhagen - Brussels - Amsterdam) that began in the late 1940s. He is considered one of the leading kinetic artists.

First monographic exhibition dedicated to Martial Raysse on view at Palazzo Grassi

The French painter Martial Raysse, born in 1936, was one of the founders along with Yves Klein of the Nouveaux Realistes group which lasted from 1960 to 1970 - everyone has got to have a movement! and European artists always seem to especially enthusiastic about officializing this, making the group a genuine entity, perhaps issuing a manifesto or two,  instead of being just a loose confederation of similar-seeking artists given a label by critics (such as the Abstract Expressionists). Raysse is also often considered a pop artist, with rather obvious affinities with Andy Warhol (the influence may have gone both ways). More recently, Raysse was the 2014 recipient of the Praemium Imperiale in Painting.

One production of Raysse's that I would badly like to see is his 1972 experimental art-film feature Le grand depart with Sterling Hayden (!) and Anne Wiazemsky (then married to Jean-Luc Godard). Zev Toledano has written, "Some heavy drugs were most probably taken and worshipped for this movie."

Galerie Springer exhibits masterpieces by Arnold Odermatt on the artist's 90th birthday

The Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt, born in 1925, is a bit of an inadvertent artist; he was primarily a policeman. and the photographs for which he later became celebrated were taken as part of his work. It was his son, film director Urs Odermatt, who first noticed the unusual quality of his father's pictures and started promoting them in the early 1990s.

The Buchmann Gallery opens exhibition of works by British/American sculptor William Tucker

The British sculptor William G. Tucker, born in 1935, specializes in massive, deceptively inchoate bronzes. He is also an art historian.

You may have noticed that when presenting visual art, I try to keep my language simple and factual, avoiding any whiff of International Art English. That is on purpose - visual art, like music, is notoriously difficult to put into language, and the works speak for themselves (even more so if you can take them in in person, of course).

GIUSEPPE UNCINI: SCULTORE/BILDHAUER, 1929-2008

Luciano Fabro

Pol Bury.

Martial Raysse (French Edition)

Arnold Odermatt: Karambolage

William Tucker

Early Modern Sculpture (William Tucker)

Quotation of the Day

[I]t is highly unlikely that...romantic love songs...will ever again attain anything remotely approaching the cultural primacy that they long occupied. One cannot make art about that which one cannot imagine, and now that nearly 70 percent of all children born to high school–only graduates grow up in single-parent families, it is improbable that the children of those families would feel inspired to sing songs that take an idealistic view of love. In much of America, love and marriage are a dream, not a reality, and our popular music will surely reflect that fateful transformation for a long time to come. - Terry Teachout

Love Songs, RIP

This represents a conservative point of view, but a reasonably persuasive one. Maybe there will be a surge in gay and lesbian love songs? - Because if anyone is serious about marriage right now, it's surely not conservatives and Christians, it's gays and lesbians. There are unexplored lyrical possibilities here.

Teachout doesn't really get into why marriage has been on such a decline, but it has a lot to do with a lack of economic confidence. People who don't feel good about the future are not as likely to feel inclined to marry. Of course, it is "conservative" economics that put us in that place, so to avoid cognitive dissonance, conservative writers are apt to insist that the loss of traditions that they value is mostly attributable to a change in values. I don't think that's right. Values are in there but I think it is mostly economics.

Terry Teachout doesn't explore that reality in this essay, although he edges up to it:

...while college-educated millennials who marry take a relatively conventional view of how best to rear the children of their union, this view is no longer widely shared further down the socioeconomic ladder, where single parenting is the new norm.

Well, sure. College-educated millennials have better prospects. Isn't it obvious? Americans used to be able to own a house, a car, and raise children on a lower-middle-class salary. Now they can't.

