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Landscape Cinema: An Introduction

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Without consulting a reputable source that might satisfactorily define what ‘Landscape Cinema’ might be, I am left to define it myself. Alone, in suburbia, the low drone of midweek traffic humming through my windowpanes, I am to consider what I mean when I designate a film to fall into the category of landscape cinema.

It is always better to give examples when defining a concept, but I will give a brief explanation as to what I mean by the term landscape cinema. In my eyes, landscape cinema is cinema that employs the landscape not as a path on which its characters tread, but as a character in its own right. In the films I will discuss, the landscape sleeps and wakes and breathes and dreams and argues and laughs along with its human protagonists; it demands as much attention from its viewers as the actors that walk amongst it. Landscape cinema can manifest in narrative pacing, whereby the events in a film seem to mirror that which is occurring in the natural landscape; on the other hand, it can occur as an inevitable result of a film whose focus IS the natural landscape and its effects on the people that live within it.

Of what I have seen of it, I love landscape cinema. Perhaps it is partly to do with my penchant for slower-paced films, but to me it seems that filmmakers who take the landscape and use it to reinforce the story being told on screen create works that have a great thickness and richness to them; these are films that remind us we are but flesh walking atop a merciless earth.

There are a wealth of movies that fall into this category, most of which I have not seen – many are obscure titles that are difficult to find and watch, and many are documentaries. I will focus my efforts instead on the films I have seen and which I deem suitable for the categorisation I have proposed.

A very long time ago, my mother had a subscription to ‘LOVEFILM’, which was the precursor to ‘Amazon Prime Video’. She’d get DVDs delivered through our door and we’d watch them together, often on a Friday with a bowl of buttered pasta on our laps. I remember a film I must have seen when I was about 14 years old called Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue, Luc Besson, 1988), a film that chronicles the devastating and glorious power of water Jacques Mayol (played by Jean-Marc Barr), its protagonist, is an accomplished free diver drawn to the deep, the deep blue, the wide blue, the blue that stretches out as far as the eye can see. Whatever might happen on land, and much does indeed happen, Jacques finds solace in the quiet beneath the waves. For much of the film, director Besson places his viewers under the water. It is difficult to think of any other times we are subjected to this kind of imagery, save for in nature documentaries. In Jacques’ waking life, he finds himself falling into strange hallucinations, and his dives become increasingly extreme throughout the course of the film culminating in his ‘final dive’. Facilitated by Éric Serra’s surreal, dreamy soundtrack, Le Grand Bleu is a hallmark of landscape cinema that stares nature in the eyes and beckons it to fill the screen with its impulsive, changeable character.

A few months back, The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square screened a few films by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of which was his last feature, completed just before his death: The Sacrifice (1986) a Pagan-Christian parable about a man (Alexander, played by Erland Josephson) who attempts to bargain with ‘God’ to stop the impending nuclear holocaust. The Sacrifice is a lonely film, shot in a place that seems as though it could already be a cemetery of post-nuclear fallout. It was filmed on the southeast coast of Gotland, Sweden, in a peninsula called Närsholmen, a savanna-like nature reserve of grass and stone and sea. A person walking through this landscape could be seen from miles around, and this is key to the film. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to shelter save for the house where our Alexander lives with his family, and the house down the winding road where Maria, the family’s pagan maid, lives.

Desperate hope rings as a central theme for the film, and yet the landscape itself speak of hopelessness, of isolation and separation from the mainland, from the people, from time itself. This is a land without time, without dates or days or weeks or years. The Sacrifice speaks also of the strangeness with which we perceive nature and the landscape; when I am out and about in the forest, beside the sea, in fields, by ponds, I become acutely unaware of the implications of pollution, of warfare, of the ongoing decline of the natural world as a result of climate change. I am here, in the trees where the birds chirp, and all is well. Isn’t it? In the world of The Sacrifice, we are left wondering what exactly would change, or has changed, in the event of nuclear disaster. Would the lives of these people, far from everything, change? Would the landscape change, or would it simply breathe differently; where before, it breathed the clear salty air of the sea, would it heave and splutter beneath the surface, invisibly clogged with nuclear waste that would manifest in deformities of its flora and fauna?

Where the landscape of The Sacrifice stands as an onlooker as its character slowly fall into despair, in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), we witness a different landscape, one of a much more insidious nature. Here, the malevolence of the landscape is pinnacle to the tale itself, a tale of private school girls disappearing at a picnic in rural Australia. The ‘hanging rock’ of the title is situated in rural Victoria, and is a towering volcanic formation – called a ‘mamelon’ – which is created by a particularly stiff variety of lava which solidifies as it travels. The result is the rugged, maze-like structure that the young girls are drawn to explore during the picnic. There is something in these rocks, something inexplicably terrible but which remains unnamed and unseen throughout the film, save for a few strange lights, colours, and memories told from the eyes of the girls who survived the experience. The otherworldliness of this film, and of its depiction of the Australian landscape, was facilitated by the brilliant cinematographic techniques of Weir and DOP Russell Boyd, who were inspired by British photographer David Hamilton to drape fabric over their lenses to create the dreamlike visuals in the film. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Weir dwells on the rock itself, on its grandeur, its coldness, how it pierces the sky, how it takes the girls in and hides them from view.

Nature is often perceived as the ideal, as the ultimate in purity; current trends in diet and fitness are geared towards eating closer to the ‘earth’, or how our ‘ancestors’ used to eat and move. We forget that many of our ancestors were pillaging colonialists, and often even warmongering rapists, and that the majority of fruits and vegetables that we eat today have been manufactured over hundreds of years to make them edible to us, where before they might have been too fibrous or even downright poisonous.

Nature is not always our friend – nature is cruel, nature is merciless, nature lacks consciousness, morality, kindness. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Weir shows us the brutality of the landscape, its inhospitability, and, ultimately, our complete lack of understanding of it. With all our advancements in technology, industry, and all the rest, we are still powerless in the wild. Weir’s rock is a fearsome antagonist, and Picnic at Hanging Rock is a wondrous example of landscape cinema.

