film + video

“My interest was to show Richter at work. How he moves, how he applies paint to canvas, his compelling squeegee technique. The purpose of the film was not to reflect the art historical discourse. It’s not that I didn’t have such concerns in mind, but I didn’t want to use the film to interpret the paintings. Books are a better medium for articulating theoretical positions. And the actual act of painting is hard to describe in words—especially the way Richter mixes primary colors on the canvas, generating such a complex system. The way layers are built up and submerged, and how sculptural they appear on canvas. The most important thing for me in this film was to show something uniquely visual.”

-Filmmaker Corinna Belz, who wrote and directed Gerhard Richter Painting, which opens next Wednesday at Film Forum in New York

This writer is suffering a bit today from having endured three hours in a dentist’s chair to get some crowns put in, so instead of a heady and/or lengthy write-up, we instead turn to the magic of video. This trailer in particular has helped us get through the pain and Novocain numbness: Ben Shaprio’s documentary about photographer Gregory Crewdson, Brief Encounters. More than a decade in the making, it documents Crewdson’s film set-like process of capturing almost-surreal, haunting images of small town America. Knowing that the film will have its premiere in just a few days, launching with four screenings in Austin for SXSW (the first on March 10th at the Alamo Lamar) means that it’s that much close to starting a tour, which means it might come to Chicago so we can see it, which was the extra push we needed today to keep our sore head up. Here’s the film’s site and here’s the trailer, which is guaranteed to have you hooked within seconds:

“I’ve always said that the DNA of a house is a based on the personality of the founding designer. Mr. Dior was really mean, and the house is still mean. Chanel was crazy. At Louis Vuitton, there was no fashion, only bags, so there was not this big ghost over them. And Marc Jacobs has nice DNA. He works really hard—too hard, maybe.”

-Loïc Prigent, speaking earlier this week at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology about his 2007 documentary Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton. Next up for the French filmmaker (Signé Chanel, The Day Before) is a look back at Yves Saint Laurent‘s final haute couture show. “I’m doing the interviews now,” said Prigent, “and everyone is crying.”

Jacobs and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault in 2006. (ARTE France/ANDA MEDIA)

“I was somewhat amazed not to see a single handbag in the first show,” says LVMH honcho Bernard Arnault toward the beginning of Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton, a documentary by Loïc Prigent. “However, he has made up for it since.” The film, screened last night for a capacity crowd of fashion lovers at FIT, delves into Jacobs’ transatlantic roles at the helm of both Louis Vuitton, the leathergoods powerhouse for which he inaugurated ready-to-wear in 1997, and his own fearlessly quirky label. It’s a rare behind-the-scenes look at the designer and his team at work on two spring 2007 collections in Manhattan and then Paris, interrupted only by a triumphant trip to Tokyo, where Vuitton held a champagne-soaked encore presentation of the previous season’s looks in a translucent pod erected for the occasion. “The things you have to do to gain new markets!” LVMH exec Yves Carcelle tells Prigent with a grin, yelling over a live set by Grace Jones.

After six months of fly-on-the-wall filming of Jacobs and interviews with the likes of Sofia Coppola and Larry Gagosian, Prigent was most stunned by a member of the Vuitton creative team he met while on the Tokyo trip. “I asked her what she did, and she told me ‘I’m here for the belts. In case one hole is not right and they need another hole. That’s what I do,’” he explained in a Q&A following the screening. “The belt girl blew me away. Keep in mind that they were putting on the same show as they had a couple of months before—with the exact same models.” Prigent also singled out “the bag people” at Vuitton as particularly…innovative. “They had all these unbelievable ideas,” he said, having been allowed to film design meetings but required to blur the “mood boards” lest competitors’ steal ideas. “It was all this crazy stuff, things with Mickey Mouse. Crazy!”
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Pruitt-Igoe. Cabrini-Green. Mellifluous hyphenates that have evoked, in turn, hope, pride, fear, terror, shame, and utter disappointment in utopias, razed. In The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, filmmaker Chad Friedrichs wades through the thicket of emotions aroused by the infamous public housing project, built in the early 1950s by the St. Louis Housing Authority, to examine what comes between optimism—for 33 pristine, Minoru Yamasaki-designed high-rises that promised to solve the problems of overcrowding in a then-booming inner city—and disillusionment, with a vertical ghetto that, just two decades later, was leveled and declared unfit for habitation. This documentary is complex and fascinating: a chilling clash of Modernist zeal, postwar urban decline, and racial tensions that plays out through an incredibly rich (and masterfully edited) collage of archival footage and the individual stories of a handful of former Pruitt-Igoe residents, who share their memories against a backdrop of optic white. “So much of our collective understanding of cities and government and inequality are tied up in those thirty-three high-rise buildings, informed by the demolition image,” notes Friedrichs in his notes on the film, now playing at the IFC Center. “Too much of the context has been overlooked, or willfully ignored, in discussions of public housing, public welfare, and the state of the American city. Pruitt-Igoe needs to be remembered and understood—in a different way that it has been—because the city will change again.”

