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The Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull was highly touted by The Times "'Neon Bull,' With Creatures Great and Small," 4/7/16) and there were intimations of exotic sexuality to boot. With all that's appeared on the screen from Blue is the Warmest Color to Gaspar Noe's Love, that’s a pretty tall order. Actually Neon Bull might better be titled Fashion Designer in a Bullpen, as the central character Iremar (Juliano Cazare) is a cowboy by day who dreams of being a fashion designer by night. He draws his designs on the centerfolds of pornographic magazines and his scavenging for mannequins in a muddy dump recalls Waste Land, Lucy Walker's film about the artist Vik Muniz and the Jardim Gramacho. Iremar has an ambiguous relationship with Galega (Maeve Jinklings) an exotic dancer who dons a horse’s head and hooves as part of her act and looks like she'd once been extra in Eyes Wide Shut. In the course of the movie Iremar has an affair with Geise (Samya De Lavor), the pregant security guard in a panties factory. It is shall we see say Iremar’s backdoor entry into the world he aspires to and one can't help think of Annie Leibovitz's famous Vanity Fair cover of the pregnant Demi Moore. Lautreamont's "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" is often used as a definition of surrealism. (Was Iremar and Gelse's lovenest with its sewing machine a reference to the Lautremont quote?) So any film dealing with unlikely appositions or oppositions, in the service of a surrealist esthetic, is going to be jolting. Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou was one of the most famous illustrations of jarring contrasts with a nude woman, a bicyclist in a nun's habit and the famous slit eyeball providing the requisite cocktail of humor, sexuality and aggression. But what is missing in Neon Bull is the weaving that characterizes great surrealist works. Mascara's scenes are mini homiletics that end abruptly, with lots of fervor, but little elegance or flow from one to the other. The movie is fragmented and jumpy and after a while you wonder what all the fuss is about. Even the sex, which does succeed in adding one more color to an otherwise crowded palette seems to have a take it or leave it quality. Are we supposed to be shocked, titillated or enthralled and to what end? Even though the point that men and animals have something in common is hammered out in almost every take, the film ultimately seems disjointed, with most of the incipient drama foreshortened and dissipated by film's jumpy and often jagged cutting and pacing.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

The title of Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence refers to a poem that is being read on stage by a little girl at a school event. When quizzed by her teacher about what the pigeon is thinking the little girl says that it’s thinking it doesn’t have enough money. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is a philosophical comedy, Monty Python meets Kierkegaard, with the title of Damien Hirst’s famous sharkwork, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," thrown in for good keeping. It starts off with three vignettes all lumped together under the rubric “Meeting With Death.” In the first a man dies of a heart attack, as his wife, oblivious to what is going on, cooks. In the second, the son of a dying old woman tries to wrest a bag full of valuables from his mother, whose intent is plainly to take her wealth with her to the grave; in the third another man dies in a cafeteria. The problem is what to do with the food which has already been paid for? The stars of the show are a pair of Vladimir and Estragons, Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom). They’re salesmen whose trove of novelties includes “vampire teeth with extra long fangs,” and an item they keep saying they "have faith in," “ a mask called “uncle one tooth.” Their business plan is to “help people have fun,” only they can’t escape the fear of death, with one tormented by a song (he can’t get out of his head), about going to heaven to see his parents. Among the other characters are a uniformed worker who’s constantly being stood up at a restaurant, a flamenco teacher whose leering sexuality recalls the surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou and the historical character of King Charles XII who shows up in a present day bar in search of a bathroom. A character sitting in a rathskeller cries out “I’ve been greedy all my life. That’s why I’m so unhappy.” Around him the staff begin to close up the place as if nothing untoward were happening. “I’m happy to hear you are doing fine,” functions as a kind of Greek chorus as varying grotesqueries are perpetrated, amongst them the torturing of a primate. Towards the end, the movie tips its hat to colonialism, as slaves are whipped and then forced into a rotating oven where they’re cooked to death. The scene is being witnessed by a group of tuxedoed aristocrats holding flutes of champagne. The locution of  A Pigeon Sat on A Branch Reflecting on Existence also recalls the famed philosophic conundrum about “a leaf falling in forest with no one watching,” but the intention of A Pigeon is far less benign. As imaginative sequences give way to adolescent outrage at the meaninglessness of existence, the film becomes its own best parody. Andersson’s pigeon needs to shit or get off the pot. Right now it occupies a no man’s land between philosophy 101 and watered down Lars von Trier. Are the questions A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence raises difficult or is the disquisition merely oppressive? 