And then, there are the instances where the landscape watches. It stands and watches from behind bushes and rocks and trees to see what we will do next. It is silent, but it is not benevolent. Here, I speak on Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022) and L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960). To speak of them in parallel, and to witness them as such, we might see, from the perspective of landscape cinema as a concept, some innate similarities between these two films. In these films, we see two separate rugged isles pushing humans to the brink, both emotionally and physically. Nature watches from the sidelines of L’Avventura as its protagonists, Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search desperately for a trace of their lost companion. It is as though the land had eyes, for it stares at these lost people through cracks in rocks, from behind bushes, from the coastline. The sea batters the shore of the island of Lisca Bianca, where much of the film was shot, and the body of the missing woman is never recovered. What are we meant to feel? The emotions of these people are as unreadable as the landscape itself; beautiful yet unfriendly, cold yet at times joyous.

In L’Avventura, the landscape blends with its characters to make something inexplicably poignant. In Pálmason’s Godland, we see something else; the presence of the landscape within a character: Ragnar (played masterfully by Ingvar Sigurðsson) the leader of the Icelandic group guiding a Danish priest (played by the brilliant Elliott Crosset Hove) to the southeast coast of Iceland so he can build a church and spread the word of God. Ragnar is the rugged barrenness of the icescape, and the fairytale beauty of waterfalls plunging down from flower-covered precipices, and the quiescence of water lapping before a half-built wooden church. As in L’Avventura, Ragnar watches with a silent, all-knowing eye. He can read the skies and the water like they were words written in a book, and he is as humble as the horses he rides. But our protagonist – Lucas, the Danish priest – is a most wondrous contrast to the weather-worn Ragnar. In him is modernity, is the rejection of the ways of the land, is technology and callousness and colonialism, all in the name of God. In Godland, the landscape is fractured, and the calm existence of a people is disrupted by the oncoming tide of foreign religion, domination, and greed.

Ah, I could speak for hours on this. I have a list beside me with all the other films I was going to talk about, but perhaps we should leave this here for now. I can’t say for certain why I was drawn to speak on this, but perhaps it is something to do with the low drone of traffic outside my windowpanes, and the rumble of trains beneath my feet, and the sky, obscured by the rooves of the houses on the other side of the street. Perhaps it is that, despite all of their violence and coldness and mercilessness, I long to be in the landscapes that I see on my screen, away from the blinding noise of the city.

Perhaps I just need some peace.

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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include: The New Art, Ememem, and Film Scenes I Wish I Had Never Seen.
Also find Carl Kruse on Fstoppers and on Carl Kruse at Stage 32.

The New Art

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

I was speaking with a friend of mine a few days ago about innovations in art, or the lack thereof. He was of the opinion that nothing new was being made, that we, as a collective, were stagnating in our incessant recycling of the old, and in our opulent media wealth. At our fingertips, we have it all, from the birth of recorded music in Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautographic capturing of Au Clair de la Lune to the newest Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poet’s Department. Type, and you will get. That is how it is now. We are used to it.

I did not disagree with my friend. I feel it too, sometimes. When I am writing a film, when I am playing music, when I am writing my articles…am I simply recycling what came before? Am I, as we all seem to be, caught in the web of ceaseless creation, forever destined to be one step behind. It’s that feeling when you watch a film and you wished that you’d made it, or when you listen to a song that you wished you’d written. It’s the feeling of a seeming inability to see the world in a way that has not been done before, and it appears insurmountable.

It is boring, too, sometimes. There is so much that it is hard to look at, hard to see a thing amidst the digital trees. A smog of screens clouds my own creation and makes me leave projects hanging half complete.

However – I did not agree with my friend either.

I have been frequenting many music venues lately. Small places, with small dancefloors and dimmed lights. The music, here, is small too. Names I’ve never heard, people I’ve never seen. And some of it, sure, is as I mentioned; a desperate harkening to the bygone days of 60s rock, a tepid hippy revolution a la 70s with all its tassles and flowing paisley dresses, or a retelling of the pop idols of the late 2000s. But some of it is new, brilliantly new, wonderfully new – voices I’ve never heard before, melodies that stick around in my mind when I return home to my house beside other houses. Bishopskin, The Wheel 2!, Drive Your Plow – these are bands that have found the means to somehow squeeze themselves into the holes that remain in our musical landscape, and there they are building deep foundations that, they hope, will endure in the years to come.

But, sometimes, when I watch some of these bands writhing about on the stage, shouting about politics and love, throwing themselves off the stage into the audience, it is as though, at times, I can already see their end. Because it’s true, what Noel Galagher says. Streaming has killed music, particularly rock music. It pays artists a pittance of what they would have been paid before through record sales. In other ways, it enables smaller bands to be discoverable more easily, through such platforms as Spotify, giving them a reach that would have been neigh impossible before the advent of streaming. But nonetheless; we are out here, us artists, working tirelessly for ‘nish’. And that is enough for many artists to eventually break and throw in the towel.

But there is hope in it. Some of this music is indeed new, indescribable and incomparable to what I’ve heard before. There have been times where I have been so shocked at the skill and innovation of a band that I’ve found myself standing motionless, mouth agape, in awe of what I am seeing, because what I am seeing feels like a birth of something that, one day, will no longer frequent these small dingy venues. It feels like I am dancing in purgatory with performers that will soon find themselves up in the sky, untouchable at last.

Similarly, in film, when we search a little deeper, we find a clamouring, the clunking resonance of thick-bodied old cameras, and the quiet poise of a director with an eye unlike any other. In film, I find the new over and over again

A little while ago, I discovered the work of Hlynur Pálmason, an Icelandic director, whose heart of ice and snow and shingle and waterfalls bewitched me instantly. The first work I saw of his was Nest (2022), a film created over the course of 18 months which follows three siblings as they build a treehouse. The children building the treehouse are Pálmason’s children, and the film is permeated with the endlessly changing landscape of Iceland. The cold, the wind, the whiteness of the sun, then the orange of the sun and the green of the fine grassland. The film is plotless, in a sense, and yet, as we watch the months pass, and the treehouse being built, we feel the passage of time as something so present, so palpable, that it makes us see it in our own lives, in the passing of our days, our weeks, our months, our years. Nest reminds me of long summer days spent whiling away the hours doing nothing, or of winter mornings, wrapped in sheets while the kettle boils and the fire burns away.