The only thing that surprises me is that there aren't more pop songs about economic stress, as there were in the 1930s. Cuing Dick Robertson:

Birthday: Art Fleming (1924-1995)

Alex Trebek is so associated with the game show Jeopardy! from 1984 on that it is often forgotten that Art Fleming was the show's original host, from 1964 to 1975 and again in a 1978-1979 revival. I was a huge fan as a kid (and since), and have often thought about trying out for the show; I have such a good memory for minor facts that after a while, my family refused to play Trivial Pursuit with me. Most of the Fleming-era Jeopardy! episodes were "scrubbed" and no longer exist, but there is some footage (naturally) on YouTube:

Crimes of the Century 1949: Stray Dog (dir. Akira Kurosawa)

[A contribution to Past Offences' monthly Crimes of the Century.]

Given that there is a long-standing argument as to whether the cycle of "semi-documentary" post-war American crime films -- The Naked City, The House on 92nd Street, He Walked by Night, and so on -- are truly "noir" or not, it probably won't do to extend the argument across the Pacific and try to decide to whether a Japanese post-war semi-documentary crime film is truly noir. So let's hedge and say that Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949) is a policier with certain noir characteristics -- not least of which is the conflictedness of its protagonist, a rookie detective played by the great Toshiro Mifune. Mifune had played a devil-may-care yakuza gangster in the noir-ish Drunken Angel for Kurosawa just a year earlier, and the two pictures between them show off his incredible range.

Mifune's Detective Murakami in Stray Dog is an extremely earnest young policeman who beats himself up badly over the loss of his Colt revolver to a pickpocket on a bus. Three superiors, most importantly the seasoned homicide detective Sato (Takashi Shimura), have to counsel him to ease up and get on with business ("Instead of brooding, prevent the next incident"). The pursuit of the lost Colt takes Murakami and Sato through a cross-section of the petty Tokyo underworld and ultimately involves them in the investigation of a murder committed with the gun. Murakami comes to feel that the murderer, Yusa, is his dark double, both being veterans whose knapsacks were (gallingly) stolen on the way home from the war-front, but who made very different life-decisions thereafter. Murakami applies psychological empathy to his investigative process, but the more experienced Sato, although an exceptionally warm and generous person, has no sentimentality concerning criminals -- nor does he feel that a cop can afford to.

Stray Dog is as emotionally rich as one would hope for from a first-rank director such as Kurosawa. A visual motif repeated throughout the film involves looking at the sky, often a night sky, which the characters do -- or the camera does on our behalf -- at moments of great feeling, such as when Sato brings Murakami to his modest ("just a glorified shack") but very happy home. But this is no sappy visual poetry, because it is embedded in a context of thrilling formal rigor. For example, Kurosawa experiments extensively with multiple planes of focus in this movie; a typical three-shot (and Kurosawa is very fond of three-shots) has one person foregrounded (sometimes quite exaggeratedly), one person mid-grounded, and one person backgrounded. This technique has a Wellesian / Tolandian flavor, as do quite a number of specific shots (the descending opening shot of the Blue Bird nightclub, or the shot from within the innards of a carnival game). I wonder if Citizen Kane had played in Japan as of 1948, when Stray Dog was made? (A Google search didn't help me on this.)

Kurosawa also utilizes the semi-documentary style with panache (and it is interesting how seamlessly it fits with the more baroque visuals). Film blogger Robert Kennedy speaks of this as Kurosawa's "street style":

The camera moves fluidly through crowded streets, following the detective through Tokyo’s poverty-ridden streets for one entire reel without any dialogue, capturing the physicality of the people, the style, the mood, especially the heat, contrasted against Western influences, the introduction of the gun, baseball, white suits, dancing girls, the blues, jazz, and classical music.

The long sequence described is one of several kinetic sequences, also including a chase scene with the original pickpocket; a "tailing" procedure; a professional baseball game that blends on-location footage shot by Kurosawa's crew with studio re-takes; and the final show-down between Murakami and the criminal Yusa in a mucky marsh. The film as a whole is beautifully balanced between kinetic and static, exterior and interior, action and dialogue, specificity and generalization.

Stray Dog represents the then 38-year-old Kurosawa as an indisputable Young Master, and it is interesting to note that his slightly younger contemporaries, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (the three of whom together formed a strong international admiration society), made The Seventh Seal and La Dolce Vita respectively in the 37-39 age range. Perhaps that is roughly the time when, for many, life maturity can match technical mastery.