Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters

“When I was working at the gallery, he was breaking up with his second wife.” Could this bit of overheard conversation, on the way out of Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, Ben Shapiro’s film currently playing at Film Forum, be a comment on the subject? Brief Encounters is mostly about a series of 50 photographs taken over 8 years entitled Beneath the Roses. Crewdson uses old mill towns like Lee and Pittsfield Massachusetts that he’s known since childhood as the stage set. They are his Yoknapatawpha County. If a photographer like Rineke Dijkstra seeks to find a moment in the flow of human existence, the involuntary memory that’s at the heart of the Proustian Madeleine, then Crewdson seeks to create the madeleine itself. He stages a woman sitting outside a Hopperesque bar called The Madison, he gauges out the side of a house that will be gauged. He loves opened car doors at twilight (most of his filming is done at dusk since streets can’t be lit during the day and at night the contrast would be too great). All of this image creation is influenced by such predecessors at Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman and all of these fictions are produced with the attention and expense given to an independent film (though the hyper attention to individual details far exceeds the budget of any independent film). The mixture of beauty and sadness that Crewdson says he likes recall the sense of the sublime that Wordsworth created in Tintern Abbey. However, one can’t help wondering if there isn’t a slightly studied quality to all of this, as if Crewdson were one of his own set pieces—the upscale Yale educated New Yorker exploiting his subjects suffering for the sake of his growing international reputation (in the same way that in the course of the film he blames the grotesquery of his earlier work on his failing first marriage). It’s a far cry from Robert Frank's The Americans; there’s something self-congratulatory about the emphasis on style and also dismissive about the way he handles his subjects. He puts make-up on despair. Everything fits a little too neatly together. At the end of the film Crewdson is off to Cinecitta where he is busily making a home for himself shooting artificial mists onto abandoned sets of imperial Rome. “Let Me Take Your Photo,” was a hit song that Crewdson’s rock band the Speedies created back in  l979. Then Crewdson met a girl who turned him on to photography and he was on his way. Brief Encounters, the photo after which the film is named, is the final in the Beneath the Roses series. It’s a dazzling shot, a stark figure under a movie marquee advertising the 7:30 show on a snow covered street. But one wonders what is more effective, the frozen moment or the filming of its creation?

Rineke Dijkstra

Proust coined the term  “involuntary memory”—in short a kind of memory that is not normally accessible like that ignited by his iconic madeleine. The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, a retrospective of whose work was recently exhibited at the Guggenheim, traffics in the visual equivalent of the concept, capturing visual moments that elude everyday perception. In a series of videos shot at the Liverpool Tate, she filmed a group of school children looking at Picasso’s Weeping Woman (l937). We never see the painting of Picasso’s wife Dora Maar, but we see the reactions of the students. It’s a little like the work of the Viennese photographer Thomas Struth who created a famous series of photographs of museum visitors. One particularly arresting image from the video is that of a young girl.  Her head is canted to the side in a look of distraction, perhaps her way of absorbing an unsettling image. It’s not surprising that Dijkstra is interested in adolescence to extent that it constitutes an awakening from the cocoon of childhood and thus contains many of these quiet epiphanies— in which subjects straddle the line between knowing and unknowing, innocence and experience. She follows the development of a woman from childhood to pregnancy. She records a member of the French foreign legion from his induction as a callow young man through his development into a seasoned fighter. She also captures subjects following exhausting activities—Bullfighters, New Mothers— in which they are totally bereft of self-consciousness. In Buzz Club and The Nugent R.C. High School, she identifies two different kinds of uniforms in trendy club dress and parochial school garb and the ways in which personality, like the butterfly born from the pupa, emerges from each.