Later, I watched Pálmason’s Godland (Volaða land (Icelandic); Vanskabte Land, (Danish – ‘Malformed Land’) (2023), a film whose terrible, stark beauty and impossibly crisp images stayed with me long after its last frame. Godland is imbued with the insidiousness of colonialism without a word being said about it. It is also a film filled with simple pleasure; the pleasure of sun and warmth after days trudging frozen tundras, the pleasure of an accordion bellowing out over the water as people dance, the pleasure of a hot soup swallowed under a wooden roof.

Pálmason is new. His films are new, his eyes are new. Away from the endless mechanical pumping of the Hollywood machine, we find many like Pálmason. Not like him in vision, but like him in sentiment. Making only art that he feels must be made, not the art that is asked of him, not the art that is made only for money.

Mark Jenkin is another director who has caught me in his grip with his eye and his fishing line. I watched Enys Men (Cornish for ‘Stone Island’) (2022) recently, which follows an ecologist as she goes out to check on some strange flowers growing on a cliff on the Cornish coast. Every day, she goes out, checks the temperature of the soil, drops a rock into a well, then returns home and switches on the generator, pens down her findings, and makes tea. In the evening, she reads by candlelight, because she has turned off the generator. This is a slow film, despite its short running time (1h 30m), and all the better for it. Time is not an anxiety, time merely serves as a tool with which to dwell on the rolling waves, the verdant fields, the darkness of the night in rural Cornwall. The protagonist’s house is away from everything, and so she is alone. And despite the implications of her solitude, I found myself yearning for the simplicity of her existence. London is tiring, at times. It is perhaps because I am here that I am often anxious that I can never create something new, something that touches people as the musicians and directors I have mentioned have touched me, something that excites people and makes them see this strange life a little differently, with wider eyes, like those of a child. I live and breathe in the saturation of a city groaning under the weight of millions of dreams and lives, and it is difficult, at times, to see the light, to see the possibilities that shine through the cracks in the grey paving stones of the streets where I live.

But I have hope.

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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Ememem, Shojin Ryori and What Does It Mean To Be Wealthy.
Other Carl Kruse Blogs include the Carl Kruse WordPress Blog and the Carl Kruse Blogspot Blog.

Yury Kharchenko Art Exhibit at the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum

by Carl Kruse

After the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7th in Israel and the Gaza war, life changed for artist Yury Kharchenko.

And now,, the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum is showing works by the artist in a solo exhibition from June 29th to October 20th, 2024.

The Berlin-based artist was born in Moscow in 1986. He came to Germany in the late 1990s as a Jewish refugee. From 2004 to 2008, he studied painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and then philosophy and literature at the University of Potsdam. The up-and-coming young artist has recently exhibited in well-known institutions, including the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück, the Kunstmuseum Walter, the Kunstmuseum Bochum and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Influenced by his experiences as a Jew in Germany, he takes up themes in his current paintings that deal with the war in Israel and Gaza, the Ukraine war, the problematic culture of remembrance in Germany, anti-Semitism and the relativization of the Holocaust. For example, he presents an Auschwitz gate with an Israeli and Palestinian flag hanging above it, and a ptyrodactyl flying out of it. What German responsibility does the Holocaust have for the current Middle East situation? Or the founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the T-Rex from the blockbuster “Jurassic Park” by filmmaker Steven Spielberg under an entrance gate whose shape is reminiscent of that of Auschwitz. The lettering, however, reads “Welcome to the Jewish Museum.” He depicts Beavis and Butt-Head, who embody woke culture from the US cartoon series, in front of the Auschwitz Gate. One of the images shows Jean Amery and an inscription on the Auschwitz Gate reads “From the River to the Sea”. Is it a call for a new genocide of the Jews and the annihilation of Israel? It is images like these that Kharchenko uses to demand more ethics from a society that is facing the decline of historical knowledge. In his works he focuses on the present, which contains a past that can never be overcome, and references to reactionary identity politics and post-colonial anti-Semitism meet totalitarianism and the utopia of consumer society. The synagogue paneling by Elieser Sussmann on display in Schwäbisch Hall is one of the most important Judaica in Europe. This alone is one reason why the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum regularly makes reference to Jewish topics.

Among other things, Yury Kharchenko also makes reference to the museum’s collection, such as the synagogue paneling, the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and vice versa, to the questioning of what terror is today and how or whether one can still live as a Jew in Germany today.

What do the German Holocaust, Hamas and Russian terror have in common and how does an artist experience the current world situation in his pictures?

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The Carl Kruse Arts Homepage “Ars Lumens” is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles about Yury Kharchenko are here, and here and over here.
Find Carl Kruse also at Vator and on Dwell.

World Premiere of “The President’s Tailor”

by Carl Kruse

Friend of the Carl Kruse Blog, Rick Minnich will be celebrating the world premiere of his latest film “The President’s Tailor” as part of the Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Brandenburg. The screening takes place at the Bundesplatz Kino in Berlin on June 19th at 20:30.

Blog followers and friends will gather with Rick at the Mexican restaurant “Alcatraz” beginning at 6pm for complimentary appetizers and drinks. The restaurant is located at Bundesplatz 6, right across the theater.

“The Presidents’ Tailor” is a heartwarming story about the Holocaust survivor and star tailor Martin Greenfield, who dressed six US presidents and hundreds of celebrities. The New York Times wrote an extensive tribute to Martin upon his death in March at age 95. The Jewish Journal also ran a cover story about the film.

An additional screening is planned for June 23rd at 5 p.m. at the Bundesplatz Kino.

There will be a Q&A session with Rick after the film for those interested.

