No, I hadn't heard of him either. Basically, Per Kirkeby is a Danish abstract painter who has also experimented with sculpture and collage and who has published a number of tracts and books on various (usually arty) subjects. With the exception of a disappointing, youthful flirtation with Fluxus he sounds fairly cool.
And, on closer inspection, he is quite cool. The earlier rooms flag up his bucolic interest in huts, one of the few figurative images that make it onto his canvases (well, boards, actually - canvas came later). One can also feel a Scandanavian interest in a fresh, outdoor - dare one say it - icy palette to go with this, inamongst the his recycled confrtonations with pop art (opaque, glossy primary colours, collage). The experimental watercolours are all part of this groping for self-expression.
It's difficult to see exactly where we're getting Kirkeby sui generis rather than a talented stylist absorbing and reworking all manner of interests. The key room, in terms of transition, is the fourth*, where we are informed that Fram (1983) is a key work... well this is certainly representative of the technique characterising the room but it still exhibits a certain inhibition, a rigid self-consciousness.
I felt that the authoratitive self-expression came in room 6. To get through this one has to move past a series of 'blackboard' works and their sculptural equivalents, bronzes painted with a black matt finish. These are idiosyncratically rendered - there is a sense of the artist's maturity of technique - if not a uniqueness of content. Yet, in room 6, we are finally confronted with four grand canvases, expansive, arms-thrown-open affairs in which his work with colour, form and technique seems to come into focus. Paint on unstretched canvas continues to be more or less the medium of choice up until the end of the exhibition, which concludes with some super paintings, including the mighty The Siege of Constantinople (at the head of this post).
I'm going to go off on a tangent which concerns the Tate's new policy of note handing out exhibition notes in hard copy as a means of reducing their carbon footprint. This is, broadly speaking, a good idea. After all, the notes are printed on the walls of each room. It is a little inconvenient to not be able to have them to hand when one is blogging a potted review of a visit but at least they'll be online...
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!!
... no - they're not available online, which means I have to guess (*) when it comes to talking about certain rooms in retrospect (and yes, I do often take notes on visiting an exhibition, but I usually make those notes on the exhibition literature that was previous handed out). Now that really is a terrible oversight.
With slightly more detail I'm best allied with Edward Seckerson in The Indie. He's prepared to recommend the show to the Classic FMers in the same way that Christiansen does - "If two hours in a floatation tank is your idea of heaven, then this is for you." - but does the piece the service of trying to actually get a grip on it too.
He has two interesting points. Firstly, one that eluded me, was that
"love from afar"... has some resonance with the internet generation... in endorsing the idea that distance (or anonymity) really does lend enchantment, promoting safety in fantasy.
This is the romance at the heart of the opera's appeal, exacerbated by the principals' inability to actually connect with one another, as each character is played in triplicate, dancers shadowing the singer. This act in itself has interesting potential and is terribly confused over the span of the opera. It just hadn't quite been sufficiently thought through.
The second is that of the nebulous spiritual - in fact, religious - gravitational pull of the text. With a pair of lovers drifting together on the basis of hearsay there is a lot of store put by fatalism, the idea of destiny. Rather weakly, Amin Maalouf's text all too easily slips into their assumption of some sort of divine scriptwriter who has decreed their union. This half-baked idea is taken up in Clémence's abject rant as the piece closes.
It's a great shame. There's an opera just waiting to burst forth from the third character, a sort of go-between for the lovers who is also a pilgrim; this character is never some sort of Olympian seer, removed from the (chaste) passion by piety but rather the all too human messenger-to-be-shot. I'm really sorry to say that this potential seems to emerge because of the weakness of the writing/staging than as the intention of the composers, something that is also apparent in Clémence's final peroration. It's just (buzz) words for Saariaho to wind sound around rather than something to pique the interest of the audience. It is not insignificant that during the curtain call the one production member so caught up in congratulating the (deserving) performers to the detriment of the patient audience was Maalouf.
Very sorry to hear of the death of Karl Malden. I thought he was great in On The Waterfront and, most recently, I saw his turn in I Confess, which grounded that film. But I'm rather overcome to discover that latterly he played Bartlet's former parish priest, visiting the President during the first series of The West Wing to provide counsel when Bartlet has struggled with a death row decision. It's one of the best set pieces in the entire TV series, with arguably the greatest episode-closing line, delivered by Malden:
He sent you a priest, a rabbi and a quaker, Mr President, not to mention his son Jesus Christ. What do you want from him?.. Jed... would you like me to hear your confession?
It went in at around #170 in IMDb's 'top 250 films' list on its first day of release. To me that suggests that the faithful had turned out on the first day of opening and, having had all their Michael Mann buttons firmly pressed, came away sufficiently mollified to canonise the film without pausing to reflect on whether what they'd seen was actually worthwhile.
Every film should be assessed on its own merits, not through the prism of its predecessors or progenitors. Michael Mann's Public Enemies is a thorough film in many ways with its detailed research often evident on screen and sporting a fluid but comprehensive structure. Yet Public Enemies skates over the drama of its content in pursuit of some other aesthetic and in this Michael Mann has overplayed his hand.
