Sorry, Arindam, I /did /mean my response about /Gabriel /to be sent to
the list. Thanks for replying. /Gabriel/ interested me as a record of
what interested Martin. I don't like//Smithson's film as a film but it
is interesting too as a document of his work. Serra's films are actually
pretty good as films, in my view. So there is no obvious pattern here. I
agree that even an aesthetically bad film by a great artist can be
interesting.
Of course I am not trying to control what gets posted here. A curator
dealing with putting together a subject-oriented program can use this
list as a resource. It's just that personally I don't choose to see
films because of their subjects, but because they might offer good cinema.
Fred Camper
Chicago
On 4/29/2024 11:19 AM, Arindam Sen wrote:
I agree that Gabriel is by no means a great film.
Having seen it once, I had only partial recollection of the scenery
which I thought to be the jungle. The film is a lot of things that
Martin otherwise would consciously avoid while painting.
Artist films get a lot of attention not because of the films’ merit
but because they are perceived as some noble adventure of an artist
who usually is reputed as a painter, sculptor, or a musician. But that
doesn’t make their films good or bad by itself, and not many of these
artists are setting out to make aesthetically distinguished work when
working with film (which is absolutely fine). Smithson is a great
artist and film is integral to his practice, he is not just trying out
a new media, as perhaps is the case with Agnes Martin. Same goes for
Carolee Schneemann or Richard Serra. Their films are fascinating.
On Mon, 29 Apr 2024 at 17:52, Fred Camper <[email protected]> wrote:
On 4/29/2024 6:16 AM, Arindam Sen wrote:
Also perhaps Agnes Martin's /Gabriel /could be added to the list.
Was this not shot entirely in the Northern New Mexico she lived
in? This region can be quite beautiful, but is in no way a jungle.
While reading these I was reflecting on why I personally dislike
these threads, looking for films based on subject matter. Unlike
most, I don't like most films. I look for films of great aesthetic
merit, films that, to paraphrase Paul Strand writing on
photography in 1923, can stand alongside the best paintings in
museums. Such values have nothing to do with subject matter; any
subject can make a great film, wheras most films of all types show
little or no sense of using cinema with that level of complexity.
Agnes Marin is a sublimely great artist; I think I hold her in
higher esteem than even most of her admirers do./Gabriel, /unless
I missed something on my one viewing, is a worthlessly bad film,
simply artless pictures of the rural scenes that might have
inspired her to her great abstract paintings, and with the cloying
cliche of a young boy as surrogate for the viewer. Like some other
great twentieth-century artists (Robert Smithson comes to mind),
she had zero understanding of how to use the film medium.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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