Tickets for the film are 9€ and can be reserved at http://www.bundesplatz-kino.de/ The Carl Kruse Arts Blog has 5 complimentary tickets, preferably earmarked for students and anyone under financial duress, but really available to all on a first come first served basis.

For any questions please write me at info@carlkruse.net

See everyone on June 19 for what should be a wonderful evening.

Cheers!

Carl Kruse
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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Another Rick Minnich film premiere the blog participated in was for his film the Strait Guys.
The blog’s last event was an exhibition with artist Michael Dyne MIeth in Bertlin and we also sponsored the concert of the Mavericks.
Also find Carl Kruse on Pinterest.

Another Art Exhibit With Michael Dyne Mieth

by Carl Kruse

The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all to another exhibition and social gathering in Berlin as part of its Art series with German artist Michael Dyne Mieth.

Join us Thursday, May 23, 2024 from 6:30pm – 9:30pm at Dorotheenstr 83, 10117 Berlin.

Dyne will exhibit a collection of his works spanning his more than three decades as a painter. We will also have on hand staff from Margarethenhof Vineyards who have graciously offered to showcase some of their wines for the event. Jasmin Catering will serve unique Levantine-inspired finger foods. It will be good.

The event is free and open to all, though an RSVP is requested to carl@alumni.princeton.edu.

Dyne is a painter, sculptor and multimedia artist living in Berlin, whose art is exhibited internationally and always attracts attention due to his visionary motives. Some of his work includes his massive “G18” in which he revisits and reimagines Picasso’s Guernica, which has forever inscribed itself in art history as an appeal for peace. G18 was exhibited along with Pablo Picasso’s original Guernica at the Imperial Hofburg Museum in Innsbruck during the anti-war exhibition GUERNICA – “Icon of Peace.”

Dyne was also selected by Cisco Systems to envision a work on sustainability for their innovation center openBerlin. He created a sculpture in the shape of a robot called “Recycle” from packaging material that is normally hazardous waste. Sensors in a bodysuit that Dyne wore saved the data of his movement as the work was created and later published as “the data of creativity” allowing viewers to immerse themselves in the artist’s world and understand what he did and how he did it.

We look forward to seeing you on May 23 for what will be a beautiful evening.

Cheers!

Carl Kruse

The Carl Kruse Arts Homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
The last event in Berlin with Michael Dyne Mieth was this one.
Other events include The Mavericks in Concert, Tour of the Wallraff Museum, and the SOPHYGRAY Exhibit in Berlin.
Carl Krus e is also on an old blog here.

The Mavericks in Concert in Berlin

by Carl Kruse

Dear Friends of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog,

Max Abrams (Princeton ’99) and his band THE MAVERICKS perform on May 4th at 8pm in Berlin at Huxley’s Neue Welt.

The show is sold out but Max invites a few of us to attend for free.

The tickets are extremely limited and available on a first come, first served basis.

Here’s a playlist of The Mavericks’ music:

Reach out to info@carlkruse.net f interested.

Cheers!

Carl Kruse
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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Page is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Carl Kruse is also active on the cardiovasculat research project DENIS@HOME.

SOPHYGRAY Presentation in Berlin

by Carl Kruse

The Carl Kruse Arts Blog joins the Columbia Club of Berlin to invite all as Columbia alumna Nadja Marcin presents her new exhibition, “SOPHYGRAY – A Feminist Voice Bot,” at Alpha Nova & Galerie Futura, Am Flutgraben 3, Kreuzberg in Berlin.

The event takes place Saturday, February 3 at 2:00 p.m.

Developed over three years with 40 collaborators, the voice bot SOPHIEGRAY engages in surprising, philosophical, and humorous conversations on identity, art, and feminism. SOPHIEGRAY was developed within the framework of a European Media Art Platform residency at the Onassis Stegi Foundation, co-financed by the European Union and was awarded the European Union Prize for Citizen Science in 2023.

Space is limited to twenty participants. To reserve, please email apollinaire@live.com.

Nadja Marcin is a Berlin and New York based artist and filmmaker, exploring gender, history, morality, psychology and human behavior through an intersection of feminism and emotional architecture in theatrical and cinematic contexts.

Best known for her performances “OPHELIA” and “How to Undress in Front of Your Husband”, she subverts historical and media representations of women to highlight ideological systems of power and psychological effects at the moment of their creation. Addressing ecological and human rights concerns through an often absurdist, surreal, bold repurposing of imagery to create thought-provoking encounters.

She has presented solo shows and performances in Kunstverein Ruhr (2021/22), Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (2020), SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen (2019), Minnesota Street Project (2018), CONTEXT Art Miami (2017), SOHO20 Gallery (2016); Esther Donatz Gallery, Munich (2015); GOETHE Center, Santa Cruz (2014), and Dortmunder Kunstverein (2012). She has participated in group exhibitions and presentations in institutions such as TICKTACK, Antwerp (2022), Transpalette, Bourges (2021), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020), Ecofutures, London (2019), Fridman Gallery, New York (2018), Microscope Gallery, New York (2017), 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2016), Middle Gate Geel’13 (2013), ZKM- Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2012), and Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2010).Marcin has won numerous grants and prizes, including: Artsformation Commission (2022), NEUSTART Modul C by BBK via the Federal Germa Culture Commissioner (2021/2022), Individual Artist’s Grant in Electronic Media & Film by New York Council on the Arts (2022/2019), Kulturamt Köln (2018), Franklin Furnace Grant, New York (2017), NRW Film-und Mediafoundation (2013), DAAD, Germany (2011), and Fulbright, New York (2007).

Hoping 2024 is starting beautifully for you and see you on February 3!

Cheers,

Carl Kruse

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The Carl Kruse Arts blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Past exhibits in Berlin sponsored include the Underground Art Series, Open Studios Berlin, and the Helena Kauppila Solo Exhibit.
Also find Carl Kruse at Goodreads.

