Character Director

There are some movie directors who make unassuming films that aren't formula entertainment. One of those artists, Irvin Kershner, when he died in 2010, almost went unnoticed himself. Kevin Courrier, in Critics at Large, delves into why.

The Invisible Artist: Irvin Kershner 1923-2010

When George Lucas tapped director Irvin Kershner, who died last Saturday at 87 after a three-year battle with lung cancer, to direct The Empire Strikes Back (the sequel to Star Wars), Kershner asked him, "Of all the younger guys around, all the hot-shots, why me?" Lucas replied, "Well, because you know everything a Hollywood director is supposed to know, but you're not Hollywood." Lucas wasn't kidding. Nor was he simply pandering to the veteran director. Although Irvin Kershner had been making movies in Hollywood since the late fifties, he certainly wasn't typical Hollywood. He didn't make the most obvious commercial entertainments, but rather he examined with thoughtful consideration what constitutes commercial entertainment. Which is one reason why The Empire Strikes Back was a significant improvement over its predecessor.

Yesterday's Papers

With Fox news having recently dropped Sarah Palin from their staff of commentators, it seemed timely to look back at Susan Green's review in Critics at Large of the HBO film Game Change.

Thrilla from Wasilla: The High Stakes of Game Change

Ed Harris and Julianne Moore as John McCain and Sarah Palin in HBO's Game Change

Greetings from Cloudcuckooland! Here in the not-so-United States of America, many Republican legislatures are proposing draconian laws to insert medically unnecessary transvaginal probes into the private parts of women seeking abortions (Texas and Virginia), or force female employees to tell their bosses if they’re using birth control for controlling births rather than for health concerns (Arizona), or change the legal definition of women who have been raped from “victims” to “accusers” (Georgia), or allow the murder of doctors who provide abortions (South Dakota).

State of the Tube

As television programming has improved dramatically over the years, TV critics have emerged like Alan Sepinwall, whose chops are as sharp as the shows they write about. Mark Clamen, in Critics at Large, recently review a promising collection of his work.  

The Revolution Was Televised: Alan Sepinwall Takes On TV’s New Golden Age

It has become almost cliché in some circles to proclaim that television – American television in particular – has never been better. Quality television is no longer, as it was for decades, confined to BBC adaptations of Jane Austen or Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. In the past fifteen years, television has grown into a genuinely popular art form, finally embracing all of its strengths as a medium: the ability to tell long, complicated stories rich in complex characters, compelling writing, and morally and narratively risky storylines. With new technological innovations (DVDs, Netflix, DirecTV) and the rise of the new business models that came with satellite TV and the ever-expanding cable universe, television is no longer a disposable medium. Shows are produced not only to be watched, but to be re-watched. We used to rent the shows we watched, but now we can literally own them. Television series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Breaking Bad actually reward our attention, instead of discouraging it. The more you watch these shows, the richer they become. The impact of these shows successes – both artistically and commercially – is being felt across the whole television universe, and that story is far from over. That television has decidedly entered a new Golden Age is apparent to all of us who love the medium – what is less talked about is that TV criticism has grown up just as much in that same period. This new age of television has been paralleled by the rise of new and exciting forms of writing about television – and Alan Sepinwall is among the best of the new breed. 

What if...

Creating an alternate history is always a fun game to play, both in literature and in film, but with no solution only more riddles. Shlomo Schwartzberg in Critics at Large looks here at the literary end.

For Good or Ill, What Might Have Been: Jeff Greenfield's Then Everything Changed

 "President Robert Kennedy", speaking on August 3, 1969

As a lifelong science fiction buff I must confess that my favourite sub-genre in the field is the alternate-history novel. Likely stemming from my interest in history and its many ramifications (I have a minor degree in it, to go with my major in Political Science) I’ve always been gripped by stories of the Nazis winning the Second World War – being Jewish makes that one more understandable, of course – or of the South triumphing in the US Civil War, among many other tropes. (Clearly I'm not alone, as these two “alternate realities” are the ones that have appeared most often in alt history novels.) That’s because, in my view, history can turn on a dime and one deviation from the norm can trigger any number of side effects or alternate history scenarios, which is absolutely compelling to someone who also likes reading SF as much as I do. (Imagine if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated when he was; or if Adolf Hitler had not attacked the Soviet Union when he did, to name two of the most obvious examples of history changed by one specific action.) And now that the pivotal crucial American presidential election is merely two weeks away, it’s worth examining Jeff Greenfield’s latest book, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (G.P. Putnam and Sons, 2011) for a fresh take on the what-if basis of alternate history.

Bold as Love

When Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, he left a body of work that's still compelling today. But it's where his work was heading towards the end that captivated Kevin Courrier in this piece in Critics at Large.

Jimi Hendrix Drifting

When Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, over forty years ago this month, I was in high school. It was a time when a number of key pop figures – all in their twenties – never got to see thirty. A year earlier, it was Brian Jones of The Stones, and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison would soon follow Hendrix to the grave. Besides providing you with a keen sensitivity regarding death (right at that moment when you saw nothing but life straight ahead), you also realized that a person's genius, their gifts, even their youth, could do nothing to protect them.

