Mad Max: Fury Road

“The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch

A post-apocalypse world, ruled by a fiendish demagogue, where, despite the presence of technology, man is reduced to a primitive nomadic existence. That’s the scenario George Miller envisions in the fourth of the popular series, Mad Max Fury Road. The hugely advanced screen graphics enhanced by 3-D is one of the ironies of a movie that's spells out a recipe for catastrophic regression. Doesn’t the landscape of a former country, reduced to huge plains of rubble where small bands adhering to residues of liberation ideology seek oases of freedom, sound frighteningly familiar? In Mad Max: Fury Road one such rebel band is led by the title character (Tom Hardy) and his female counterpart, Furiosa (Charlize Theron). They're seeking to escape the rule of Immortal Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the local tyrant. The movie is rife with biblical leitmotifs, in particular the wandering in the desert and the search for “the green place,” which, in this case, is the Edenic memory of a vanished world.  Consider that violent action film fantasy is probably close to the psychic reality for a good part of the population of destroyed Middle Eastern societies. It’s easy to understand why ISIS seeks to obliterate the great monuments of antiquity. If the cradle of civilization were to be totally destroyed, there'd be no past to reclaim, in short no Promised Land. For all the political and religious allegory, the plot of the film with its universe of destruction has become rather familiar to audiences for Armageddon on screen on in advanced computer games. But it’s the visuals that really take over at one point and you begin to wonder what classic you’re reminded of. You quickly discountenance “The Garden of Earthly Delights” or “Guernica” and yet you can’t help thinking about a model, a painting that  imagined the end and resurrection of the world. Perhaps you can’t remember it. Or is it possible that such a work has yet to be?

Selma

Ava DuVernay’s Selma could be subtitled “behind the scenes of a hagiography.” Apart from the stock footage of the famous march from Selma to Montgomery it’s not cinema verite in the style of say The Battle of Algiers. Despite the graphic depictions of violence, it’s just too slick; DuVernay’s paints her Guernica on Selma's Edmund Pettus bridge and it’s almost beautiful. But the strength of the movie lies in its depiction of nonviolence as strategy. “Our lives are not fully lived until we are ready to die for those we loved,” King (David Oyelowo) says. He possesses a sculpture of Gandhi, yet it’s plain non-violence is as much a weapon as a principle for him. Jim Clark (Stan Houston), the sheriff of Selma is a perfect foil for the protests as Bull Connor was in Birmingham. In Albany, Georgia the sheriff, Laurie Pritchett, had removed the demonstrators on stretchers and that was not what King wanted. It didn’t create either sympathy or headlines. Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), making a cameo appearance, tries to employ the idea of another kind of strategy. He’ll incite violence in order to make the authorities regard King as the lesser of two evils. It’s a form of gamesmanship that King isn’t ready to buy. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let history put me in the same place as the likes of you,” Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) tells George Wallace (Tim Roth). But it’s not surprising to see one of the greatest politicians of the 20^th century or all time adding to the chorus of realpolitik that’s the movie’s recurring leitmotif. Neither the tensions in King’s marriage nor his infidelities are glossed over and they in turn are exploited by yet one more power player, J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker)—who unsuccessfully tries to use them to throttle King’s charismatic drive. The real march of the movie is towards the passage of the Voting Rights Act of l965 with Lyndon Johnson lamely proclaiming “we shall overcome.” Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), the conflict between John Lewis’s (Stephan James) SNCC (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee) and King’s SCLC (South Christian Leadership Conference) are all part of the tableau—which, on the basis of recent headlines, poses the troubling question of whether much has really changed?

The Expressionist as Rationalist

Thinking is not always associated with abstract expressionism. After all, the technique was called “action painting” and it’s quarterback, Jackson Pollock, was intentionally or unintentionally rough around the edges. He had some of the qualities of the outsider artist with his edgy personality and primal energy. “Robert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, l944-52,” the exhibit currently on display at East Hampton’s Guild Hall (which is also the title of the book to accompany the exhibition by Phyllis Tuchman), records the sensibility of an artist who came to abstract expressionism from a more cognitive direction than some of his contemporaries. Motherwell was a Stanford graduate who studied philosophy at Harvard and art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. He hung around with the likes of the architect Percival Goodman and when Goodman commissioned him to do a wall painting at B’nai Israel Synagogue in Milburn, New Jersey he consulted Schapiro on Jewish Iconography. Although not part of the current show, “Elegy for the Spanish Republic” (1961), with its political overtones (calling to mind Picasso’s “Guernica,” l937) is one of his most famous paintings and he provided drawings for a poem by Harold Rosenberg (the future art critic of The New Yorker) in a magazine they were both involved with, Possiblilities. In addition, as a young man he travelled to Europe with his father, where he had the luxury to weigh his options between surrealism and cubism. The exhibit features a film in which Motherwell comments on the violence of abstract expressionism quoting Rothko to the effect that “people don’t understand how aggressive my paintings are.” One of his best friends was David Smith and Motherwell was a charter member of the famous circle that included Rothko, Pollock, Kline, de Kooning and Newman. But the film reveals a personality that had the repose to also consider the very movement he was part of from the distance. It’s as if there were six degrees of separation between Motherwell and his contemporaries. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Extemporaneity and action were part of his process, but he constantly reworked his paintings and separated himself from his crowd to the extent that he thought before he acted. Eric Bentley wrote The Playwright as Thinker about Brecht. Someone could undertake a monograph on Motherwell called The Expressionist as Rationalist. Here for instance is a text by the poet and painter Henri Michaux which is the centerpiece of a drawing from l952 entitled “In Bed:”  “The sickness that I have condemns me to absolute immobility in bed. When my boredom takes on such excessive proportions that it will wreck my equilibrium this is what I do: I smash my skull--stretch it out before me as far as possible; and when it is all flat, I send out my cavalry. The horses stamp distinctly on the the firm yellow soil.The squadrons then break into a trot and there’s prancing and kicking. And the noise, this clear and repeated rhythm, this excitement that breathes struggle and Victory, enchants the soul of one who is nailed to his bed, and cannot make a move.” For good or bad, Motherwell was tethered to words from the very beginning of his career.

The Artful Dodger

Portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Joseph Karl Stieler

When something painful happens, do you immediately think you can make it worthwhile by transforming it into a great work of art that will make you famous? Do you find yourself using your iPhone to take pictures of your wife when she's in a rage, and fantasizing about the show you will be having at the International Center of Photography, instead of attempting to fathom the source of the complaint? Did you consider writing a poem or short story about it and even try to submit it to The New Yorker before finding out what was bothering her? Creative expression was usually thought to be the province of artists. The artist’s life may have been one of poverty and self-sacrifice, but it’s one saving grace was that everything became gris for the mill. While average people tended to find no pay off in pain, catastrophe was like striking gold for the artistic prospector. At the very least the enemy earned a diary entry. At the best, he catalyzed "Guernica" or For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, today the degree of separation that was always a lagniappe of the artistic personality is available to anyone. Literally anyone can imagine himself the Cartier-Bresson of his time with the help of his or her smart phone. Most smart phones also are capable of giving Italian neorealists like Rossellini a good run for their money. Employing the video component literally anyone can make their version of Rome, Open City (1945) whether they’re in Buffalo, Albuquerque or Kalamazoo. Say you’re a Werther and want to record your sufferings, just flip open your iPad. Let’s say reading this post is making your confront some aspect of yourself that’s painful. Let’s say at the very least that it’s irritating, blog about it or just, “post a comment.”