Photography Over Time

By Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

We are very aware these days of our submersion in the image; that much of our cultural meaning and awareness originates in the consumption of, production of, and of our being represented by images. The burning questions and controversies around the latest development in A.I.-related productions, or re-productions, or pastiches and parodies of the “real”, seem to take this image-world for granted, or at least it has forced a recognition of the limitations that we consider apt for it. Not too long ago, the invention of photography is now coming up to its second centennial, there were fusses on what actually photography was meant to be: does it function as an art? Is it the technical extension of perception? If it is not an art, what are we being gifted by this capability to fix an image? It is accepted now that photography can function as an art (museum space, exhibitions, online), and that the photograph can exhibit powerful displays of humanity; photography also displays much else besides and aids across contemporary industries. Photography is also an activity, a way of seeing and reacting to space and time, and has had a decisive effect on altering our perception and informing modern consciousness.

In an anthology of “classical” essays on photography (which ranges from the pioneers, Daguerre, Niepce, and Fox Talbot, to cultural critics of images, such as John Berger reminding us that an image is not just an objective fix of reality), the editor says ‘a common lament among photographers … is that the medium lacks a critical tradition’, as opposed to the critical traditions we find in painting and Literature where these medium’s cultural use and evolution are discussed and debated. One of the reasons why this is so is because photography has had a confused history with its relation to painting, not just whether it should be understood as an artistic practice or not, but whether it should be taking cues from painting as it did during the latter half of the nineteenth century: those strange portraits where serious faces look back at you from an artificial room decorated in Grecian amphoras and columns, or how it later tried to resemble Impressionism. It is not entirely obvious how to compose a photo, at least in the beginning, without the aid of referring to painting, that other visually composed experience. It is further confused because it is also not entirely obvious what social and existential effects the ability to reproduce reality by fixing its image will have, or mean, whether it is used for artistic, political, or scientific purposes.

In 1839, Astronomer and Physicist, Francois Arago, appealed to the French Commission of the Chamber of Deputies to grant Daguerre and the son of Niepce an annual and life pension for their invention of the process which fixes images obtained in the camera obscura (the commission complied). Arago speaks about the ‘extraordinary advantage … derived from so exact and rapid a means of reproduction … to copy, for example, the millions of hieroglyphs which cover even the exterior of the great monuments … would require decades of time and legions of draughtsmen. By daguerreotype, one person would suffice’; he praises the ‘unimaginable precision of detail’ which can be used in service of the artist, and reminds the audience that it does not require any knowledge of drawing or any special dexterity ‘when, step by step, a few simple prescribed rules are followed’. This process will bring reality closer with unheard-of speed of execution, will optimise our storage of knowledge, and anyone can utilize it. From Arago’s address onwards, the daguerreotype flourished and captivated the curious middle classes of Europe and America; photographic societies were formed, professionalism began, the portraiture business was no longer exclusive to the moneyed (portraiture being one of photography’s lasting performances); Edgar Allan Poe exalted the daguerreotype, seeing in it the magical potentiality of modernity, and doctor Oliver Holmes delighted in the fact that, finally, humanity has been able to separate the form from the object, form from matter.

The poet Baudelaire voiced a different opinion, imitating a generalised spokesman for a “realistic” art, he writes: ‘I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature. Thus, if an industrial process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be absolute art’. He goes on: ‘but if once it [photography] be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!’. “Realism”, Baudelaire is reminding us, is not only about fixing an exact reproduction of time and space; it is a flux of time, emotion, and uncertainty. It must have been a strange experience for the budding photographers of the nineteenth century, being used to visual representation only through painting which the finest painters made their own. It is no wonder that the confusion began on how to take a “proper” photograph, and of what subject – how to compose nature, or reality, in spite of “style”. Since the camera seemingly offered an unlimited scope in terms of angle, light, and scene, it is no wonder the “professionals” were quick to ally themselves with the then vogue of the “realistic”, finding they had the device which would do exactly that, and, in fact, even “better” than an artist could – by allying with painting standards, an “artistic” photograph could be judged. Amateur photographers and those curious about the new medium, i.e. unconcerned with whether photography was an art or whether it should follow rules of composition, allowed photography to expand on its own right, as a medium of interest in itself – something similar to the above enthusiasm of Holmes: “taking the form from matter”.

It is with Baudelaire that we begin to detect what photography will mean to humanity under modernity. Baudelaire was concerned with the direction of art: ‘can it legitimately be supposed that a people whose eyes get used to accepting the results of a material science as products of the beautiful will not … diminish its capacity for judging those things that are most ethereal and immaterial?’ We should, moving away from the question of art, ask: what about our capacity for judging reality away from the image of reality? Why do some moments, now, stand out as “fit for a picture”, what does the ability to “collect” fragments of the world mean? With the camera, the world now very easily appears as a fragmentary experience. Humanity now faces a reality that can be broken up and composed at will, a sort of triumph over its flow – or at least an image of a triumph, which has the quality of “objectivity”. The camera, then, is the characteristic appendage of a fragmentary modernity. It details desire and traces of events, but never a unity, and in the end, justifies the travelling; it miniaturises the world. The inhuman metropolis is transformed into the photographer’s playground, full of fit subjects. The photographer, and I have in mind someone like the great French Photographer Cartier-Bresson, will say something like: “I prowled the streets, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determine to trap life – to preserve life in the act of living’.