Mann doesn't like being called a stylist and refuses to acknowledge fulfilling the demands of commonly understood genre. These are reasonable denials from an auteur meticulous in his pre-production. Instead Mann likes to fashion something rather more organic from his own exhaustive research into the subject and story.
Consequently, in this film, he has tried to use original locations and pull into the foreground those elements of his research which are unusual and interesting. In this interview for The Guardian Mann lists some of these, e.g. the examination of Dillinger's coat style and tailor and the rudimentary FBI wire taps (a contemporaneous novelty). He also gets excited by his own discovery that not only did they film a set piece shoot out in its original Wisconsin location but it happened to be on the same date as the actual event:
... the real magic is that when Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger is asleep in the same bed and the FBI assault begins, Johnny Depp is in literally the same bed and the same room that John Dillinger was...
Well, here's the classic problem with Mann's auteurial version of The Method. No, that's not the real magic. It may be inspiring for the actors and crew but it's not interesting per se to the audience who will not be able to tell the location apart from your average stage set. Magic may make itself to the screen as the actors, in this unique situation, find something special to communicate but the information that this is the 'hallowed ground' is superfluous. Indeed, in the case of Purvis making an ever-so-slightly laboured point about the coat we begin to see the detail taking over the drama in this way - we begin to see the director taking over the characters. This is the way in which Michael Mann has exceeded himself, flooding his cast with a surfeit of detail and, in doing so, risking the substitution of his own voice in place of those actors trying to invest those characters.
Purvis is the absolute example of this. There is no more thorough, self-effacing A-list Hollywood actor working at the moment than Christian Bale (indeed, the in-at-#170ish effect may well be as much to do with him as it is to do with Mann - remember who else was in the cast of similar list-crasher The Dark Knight?). However, Melvin Purvis is little more than a 1930s, white-collar trope in Mann's film, a period attack dog, sent to up the ante on Dillinger and create the heightened drama that makes the film. There is no extemporary explanation as to why Purvis has the slo-mo, tight-shot moments that Mann affords him in his pursuit of Dillinger. Neither do we see him react as Dillinger's career progresses in defiance of Purvis' remit.
The worst offence though is in the penultimate caption that closes the film, which tells us that Purvis lived on until the 1960s when he took his own life. Surely if this isn't the real drama that needs investigating, then it ought to be the one that focuses Mann's mind.
Clearly Dillinger is a close relation of the consequent uber-villain Neil MaCauley from Mann's own (fictional) Heat. The drama of Heat is in the existential stand-off between the two men whose pursuit of life and self-definition must result in taking the life of the other. If Dillinger is a predecessor of MaCauley then Purvis must mirror Hanna. Now we are not privy to Purvis' marital situation and neither do we get a parlay over coffee as we do in Heat. But really - if this man brought in to bring down the principal bank thief of the Great Depression then goes on to take his own life having achieved his goal, then this must be the next part of a tale which can be extrapolated from the MaCauley Hanna relationship?
Reviews in The Times and The Telegraph - two stars apiece - are critical of this lack of drama, as Mann's focus on the detail to bring the drama alive conversely starves the drama of life. It will be interesting to see which way the official slew of reviews tends when it comes tomorrow. In the meantime one suspects that Mann may find his own words coming back to bite him (from the Guardian interview again):
the second... one forgets the dramatic imperative, that's the second it decays into meaninglessness
Quite so.
UPDATE (3 July, three star reviews): Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, "Everything is very, very male." Robert Quinn in The Independent, "fatalism, to have any impact, needs to be more single-minded and stately than this." UPDATE (4 July): Mark Kermode on Radio 5 Live suggests that the film has had better reviews than it ought.
Today's Observer runs a disposable-topical list piece called Top Ten Tennis Films. Philip French has come up with a broad roster of films which, whilst not necessarily about the sport, have a tennis scene in them. Consequently a masterpiece like Blow-Up has a nod although French also feels compelled to include the tissue-thin Wimbledon.
Of course, there are a handful of films that this necessarily cuckolds. Here are the missing half dozen:
1. The Squid and the Whale. If on-screen tennis isn't about sport then it's about gamesmanship and the disingenuousness of the middle-class. This film about the break up of a marriage & family kicks off with such an encounter.
2. A Room with a View. More tennis as comedy-of-manners here as Edwardian passion and propriety clash on an aristocratic lawn.
3. The French Lieutenant's Woman. A peculiar interpolation for this film-within-a-film adaptation of Fowles is a sequence of Real Tennis. This is, itself, a nod towards the strong gravitational pull of all things Gallic inherent in the title.
4. The Three Musketeers. More Real Tennis - this time as yet another craftily incorporated sequence of period élan and great comic opportunity.
5. Match Point. Woody Allen's first Johansson/London outing concerns a professional tennis player who turns out to be a real nasty. The film opens with a super slom-mo shot of a tennis ball teetering on a net cord.
6. The Sopranos (Season 3, Ep. 1: Mr. Ruggerio's Neighborhood). Not a film (although many argue that The Sopranos has the breadth, ambition and productions values of such) but this memorable start to season three of the TV drama re-asserts the cultural chasm between the middle class which Carmela feels at home in and the benighted class to which she is tied, all with a voyeur's smile.
