The Empty Canvas

Some people still insist there's a meaning for everything and that you do things for a purpose. For instance, if you ask the average human being why they exercise, they'll say “to get strong” or “be healthy.” The notion that there's no meaning or reason to do anything is not an attitude that's maintained by a broad spectrum of the population. But isn’t the plight of the artist with his or her blank canvas a paradigm of the human condition? No one is telling him or her what to paint or how to paint it and yet they must begin somewhere, make a mark from which the rest of the artistic work will proceed. The act of filling the canvas is not informed by meaning, but is an exercise in meaning making. The canvas could be blank or filled with gibberish like Jack Torrance’s page in Stanley Kubrick's film version of The Shining with the famously perseverative “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Dull he wasn’t. One of Alberto Moravia’s best known novels is The Empty Canvas whose original Italian title La Noia translates as “boredom.” What these titles have in common is the state of absence, of disinformation that however uncomfortable remains an optimal condition for artistic creation. When Antonioni met Rothko he commented "Your paintings are like my films--they're about nothing...with precision.” Renaissance artists, like Michelangelo and da Vinci, dealing with Christian liturgy didn't face this problem since they had a mission. But the truly empty canvas is the predicament of modernism in which meaning is created rather than received. So when you go to the gym and step onto the treadmill, you're not ultimately attending to your health or your strength, you're stepping into the abyss—and the inertial force of the unwilling body, clamoring to return to its resting (couch potato) state is ample testimony to the fact.

Computer Chess

Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, currently playing at Film Forum, is an odd case. Even a movie like the classic Women in the Dunes posits an atmosphere that is somewhat engaging—in that case due to the existential inundation it so wonderfully describes. Let’s take horrifying movies like The Silence of the Lambs or The Shining or the crème de la crème of frightening movies When a Stranger Calls. As troubled as these landscapes are, they are places that you could imagine yourself trapped in. Computer Chess does for artificial intelligence what Boogie Nights did for porn. The film introduces a cast of nerds as devoid of intelligence, as Boogie Nights  produced porn stars lacking in eroticism. The setting of the movie is a l980 computer chess convention and the drab black and white in which the film is shot is a kind of computerized chess board in brownout. Stasi and Tsar 3 are two of the chess programs and there’s an iconoclastic character named Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige) who walks around in a three piece double knit suit that one of the characters in Saturday Night Fever might have worn to work Monday morning. Papageorge floats between the convention and a group of Esalen type spiritualists who follow an African guru. Bujalski’s film is beyond parody. The assortment of geeks and seekers rolling huge anachronistic consoles around their hotels rooms has all the makings of parody, but Computer Chess is really metaparody, if such a thing can be said to exist. We’re in Todd Solondz land in this parody of parody that turns simple comedy on its head. The problem is that despite all its brilliant concepts, it's difficult to watch. The world of the film is quirkily repellant; you don’t want to be there. The score accompanying the final credits recalls another 80’s icon Tiny Tim. If you like Tiny Tim, you’ll probably love Computer Chess.

Seven Psychopaths

David Fincher’s Seven dealt with the Seven Deadly sins. Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths deals with a hard drinking Irish writer named “Marty” (Colin Farrell) in search of a movie. If Marty is an alter ego for Mr. McDonagh then the seven psychopaths created by the writer, which include a serial murderer who leaves the Queen of Diamonds at the scene of his crimes and a Quaker, are a little like Pirandello’s Six Characters only this time they are sorely in search of a director. Still the movie is significant if for no other reason than the debt it owes to a series of predecessors from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the Coen brothers No Country for Old Men and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. McDonagh’s movie estheticizes violence, along with everything in creation including the act of filmmaking itself. Amongst the many curiosities is a dognapper played by Christopher Walken who feigns reticence when grateful owners reward him for returning their pets (and whose comic exploits might hearken back to Ace Ventura). Walken who wears a cravat which covers the huge scar around his neck explains the nature of the garment to a mobster (Woody Harrelson) who has just murdered his black wife in a digression that recalls Tarantino’s famed “Royale With Cheese”sequence. The movie also includes a Vietnamese veteran whose family has been murdered at My Lai  and whose vengeance involves turning a hooker into an unwilling suicide bomber. And then there is the bizarre logic. Psychopath number one attacks Gandhi’s statement “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” by saying “no it doesn’t there’ll be one guy left with an eye.” “The Spanish have bullfighters, the French Cheese and the Irish have drinking” is one explanation offered for Marty’s drunken muddle, though it might not explain how his creator went astray.

Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is one of the great essays on alcoholism, second only to The Shining. And even if you’re brain is dry, you should run to see the elegant edition of Hardy’s classic on display in Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time, in its last precious few days at the Carrere Gallery in the Forbes Building on lower Fifth Avenue. Here’s a brief note, exhibited in the show, which V.W. wrote to Hardy’s widow. “I was very much disappointed not to come to your lunch the other day. I had been dining out the night before and fainted owing to the heat. So that it seemed unwise to go out again the next day. Indeed I stayed in bed. But I am quite well again now and hope very much I may see you later.” Contrast this to what V.W. wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell decades later, on 3/28/41, the day she took her life, by walking into the sea. “I feel that I have gone too far to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It’s just as it was the first time. I am always hearing voices and I know I shan’t get over it now.” And here is what Virginia’s beloved Vita Sackville-West would write in the manuscript of a poem, which appears in the exhibit, “Frugal, austere, fancy, proud/Rich in her contradictions, rich I love/Some say, she lived in an unreal world…she now has gone/Into the prouder world of immortality.” And now back to Hardy’s Mayor who was also riven by creative and self-destructive urges. Along with letters, memorabilia (like Woolf’s 1923 passport) and commentary, this gem of a show, comprised of works collected by William B. Beekman, includes Hogarth Press editions of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, whose extraordinary post-Impressionist covers, show the influence of her lover Roger Fry, who had written extensively on Cezanne and Van Gogh.  Some creative publisher must bring these wonderful non-sequiturs back from the dead.

The Black Swan

Films choose particular arenas or settings in which to establish their plots. Baseball and basketball are the backdrops of Field of Dreams and Spike Lee’s He Got Game, respectively. The famously haunting Kubrick film of the ‘50s, The Killing, was about a heist at a racetrack, and then there were Airplane and Airport and Wall Street, and The Devil Wears Prada. But no setting is as conducive to portraying the human body as the world of ballet, where the discipline of muscles and the regimen of eating and exercising become a kind of narration apart from the choreography of the works performed. The necessarily obsessive nature of the ballerina’s concern with body image is one of the themes of Darren Aronofsky’s The Black Swan, and the disorders that the movie presents, from cutting and biting to bulimia, are often associated with a search for perfection that the body eludes. The other element that the movie powerfully underlines is how we do to ourselves what we fantasize doing to others. “Perfection is letting go,” Thomas (Vincent Cassel) tells his newly anointed star Nina (Natalie Portman). But how does a ballerina whose whole life is predicated on control gratify such a diametrically opposed impulse without becoming victim to the kind of schizoid state that the film ultimately depicts? The melodrama of the plotline might easily be discountenanced if it weren’t for the way the film employs it to call attention to this confusion between the inner and outer worlds. Many of the scenes in which terror results from the labile nature of the reality are reminiscent of the stomach-churning suspense in films like The Shining and William Friedkin’s masterpiece of supernatural horror, The Exorcist, in which the world literally seems to be on fire.