The conceit here is that the photograph is impersonal and so has a way of revelation, hence it taking over the ideological and journalistic fronts. Of course, the photographer must have the kind of eye to see where this ‘life in the act of living’ is taking place. The annoying response is: everywhere life abounds: you could not make it down your street without using up the roll, getting tired by all this life as it flits by so wantonly. Life in the act of living is really an aesthetic selection on the part of the photographer. It is with the camera that, despite the early fusses over whether you should “touch up” your images afterward and whether you understand the processes in the darkroom, modernity learned to look and think photographically – the vogue of the modernist photographers was that you should already have the image in your head before you take the photo; you just have to have the right eye to see it and the lens to capture it, and then there will appear an honest expression of life. This appears to be one of the main conclusions of the camera and the “photographic” mind: now the act of seeing can be one that can capture life honestly, instead of being tossed here and there with the inexplicable experience of the flow of time, you can cut off a little, freeze a moment and look at it time and time again. It is no wonder that the Surrealists ingratiated themselves with the medium. The photograph has something of the innocent about it: it appears that it cannot but tell the truth of a perception, of a moment. It acts to transcend the flow of time and leave a trace. It was, for the Surrealists, another form of automatism wherein a picture taken creates a past and reveals something hidden. This kind of fun is also a kind of distrust of reality (reality is not showing you everything); reality, for the photographer, now, is a web of hidden secrets and beauties, and potentially significant sights revealing and reflecting the self. The Surrealist camera-man had his antecedents in the nineteenth-century Flaneur, who flowed through the city relishing the continuous experience, it is only now with the camera that the Flaneur has become prey to discontinuous visions which the camera makes explicit. Most people who take photos, perhaps daily as the ease of picture-taking is obvious to all, although not participating in any kind of surrealist method, understand reality can be fragmented and meaningful and fun in those fragments.

And now we come back down to everyday living. We speak about our image-life and the images we see and then we speak about our life as lived experience, two very separate things – perhaps they are more intertwined, sometimes more in tune than not. Susan Sontag in one of her essays about photography (perhaps one of the first to begin a kind of “criticism” of photography) remarks that the great nineteenth century French writer Balzac had a terror of having his portrait taken, as he felt something akin to it stealing one of his “layers” of existence. Formally, or informally, a side of life becomes a series of portraits, whether asked for or not; Balzac’s horror holds some weight: there are times when an unexpected photo is existential theft. There is not much to be done, if you feel like Balzac, about the forced portraiture of our age – the formal ones feel very formal: the effect of formal portraiture is quite explicit when you look at your old yearbooks from school: some children love it, others shy away as if threatened, others accept their lot; it is the orders of the camera operator: Show those teeth, junior! – some of these reactions follow one through life. With the camera it is possible to bring out features of someone that they themselves could never see otherwise, that feel unreal to the person photographed, flattering or not. The amateur photographer begins by “training” themselves to see features in people that they find of interest, of worth, revealing – to say that the portrait discloses, discontinues, a feature of someone that is, in a way, in constant flux, shows that it reveals less than the truth of that person at that time, but rather an aestheticised version that no one can deny, that we have to, reluctantly or not, claim as ourselves.

Could there be some masking of the melancholic with this idea of fun? In the home, amongst the photo-albums that still abound despite the internet, or too with social media which reminds you to look at yourself from a year ago, you get the concentration of a life-lived. Not only of those now passed away, but the effect of time on oneself. This fateful progression speaks through those stamps of time no longer existent but contained in the frame. And these photos are imbued with something else that if one were to cut up, distort, montage-ify, it would seem a great act of disrespect and lunacy. In the portrait we see who a person thinks they are (how they would like to be observed), and who the photographer thinks they are; a cross between documentation and aesthetics. Through the photograph, the images we create, we survey ourselves constantly, document our phases, select and choose from time what we think we are, holding onto these moments despite knowing time will take it all away, and that, perhaps, we are not truly anywhere to be seen.

There is an exceedingly beautiful close-up of a cabbage leaf taken in 1931 by the photographer Edward Weston. I happened to see a very similar image on the side of a Co-op food shop. At first glance, Weston’s photo could be other than what it is, like a model mountain ridge, or even a lavish gown thrown over a table – luckily, we have the caption. Of course, it isn’t as ambiguous on the Co-op, but they do wish to highlight an aesthetic, a beauty of form in the cabbage leaf. Painting has done much to expand our perception of what is beautiful, or what is complex and interesting, but it is with the realism of the camera that this expansion of perception flowered. The quickness of the camera to capture a slice of time, even from the beginning, meant a new surfeit of images, a new exploration in the realm of seeing. Once photography loosened its strange relationship with painting and struck out a new way into image creation, all kinds of perception became available: bird’s eye, close-ups, telescopic, microscopic etc. – humanity began to see, in the realism of a photograph what the world supposedly really is, but, perhaps unbeknownst to photographers and searchers of the beautiful and interesting, it has drawbacks.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ speaks about the ‘desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction’. Benjamin evokes something he calls the ‘aura’ of things, the ‘distance’ of reality from us which is essential to its uniqueness, which lent a sense of unity to things. This ‘bringing things closer’, symptomatic of the increased speed of mass society, allows for greater analysis of reality – this was shown when in the late nineteenth century Eadweard Muybridge compiled photos of motion (a man walking, a horse galloping), this entirely new way of seeing such automatisms of the body seemed entirely alien to someone walking to go see these photos. It is the same with film, it can highlight the extraordinary breadth of camera angles, close-ups etc., showing such automatisms of the body, of habit, that remain unconscious to us in the everyday flow of life. On the other side of this ‘greater analysis’, and ‘bringing closer’, we also find remoteness, loneliness, and alienation. Instant access to the ‘real’ through images has a feeling of depletion and separation from reality. It has been held an obvious truth, despite all that images offer us in the way of ‘true documentation’, that all this image-consumption is not vitalising, it even appears hateful at times (the bombardment of ads and frank lies).

Image-surfeit has reached a point where things we may think would have been a grand occasion – the first photo of a sun-set for example, have now entered a new phase. This is not to say that a photo, especially if it’s for a private store of memories with their associations, becomes hackneyed, but there is a sense that if you are taking a photo to take a photo then it is probably in search of something “new”, an odd angle, or some kind of experimentation with the image. Things that are measurements of time, such as a holiday sunset can go on “reels” as a passing footnote to an experience. There is, also, the parody – the ripping out of context and placing in other orders: Dadaist photo-montage, or Terry Gilliam’s work in those Monty Python interludes, are some examples. With the accessibility of the image now instant, and the ability to manipulate in whatever order, the image can keep entertaining new contexts, and they can be re-captioned: satirical, or fake news. We are, most of the time, very adept now at understanding all these things which if explained seem quite complex, image and meaning-wise; it amounts to meeting a reality, visually, that multiplies endlessly. It is undeniable despite any reservations about “truth”, that the photograph has the potential to possess the strongest emotions, something we cannot let go, a nostalgic groping for our own lives.