Vagina: A New Biography

Photograph of Naomi Wolf by David Shankbone

Katha Pollitt is adding her name to the list of “conscientious objectors” to Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography. In a review in The Nation (“No Carnations Please, We’re Goddesses," October 1, 2012), she writes, “The vagina may be built to withstand multiple childbirths, but apparently even a joke at its expense can shut women down: Wolf says she couldn’t write for six months after a male friend celebrated her book deal with a festive dinner featuring vagina-shaped pasta (‘cuntini’) followed by salmon. It was the salmon that really did her in. Well, at least it wasn’t fish tacos. Or clams.” Pollitt also goes after Wolf on the facile equating of “female confidence”(deriving from a well orgasmed vagina) and “creativity.” “I dunno,” Pollitt says,”—the virgins- and-celebates team has some pretty heavy hitters: Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, the Brontes, Forence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf…There’s something to be said for sublimation, as Freud observed.” Pollitt has her fingers, as it were, on the role of hyperbole in dehumanizing sexuality. It’s as if Woolf had picked up the virus hosted by macho male intellectuals that equates the encounters of famous philanderers like Pushkin, Hugo and Updike with their productivity. In her critique of Wolf, Pollitt is inadvertently championing the solitary males counterparts of the woman writers she cites, Proust and Kafka. And then there is the question of the vagina itself. Is Wolf a dualist? By writing a book entitled Vagina: A New Biography, she undermines neuroscience’s hard won mind/body connection.

The Recursive Mind

In her review of Michael C. Corballis’s The Recursive Mind (TLS, 10/28/11), Barbara King brings up the Gobekli Tepe site in ancient turkey as a an example of a hunter gatherer society which had contrary to common wisdom mastered advanced forms of planning and thinking. Gobekli Tepe has also been the subject of a recent piece in The NewYorker by Elif Batuman (“The Sanctuary,” 12/19/11). But the chief thrust of King’s review is to dispute the claim that humans are superior to other animals due to their possession of recursive thinking, two qualities of which  are  “mental time travel” and  “theory of mind. “During mental time travel, an experience we’ve had in the past or that we imagine for ourselves in the future is ‘inserted into [our] present consciousness,’” King remarks in summarizing and quoting from Corballis. “Similarly, in theory of mind, we insert what we believe to be someone else’s state of mind into our own.” King’s point is that these traits are not unique to man at all. Even crows crow about it. “I wonder if, after viewing the documentary film A Murder of Crows, Corballis would still refuse to credit corvids—ravens and crows—with the recursive skills already outlined,” King complains. “In one striking scene, a New Caledonian crow (a bird admired by Corballis, though he thinks it incapable of recursive thinking) solves a complex experimental three part tool using problem.” Sure crows and chimps all have patterns that look like thought, but is King perhaps failing to distinguish between instinctual behavior based on survival with the self-referential patterns of consciousness. It’s doubtful that many crows would crow about the good old days or the past and still fewer chimps are likely to open the first volume of The Remembrance of Things Past. Sure the whale in Free Willy may intuit danger. He may even have been trained enough to realize that danger lurks behind a particular bend in the coral, but that’s a hell of a lot different than being able to think “I am the whale in Free Willy. I realize there is danger lurking in them waters and by George the Proustian madeleine is an example of Bergson’s concept of involuntary memory.”

                                                     

Paris Journal IV: Silence is Golden

The Musée Carnavalet in the Marais section of Paris is the Museum of the City of Paris, which is housed in the former residence of the great letter-writer Madame de Sevigny. One of the permanent exhibits is the room Marcel Proust occupied. “C’est dans son modeste lit du laine qu’il composa la plus grande partie de A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.” It was in his modest wool bed that he composed the great part of The Remembrance of Things Past, reads the inscription on the wall outside the installation. The room was covered in cork at the suggestion of his friend, the Comtesse de Noailles, to ensure silence. The same décor existed in the three residences Proust occupied after the death of his parents: 102 Boulevard Haussman (1902-1919), 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichat (l919), and 44 rue Hamelin (1919-22). With its antique desk, its chest, its tiny upholstered chair, Proust’s digs resemble the small but elegant respites in the expensive boutique hotels that are ubiquitous in Paris these days. Its embroidered couch recalls Freud’s study. Proust’s cane remains, and on the wall is a picture of Proust’s father Adrian, a doctor who wore pince-nez. One floor up in the Carnavalet is a floor devoted to the French Revolution, which contains a framed copy of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. The first article reads: “Le but de la société est le bonheur commun.” The aim of society is the happiness of everyone—a dictum that has apparently eluded the hardened creatures who still lurk in the doorways of the infamous rue St. Denis only a few blocks away.