Hendrix's death hit me harder than the others because I came to truly love the paradoxical nature of his music. (In a song that fundamentally came out of the blues like "Burning of the Midnight Lamp," he combined a harpsichord with a wah-wah electric guitar and a chorale section to create a powerfully intense emotional soundscape.) Although Jimi Hendrix was always fully recognized as a virtuoso and theatrical guitar stylist, he was rarely discussed in any great depth in terms of his gifts as a poet, singer and music innovator. (For those insights, it's best to read David Henderson's 1978 biography 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky which still hasn't been equalled.) But John Morthland, writing in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, captured key aspects of those many gifts that Henderson elaborates on. "As a guitarist, Hendrix quite simply redefined the instrument, in the same way that Cecil Taylor redefined the piano or John Coltrane the tenor sax," he wrote. "As a songwriter, Hendrix was capable of startling, mystical imagery as well as the down-to-earth sexual allusions of the bluesman." Those sexual allusions though also led to a particular kind of theatricality that the artist himself was growing tired of indulging. Joni Mitchell, who met Hendrix in Ottawa towards the end of his life, recognized immediately his frustration about the public and critical perception of him based on those sexual allusions. "He made his reputation by setting his guitar on fire, but that eventually became repugnant to him," Mitchell told The Guardian in 1970. "'I can't stand to do that anymore,' he said, 'but they've come to expect it. I'd like to just stand still'."

City Life

You can learn much about the character and personality of a city by its representation in photography and film. Amanda Shubert reviewed an exhibition last fall that looked at New York through the visual arts in Critics at Large.

Urban Poetry: Film and Photo in New York at the Art Institute of Chicago

Louis Faurer. Times Square USA, 1950

In 1900, the Philadelphia-born painter Robert Henri moved to New York City to teach at the New York School of Art, where he encouraged his students to go out into the city streets with their sketchbooks and record what they saw there. Henri’s ‘quick sketch’ – a fast impression of urban life that could be worked up later into a print or a painting – sparked an era of American realist art as gritty and grimy and flush with everyday spectacles and stories as the city itself. Film and Photo in New York, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through November 25, looks at the work of six New York City photographers between 1920 and 1950 who took Henri’s quick sketch to a new level by using a camera, instead of a pencil and paper, to record their urban vignettes. Pioneers of street photography, each of these artists – Paul Strand, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, Morris Engel, Weegee and Robert Frank – created images that were investigations of New York City as a dynamic, unruly, always-evolving subject, a kind of playground for the eye where a momentary glimpse could tap into a richly complex social experience. They also each experimented with film as a way of extending those investigations. The Art Institute’s exhibition looks at the way these artists approached the snapshot and the moving image as two ways of recording urban life.

Helen Levitt. New York, 1940

It’s a novel idea to examine this period of street photography by looking at how photographers used the burgeoning possibilities of film to elaborate on or enhance what they could do with still images, and the Art Institute certainly has the collection to support this topic. (All the works in the exhibition are drawn from the permanent collection, which includes a number of works that are on view for the first time.) The comparisons here are fascinating. Take, for example, the fiendishly accomplished and oft-neglected Louis Faurer, whose nocturnal photographs of Times Square are lit fantastically by the ambient light of billboard advertisements. The pictures have an almost surreal sheen, and, saturated with fragments of text from neon signs and theater marquees that create ironic and often funny counterpoints, they work kind of like found poems. By photographing the heart of Manhattan’s theater district, Faurer shows us a city that is itself marvelously and garishly theatrical – it’s always performing itself. (In this way they recall the New York City paintings and prints of the Depression-era satirist Reginald Marsh.) Meanwhile, the film by Faurer included in the exhibition, Time Capsule, a silent documentary shot in the 1960s, splices together movie footage of Times Square to provide a dazzling glance into the kinetic swirl of the city. Faurer’s flash impressions of the myriad incandescent bulbs that shoot the street full of light gives you the sense of a city vibrating with life. The subject is the same as in the photographs, but the movie camera allows Faurer to go even further in recording experiences in the process of unfolding, and to convey the sense of the artist folded into them, one among the crowd.

In Excelsis Lincoln

Just as Steven Spielberg's Lincoln was settling into movie theatres, critic Nick Coccoma wrote this captivating study of the enduring myth of the both the man and the legend - especially in film - for Critics at Large.

Abraham Lincoln: Myth and Man

Who was Abraham Lincoln? Americans have mined that question since the moment he died from an assassin’s bullet on Saturday, April 15, 1865 at 7:22am. They’d wondered about it long before that tragic day, in fact, ever since he stepped out from prairie obscurity onto the national political scene in the late 1850s. Proffering the answer has yielded prodigious results: the number of books written about Lincoln and the Civil War now equals the amount of days that have passed since Lee surrendered to Grant. A museum attached to Ford’s Theatre recently stacked a pile of Lincoln biographies into a 35-foot tower for display. Writers have spilled more ink about the sixteenth president than any historical figure save Jesus of Nazareth; he lays claim to a similar global appeal. No less than Leo Tolstoy ranked him as the greatest leader in history, dwarfing the Napoleons and Caesars. “His example is universal and will last thousands of years,” the novelist predicted. “He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together…and as a great character he will live as long as the world lives.”

But despite the insatiable digging, Lincoln still eludes our grasp. As with Christ, we can’t ever seem to exhaust the mystery of his being. When you read material about or even from him, you get the sense that the true man, unlike other historical figures, floats in a realm impossible to pierce. Albert Schweitzer famously characterized 19th-century theologians’ quest for the historical Jesus as akin to looking into a deep well and seeing their own reflection in the water. We’ve done the same with Lincoln, constantly remaking him in our own image. Indeed, from the beginning people have compared him to Christ, and it’s difficult to resist the temptation. After all, he bore the name of a biblical patriarch, liberated millions from slavery, and was shot on Good Friday. I mean, really.