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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include Art Brut, Thoughts on Science Fiction and Kraftwerk.
You can also find Carl Kruse on Stage 32 and Kruse on Medium and his photos on Carl Kruse Fstoppers.

A Series on Lars Von Trier, Part 2

Breaking the Waves: Women on Film

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

It is sincerely difficult to write about love. Attempts to do so are often vapid, overly sentimental, gratuitously flowery, or simply boring. We have all written about love; in letters, poetry, texts, emails, journals – we have all thought ourselves to be the most intuitive of poets with visions of love and life more fruitful and honest than any of our predecessors. This is because love is an all-encompassing experience; it blinds, weakens, strengthens, feeds, and drains all at once. We cannot see love when we are inside it, and this can stunt us, creatively speaking. So, when someone makes a work that looks into love, as though from the outside gazing in through a window lit up in the dark, it is a marvelous and admirable feat.

Breaking the Waves is Lars von Trier’s fifth feature film, released in 1996 as part of his ‘Golden Heart’ trilogy, so named because the three films within this compilation (Breaking the Waves, The Idiots (1998), and Dancer in the Dark (2000)) all contain within them heroines who, despite their devastating misfortunes and tragic encounters, remain naively ‘golden-hearted’ right up to the end. Breaking the Waves’ heroine, Bess McNeill, played by Emily Watson in her breakthrough role, is perhaps one of the most wonderful female characters I have ever seen on screen, not only for her inimitable onscreen chemistry with Stellan Skarsgard (who plays her husband, Jan). She has an abandon, a childish glee and freedom that pervades the atmosphere of the film with nostalgia and beauty. Bess loves with her whole self, a self that is defined by her unwavering faith to God and her achingly innocent perceptions of romance, a self that seems so fragile, so virtuous so as to not belong to or be deserved by this world. When one watches Bess glide about the screen, giggling and dancing and running and making love, one feels a guilt, a shame that one so pure as Bess should be so crushed by the horrors of the world. There is a Bess in us all, a golden-hearted soul that was trampled by the boots of responsibility, work, money, debt, heartbreak.

Bess was Lars von Trier’s first female lead, and she was a stark contrast not only in gender but in temperament to von Trier’s prior male protagonists, whose idealist natures were brought to ruin oftentimes as a result of femme fatales of some variety or another. Female protagonists are a difficult thing to get right, it seems; the critics and scholars have much more of a taste for shooting down the depiction of a woman or female-identifying protagonist on screen than a man, lest he be overtly of the distasteful variety. Bess was no different – soon after the release of Breaking the Waves came the claims of misogynistic intent in the portrayal of her martyrdom. Such words as ‘problematic’ and ‘oppressive’ began to be flung about. Now, I’m not diminishing the widespread critical acclaim of the film – it was arguably Lars von Trier’s most highly awarded and celebrated film, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1996, Best Motion Picture in Drama at the Golden Globes in 1997, and continues to be beloved by many arthouse filmgoers and critics alike. But I think it interesting to enquire into the qualm of representation of female or female-identifying characters on screen; how do we get it right? Can we even get it right, or are its parameters too tight, so tight as to be suffocating, restricting, stifling to a writer or filmmaker? Are our desires for the ‘correct’ female protagonist too extreme? Which female characters do we deem to be ‘correct’ and ‘unproblematic’?

Well, if I were to refer to the perspectives of charity website ‘Girls Empowerment Network’, I would see the following list of so-called ‘empowering female leads’. Granted, this is a list for ‘girls’, but, still, I found this list to be quite enlightening: Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), Merida (Brave), Imperator Furiosa (Mad Max), Nakia/Okoye/Shuri (Black Panther), Mulan (Mulan), Storm (X-Men), Elle Woods (Legally Blonde), Princess Leia (Star Wars), Starr Carter (The Hate U Give), and Katherine Johnson/Dorothy Vaughn/Mary Jackson (Hidden Figures). Now, I can’t speak to all these characters, partly because I haven’t seen all of these films and also because this article isn’t about how ‘empowered’ these respective characters are. But I’ll just comment briefly to try and contextualise my misgivings about the perspective that Bess is a less ‘empowered’ woman than any of those on this list.

We’ll start with Hermione. I grew up with Hermione, watching and reading the Harry Potter series from a very young age and still thoroughly enjoying the films today. I understand the sentiment that this article is attempting to propound by putting Hermione on this list, but I’m afraid I have to fervently disagree. One, because Hermione’s character in the films is oftentimes COMPLETELY defined by her relationship with men, and the conflicts that arise as a result of these relationships. Hermione comes between her two best friends, Ron and Harry, because Ron is in love with her and believes her to be in love with Harry in the film(s) The Deathly Hallows. In part 1 of this two-parter, the smell of Hermione’s perfume lures in a band of snatchers. In the film The Goblet of Fire, Hermione is depicted as pining after a love-potion in an odious moment where all the girls in potions class walk towards the love potion in a sickeningly fawning manner. At the Yule Ball, Hermione’s arrival in her elaborate pink dress is lingered on in a most obvious manner, as if to say ‘look, Hermione doesn’t always dress in jeans – she’s a woman too!’.

