Entries associated with the tag "Kitsch":

Two of the more interesting programs that I saw at the just-concluded Torino Film Festival consisted of films by LA filmmaker and Cal Arts alumnus Anna Biller, who writes, directs, stars in, designs the costumes and sets for, and sometimes helps to perform the music in her films, none of which has a distributor at this point. Her first feature, Viva (2006), is a pastiche of 1970s soft-core porn, theoretically reconfigured to support a woman's viewpoint--an interesting curiosity, but a bit long for my taste (at 120 minutes, longer than any '70s soft-core flick that I'm aware of), and perhaps not sufficiently aware of its own grotesqueness to qualify as either a critical commentary on its elected genre or as a wholly convincing entry in that genre.

I found her program of earlier 16mm shorts more interesting: Three Examples of Myself as Queen (1994), The Hypnotist (2001--her only film in which she doesn't act and which she didn't write herself, written instead by her partner and frequent collaborator Jared Sanford), and, above all, A Visit from the Incubus (2001, see photos), a 27-minute horror-western-musical that I regard as her masterpiece. (It's worth adding that all her films apart from The Hypnotist contain musical numbers; Viva virtually ends with an homage to the opening number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is also referenced in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.)

All her films are fascinated with kitschy decor and costumes, and all of those that Biller stars in are clearly dress-up fantasies (Three Examples of Myself as Queen is especially evocative of Jack Smith, albeit with somewhat better production values). But only A Visit from the Incubus carries the full force of what appears to be a personal allegory. Biller's wild-west heroine gets ravished every night in her nightmares by the demonic incubus until she decides to apply for a job singing at the local saloon--where, as she eventually discovers, the incubus is doing a song-and-dance routine of his own. But his number bombs with the rowdy cowboy audience, while hers--which visually suggests Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood--brings the house down, routing the incubus for good. 

God, UFOs, spirituality, art ... a bit like losing yourself in a hallway of talismen, the empty invocations reverberating off the walls. Not that I've anything against the idea, mind you--of cinematic art, or "aahhrrt," the more accessible scare quotes variant--only the uses to which it's all too commonly put. Here's an example: art as a rubric that privileges before the fact, as if close, burrowing analysis--this is what's happening, this is how it's done, through assorted camera angles and movements (close-ups that implicate, distant shots that hold you at arm's length), blocking and editing strategies, the whole panoply of technical intuitions and ideas in search of a desired end (or maybe not even that, just inspired serendipity)--weren't enough to get the point across. Can't stand by itself, in other words, unless the talismanic spell is cast, the rubric reverentially intoned, so all the sacred attitudes can conveniently rush in--which reminds me a little of high school athletes crossing themselves before shooting the next free throw or taking the next cut at the plate: irrelevant to the processes at hand, which ultimately are about technical skill and physiology and psyche, a mesh of largely analyzable factors. Though obviously if it helps to get the job done ...

All of which, of course, is work, the taut, demanding effort (oh, puh-leez!) of analysis and struggling to find the exactly resonant words, which makes "art" into a kind of convenient shorthand--something to invoke when you can't be bothered or haven't the time to follow out all the threads. My own bete noire in this--well, obviously just one of many--is Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue (playing at the Siskel Film Center this week), or at least the acclaim it conventionally enjoys, in which artful aspiration serves as more or less a cover for the class-bound attitudes that suffocate the tale. Think not?--then consider an alternative reading: punk rock groupie (Chloe Webb, say, or maybe Courtney Love) loses hungover but talented guitar-smashing paramour to motorcycle accident off Cline Avenue underpass in a squalid, roughhouse section of East Chicago, Indiana, where said paramour has considerately left behind an unfinished pop concerto that girlfriend's sure will ultimately be hailed a "masterpiece" if ever it gets a sufficient amount of top-40s radio play; bumming nickels and dimes on street corners and at South Shore Line depots and surviving mainly on Salvation Army handouts, girl sees project through to completion, whereupon--bingo, top o' the charts, ma! Not a likely candidate for art-movie immortality, since where are all the "tasteful" signifiers: the elegant appointments, woodworkings and fine wines, the fashionable attire, not to mention the automatic cachet that "classical music" confers on Blue's own sadly distressed heroine? And how can poor Chloe or Courtney hope to compete, in a connotative sense, with the implied sympatico of Juliette Binoche's dark, soulful eyes, or that top-of-the-line, grade-A homogenized, Clearasil-free complexion of hers? ... All pure "quality" there--yet the tale in both purports to involve death and loss, the ongoing anguish of pulling yourself through after a beloved partner's moved abruptly on. Which unfortunately is what most of the alleged "art" in Blue comes down to in the end--a preference for the travail of a certain class of sufferers, effectively a mirror to the comfortably born and bred--in which, of course, we're invited to see ourselves.

On the other hand, if that's what art--or "aahhrrtt"--is all about, then maybe we should just call it kitsch.