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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.

Letter From Croatia III: Korcula

Photograph of Vela Luka  garbage dump by Hallie Cohen

There is a film called Waste Land about the work of the artist Vik Muniz in the Jardim Gramacho, a huge landfill outside of Rio. There’s also a respectable size garbage dump outside the village of Vela Luka on the Croatian Island of Korcula. Korcula, which is known for its thick green vegetation (and also as the birth place of Marco Polo), derives its name from the Greeks who termed it Korkyra Melaina or Black Corfu. If there is a hyper awareness of recycling in Croatia, you wouldn’t know it from the dump outside Vela Luka, which though no match for Rio, is a testament to price that has to be paid for beauty. The garbage has to go somewhere and the dump, like the centuries of conquest and conflict that create the historical memory of Croatia, is a kind of legacy. Birds fly over the dump, which some might call an eyesore, in the otherwise verdant landscape, and there's an abandoned plow at the edge of the piles of debris which looks a little like the guard tower of a prison. In New York, the Department of Sanitation now employs a resident anthropologist. The dump at Korcula takes your breath away in a different way than the magnificent mountains that lead down to quaint summer cottages perched by the sea. Whether by an anthropologist as in the case of New York, or an artist as was the case with Rio, the munificence of Korcula’s dump needs to be recognized.

Waste Land

Lucy Walker’s Waste Land is a film about Vik Muniz, the Brazilian artist who, to put it euphemistically, uses organic matter in his art. The net result of his preoccupation, which started with making portraits of children out of sugar to point out the sweetness that was missing in their lives, becomes a project based on the Jardim Gramacho, the enormous garbage dump in Rio where equality finally asserts itself when the waste produced by millionaires is mixed with that of the impoverished occupants of the favelas. The catadores who occupy the dump are pickers of recyclable goods. From the beginning, comparison with the artist is unavoidable—the artist recycles reality just as the pickers recycle garbage, transforming often-painful circumstances into beauty. The dump, in fact, looked at from afar, resembles a palette, in much the way that Monet’s water lilies assume their form when looked at from the distance. Muniz, who himself grew up in a poor family, employs extensive art historical referents. In one iconic setup, for instance, he employs a pose based on David's Marat, using a tub that has been extricated from the garbage. The dump’s resident intellectual, an autodidact who has read a volume of Machiavelli’s The Prince that he found in the detritus, compares Rio to the world of Machiavelli and its fiefdoms. The transformative power of art is another theme the film explores, since Muniz looked at the film as a social act, in which his pickers would participate in and profit from the production of art. The project that Munoz describes is utopian, in that it aims at liberation, and yet it is curiously Candidian. The film ends with Muniz offering a whole new world and life to his subjects (one of the most affecting scenes takes place at an auction in London where the work is being sold off), whose expectations are heightened and whose ability to survive without him must be a source of concern to both Muniz and anyone who views the filmic document of this esthetic and social experiment.