What is Bess McNeill to us, now? Why are people so afraid of a woman using her sexuality as a form of payment, a form of sacrifice? If Bess had, for example, given away all her money and belongings when her tragically paralysed husband, Jan, told her to, then I’m sure no-one would bat an eyelid. Or maybe it would just be a different complaint, one about female empowerment in the business world, or something. We can’t pretend that bad things don’t happen, that bad people aren’t out there, that young women don’t fall prey to bad decisions due to coercion and sense of duty. I know that I have had tendencies like Bess, to please people and do what they ask because, for some reason, I feel I ought to, like I owe it to them and don’t owe anything to myself. Breaking the Waves does not suggest that a woman should do such things; rather, it explicitly reveals the pain and suffering that comes as a result of how young women are raised. Religion defines Bess’ lived experience, in a village where women cannot go to funerals, where men dominate the landscape in dark and insidious ways. Bess is just a product of her surroundings, a lonely girl whose only purpose is to serve, to serve her Lord God. So when she finds love, a beautiful, effortlessly tender love, what can she do but give herself to it, just as she has given herself to others her entire life? Bess’ power is her womanhood, her sexuality, her devotion to love and faith. We should not criminalise her or damn her for being who she is. Bess is simply a person who lived in the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong world. Lars von Trier was not misogynistic or wrong for depicting a character like Bess, in fact, he was probably right to do so; he made us feel for Bess, hold sympathy for her, laugh with her, wish the best for her. After all, women such as Bess do exist, even if we’d prefer to pretend that they don’t. And that’s just how it is.

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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include A Series on Lars von Trier, Part 1, Giorgio Morandi, and A Positive Spin on Hustle Culture.
Carl Kruse is also on Buzzfeed.

A Series On Lars Von Trier, Part 1

Part 1: A Brief Discussion of Dogme 95

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

There is a pristineness characterizing the modern film scene. I do not mean a pristineness or cleanliness of character, theme, or narrative, necessarily, but rather of the visual. Films, and other recorded media, have become indescribably high-quality, to the extent that one can see the tiny circular pores on an actor’s skin, or the goosebumps on the bodies of lovers, or the granules of salt on a table. Of course, considering the rapid advancement of filming technology; any would testify that the crispness of the image in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, shot in 1968 with the revolutionary 70mm spherical-lensed Super Panavision 70, is a delectable thing with an intricate and sophisticated image even in comparison with later films, such as Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2015 feature, The Revenant, which was filmed on various models of the ARRI ALEXA series. My conclusion being: if one has the money, why wouldn’t one propose a film of the highest calibre; clean, and sharp, and visually breath-taking.

But I have a bone to pick with such clarity, the same bone that I might fiddle with if I were to discuss hyperrealism in painted artworks. When a film overtakes its viewer, when its eye becomes greater than the eye of its beholder, then I think it begins to separate itself from its observer. Just as, in hyperrealism, a painting of an apple, which looks perfectly like an apple, cannot be an apple because it is too perfect, too real, too incredible to be the thing itself. The painted apple has overtaken the apple itself, and in so doing, becomes not-apple. It becomes an apple we can never hope to touch or taste, because it is infinitely better than any apple we might come across.

This is why I fall upon the name Lars von Trier. Trier, in his odd trajectory of filmmaking, has an overwhelming catalogue of brilliance strung to his name. I recently had the pleasure of watching his debut, The Element of Crime (1984), which I realised was indeed the veritable predecessor of much of his narrator-led filmography. The Element of Crime also offered me a prequel-esque vision into his later film The House That Jack Built (2018), mainly referentially but also in sentiment; that is, of the story behind insidious acts. Though Trier has indeed made some ‘pristine’ works, including The House That Jack Built, which was filmed on the ARRI ALEXA MINI, I admire Trier’s commitment to the aesthetic and significance of a lower-quality film, which he owed to his own manifesto, created as a joint endeavour by he and director Thomas Vinterberg. This manifesto was called Dogme 95.

Lars Von Trier

I would be loathe to attempt to describe the foundational philosophy behind this manifesto, so let me refer to our good friend Wikipedia for an answer. This sentence describes the rules detailed in the accompanying Vows of Chastity which detailed the ‘dogma’ (I suppose) behind Dogme 95:

“These were rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology.”

And, in so doing the above, the power of filmmaking was pulled out from under the rug of large corporate studios and placed back in the palms of the directors, offering them artistic authority with which to tell their stories once again. Before I continue discussing Von Trier, let me share with you the rules of Dogme 95, for I am sure that you are curious:

Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.)
Optical work and filters are forbidden.
The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
Genre movies are not acceptable.
The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
The director must not be credited.

(And, further):

″Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.″

I would argue that the last section of this passage might be devoid; we know, of course, that the film Festen (1998), was created by Thomas Vinterberg, and that the 1996 feature Breaking the Waves was directed by Lars von Trier (and arguably not a Dogme 95 film, despite von Trier’s desires for it to be…we’ll discuss that at a later date), so the tenth statement appears unachieved. Not that this matters; perhaps I’m misinterpreting the rule, anyhow.

This manifesto, which was inspired by and directly quotes François Truffaut’s Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (1954), was revolutionary for the film industry, which had taken a sharp turn towards the extremely high-budget, high-production, and highly-controlled waters of Hollywood and its sheer breadth of influence. Von Trier and Vinterberg claimed their manifesto was aimed at restoring a kind of balance within the film industry, so that its barriers could be brought down and opened up to a greater number of less-wealthy creatives.

Von Trier, despite his many scandals and sometime questionable approach to directing is, to me, a genius, and a master of his craft. If there is anything I take away from all that I have seen from him, it is that von Trier is a palpably self-aware creator, conscious of his own faults and unafraid to highlight them to his audience. I watched the new series of his 90s series The Kingdom, released this winter on MUBI, and, though I preferred the earlier series on a personal level, what I particularly enjoyed in this new incarnation of The Kingdom was von Trier’s incessant self-deprecation. He consistently mentions how cocky the young von Trier was and how mediocre and unremarkable the earlier series were (despite fervent disagreement on my part). This is what makes a great artist, to me. It is well and good to celebrate and publicly enjoy one’s work, I think, but to have the insight to damn it, to acknowledge how one has progressed and also not progressed, is a wonderfully powerful thing that I think we should all learn from as artists and creators. Perhaps it is no good to be embarrassed, or ashamed by one’s past, but to learn from it, and to continue forging ahead after all the mistakes, all the indignities, all the failures, is how we progress, in all parts of life.
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The homepage of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Giorgio Morandi, Central Governor Theory, and Art for Art’s Sake.
Also find Carl Kruse on XING.