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night or Un Chat Andalou

What is Iranian noir? Like The Blair Witch Project it’s shot in black and white and maybe recalls 60’s B movies like Succubus with a little bit of Rebel Without a Cause, thrown in.  Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night stars a vampire in a chador (Sheila Vand) who rides a skateboard. She sucks the blood out of Saeed, a drug dealer and pimp with “sex" tattooed on his Adam’s apple. Saeed has a stuffed antelope over his bar and modern art on the walls of his pad. She tells Atti, a prostitute  (Mozhan Marno), “You’re sad. You don’t remember what you want. You don’t remember wanting.” And she falls for a James Dean look alike, Arash (Arash Marandi) who drives a Thunderbird and pierces her ears with a safety pin at night in the front of the bilging smoke- stacks of the local power plant. As you may be able to tell A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is totally over the top. Like its heroine, it sucks blood-- this time out of a number of genres rather than people--including that of the morality tale. But it’s the settings of the movie, the oil fields, the domiciles of Arash, who lives with his father Hossein (Marshall Manesh), a heroin addict, of the vampire herself, of the prostitute and of a wealthy prima donna, Shaydah (Rome Shandaloo), who is recovering from a nose job, that tell the story. Though this vampire is an avenging angel, you may have to search in vain for political allegory, despite the fact that the movie takes place in, yes, Bad City, Iran. Amirpour, is obviously in love with film style and particularly the haunting postmodern surrealism found in filmmakers like David Lynch and David Fincher. Looking for a message in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night would be like trying to analyze the politics of Un Chien Andalou and with the film’s resident cat perched enigmatically between the vampire and her lover in the film’s final scene, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night might also have been called Un Chat Andalou.

Paris Journal III: Tromp L'Oeil

Photograph: Hallie Cohen

Tromp L’oeil: Imitations, Pastiches et Autre Illusions at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs begins with the following inscription from Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, “Combien d’hommes profondement distraits penetrereent dans trompe l’oiel et ne son pas revenues” (“how many deeply absent-minded men fall into tromp l’oil and don’t return”). Is that like one of those warnings about explicitly subject matter that you find at the entrance to certain shows? One of the early pieces in the exhibit is "Armoire Surrealist" (l941) whose doors literally open up into a vision of cloud filled skies.  “Un matiere peut en cache en autre” (a material with which one can capture another) is one of the subcategories with the example of “Plat Faux Bois” by Granjean Jourdain (l955) as an early example. "Le Masque d’homme barbu dit Agamemenon” is an example of the use of the use of tromp l’oeil in imitating gold. Tromp l’oeil obviously occupies a long and venerable place in art history, particularly in so far as perspective is concerned. But as a decorative technique it’s a kind of hands on surrealism, a practical application of surrealist technique. Hence, you have a Legumier  made up of tromp l’oeil asparagus which house the real thing and then an even more enchanting plate of snakes. Snakes might seem more like something in the diet of an Andre Breton or Salvador Dali. Remember Un Chien Andalou with its violent and improbably associations? But they're popular in China where this unique piece of dinnerware would undoubtedly find a huge following. 

Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890-1976)

“The Destruction of the Object” (l923) is the show-stopper in the current Man Ray show at The Jewish Museum. The artist—born Emmanuel Radnitzky—had been jilted by his lover of three years, the legendary Lee Miller, and the resulting work, fired in the crucible of his heartbreak, made art-textbook history, a little like the image of the eye ball slit by a razor in Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (l929).  Radnitzky photographed Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Proust (on his deathbed), and Joyce. But it is the image of André Breton in front of De Chirico’s “L’Enigme d’une journée” that is the show’s second most stunning piece. Blend Surrealism with Futurism and what do you get? Something curiously naturalistic, like the metronome in “The Destruction of the Object”—a time capsule sending a nostalgic message back from the past, beyond love and loss.

Radnitzky was bar mitzvahed in Brooklyn, but eventually ended up in Paris in time for Dada and Surrealism, with its infatuation with the spontaneity of the photographic image. He moved to Hollywood, and then returned to Paris at a time when New York had emerged as the center of the art world. “All NewYork is Dada and will not tolerate a rival,” he said. The current exhibit, which includes Radnitzky's first film, Le Retour à la Raison (film stock, successions of geometric images, and a nude that all defy reason), is like a message in a bottle, washed up on some silent shore after bobbing solitudinously at sea.