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is now playing at New York’s IFC Center. Click here for a schedule of upcoming screenings nationwide.

Get ready for MOCA TV! The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles has teamed with YouTube to create a new video channel for fresh contemporary art and culture programming. The online programming venture, part of YouTube’s new original programming push, is expected to debut in July with an identity designed by L.A.-based Studio Number One. “Contemporary art is the new international language, unifying leading creators across art, music, fashion, film, and design,” said MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who has always struck us as a natural VJ. “MOCA TV will be the ultimate digital extension of the museum, aggregating, curating, and generating the strongest artistic content from around the world for a new global audience of people who are engaged in visually oriented culture.” Slated for the MOCA TV line-up? Global art news briefs, programs focused on the latest collaborative projects (art and music, art and fashion), looks inside artists’ studios, the street art beat (natch), and an interactive education series called MOCA University. The musem has tapped social media company theAudience to help get the word out about MOCA TV as the launch approaches.

London continues to try and ramp up its coolness levels with the impending Olympics being held there this summer now just around the corner. For the latest effort, they’ve gone underground. Launched just yesterday in a number of Tube subway stations is a collaboration between poetry and motion graphics called “Word In Motion.” As part of the Smile for London campaign, the project blends the two, with writing from the likes of Ray Davies and Jarvis Cocker, and design by groups like Why Not Associates and Malcolm Garrett, the short pieces will play on 60 screens during rush hours. The project launched on the 16th and will only last for the next two weeks, so while Olympics visitors won’t be treated to them, they’ll perhaps provide a welcome bit of relief from the locals who have been overwhelmed by construction delays over these past couple of years. Here’s a sampling:

We can’t help but viewing 2011 in terms of artistic losses—from Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly [sigh!] to John Chamberlain and Helen Frankenthaler—and don’t even get us started on Hitch. This perspective makes our own 2011 highlight reel about as uplifting as the annual Academy Awards death montage, and so we defer to Mac Premo and Oliver Jeffers of The Daily. The video artists have whipped up this two-minute video recap of the biggest stories of 2011, from the January shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to the end of the Iraq War, all in a whimsical stop-motion style that recalls the interstitial programs of Sesame Street. Happy New Year!

Like Werner Herzog before him, Wim Wenders is proving there legitimately is some artistic value in 3D films, with the release of his latest, the dance documentary, Pina. In it, he chronicles the life and work of dancer Pina Bausch, who passed away two years ago, just before production began. In a recent interview with the Documentary Channel‘s DocBlog, Wenders extolls the virtues of shooting nonfiction in 3D, and near the end, spills the beans on his next project: a 3D documentary about architecture. Here’s a bit:

I have actually already started a long-term project, another documentary in 3D. It will take several years, but it’s going to be about architecture. I have always wanted to do a film about architecture, and I have a lot of architect friends. But that is another subject I never really knew how to approach with film. I realized through PINA that architecture is something that could have a real affinity to this medium. We started shooting already, but it’s at the very, very beginning. That’s going to be my next documentary project in 3D, but I would definitely also do a narrative film in the future in 3D as well.