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The Impossibility of Blinking Slowly

It’s next time again.

I have to say the Blog has been an unmitigated success. The contact with so many people from all over the world has been fantastic and, let’s talk about the quality of the ideas which were generated! Superb! Thank you for writing to me and thank you for reading and especially thank you for participating.

There is, however, one problem and I fear there is no solution to this one. The problem is TIME. For every person who posted a comment, I enjoyed two letters from enthusiastic people who wanted to but did not have the time. We are all so busy I completely understand. So, not being one to shy away from the challenge, I am choosing “Time and the lack thereof” as this month’s post.

I have become enthralled with this topic, and thanks to two of the smartest readers and posters here (one is an attorney and the other is a poet) I have the perfect setup for the debate; two provocative books and authors, Malcolm Gladwell’s BLINK and Milan Kundera’s SLOWNESS. Both are fascinating reads and frame the discussion perfectly.

BLINK has a premise so brilliant no one has actually taken the time to read the book. The idea is that you make up your mind about lots of things in the first two seconds and often you are exactly correct. So, with that great idea as the thesis – why bother to read the book? You don’t have the time so let me help. Here’s a good and indicative sample:

“How long did it take you, when you were in college to decide how good a teacher your professor was? A class? Two classes? A semester? A psychologist, Nalini Ambady, once gave students [for evaluation purposes] three ten-second videotapes of a teacher – with the sound turned off. The [ratings] were remarkably the same even when she showed the students just two seconds of videotape. A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the the teacher’s class for and entire semester. That’s the power of our adaptive unconscious.”

SLOWNESS, on the other hand is a genuine indulgence. Pay attention now. This is from the guy (Milan Kundera) who wrote the Unbearable Lightness of Being. His idea is really sexy. It is, of course, stated much more profoundly in the strange little book, but essentially the idea is that you ought to take your time when eating a hot fudge sundae or when savoring a Barbaresco, or for god’s sake when having sex. What a deliciously provocative concept. He says it a lot better than I ever could as he describes a sort of “dangerous liaison” of the eighteenth century:

“By slowing the course of their night by dividing it into different stages, each separate from the next, Madame de T. has succeeded in giving the small span of time accorded them the semblance of a marvelous little architecture, of a form. Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. . . . There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.”

Inspired by this book, I realize that filming is an act of slowness, of appreciation, of the capture and replay of time. It is a technological vehicle for selective memory.

Well, it seems to me, many issues in my work are summed up in the dynamic tension between these two profound ideas. I use the power of BLINK every day. Film is all about artifice, it is not reality, even non-fiction television and documentary is not about reality. It is an edited presentation of time and ideas. We create impressions through a visual language and seduce you into spending your time with a gorgeous soundtrack. Without a point of view, telegraphed by symbolic imagery, all of this meaningless. The power of BLINK is in every shot. If I show you a picture of Monica Vitti shot by Antonioni, you so easily see my point.

Monica Vitti in L’Avventura by Michaelangelo Antonioni

This movie still is a 1/24th of a second moment from a two-hour movie. Talk about BLINK! And, if you look at that picture you can sort of figure out what the film could be about and write your own movie in your head. One of the great pieces of art criticism I read about a favorite contemporary photographer, Nic Nicosia, said that his work is like a still from a movie. What is the back story? What is going to happen? Here is a shot of Nic’s work. Go ahead and knock yourself out with this mental movie:

Real Pictures #11, 1988/92 by Nic Nicosia

You can look at a lot of art in this manner. I hope to do a program someday about how to better enjoy art with ideas like this. Paintings usually have a hidden narrative and great works (often quite quickly) inspire fascinating narratives and complex feelings. Another great example of Blink is the art of the movie trailer. (I know you don’t have time to actually go to the movie.) It is it’s own art form and the bottom line is, if you don’t like the trailer, you are never really going to like the movie. (Or are you? Please see the entire discussion framed in last month’s Blog.) The other really fun thing to do, if you don’t have time to watch the trailer, is to look at the movie poster. I love to do this – it is a total blast! The poster – if it is good – telegraphs everything you need to know. Lots of really smart people agonized for days to make that poster and to entice you to watch the film. Looking at all those decisions designed to make a split second impression which gives you a BLINK experience of the movie is a wonderful pastime, but it is arrogant to say you saw the movie if you really only glimpsed the poster. But, you are in a hurry, so let me quickly switch gears before I lose you.

Put in the clutch. Take a deep breath.

What about SLOWNESS? Ohhh my goddd what a great and profound idea is this! Ask Verdi about slowness. Ask your lover about slowness. What does it have to do with Film? Only everything. Where do I begin? I fight this all the time. I try to turn ideas into sound bites and have them retain some of their integrity and power in the process. In so many ways my films, and any film, are really concentrated distillations of time. They capture slowness and preserve it and present it at the speed of light. If you have ever been on a movie set you know it is all about “hurry up and wait.” The process takes forever. Somehow all that compressed time and work ends up on the screen. What I’m really trying to do now both in my professional and personal life is to slow down and savor the process as much as the finished product. This also applies to the very editing pace of a film. I’m working on a new program about the artist Christopher Pekoc with a brilliant art historian, Henry Adams. Henry helped Ken Burns make a film about the great painter Thomas Benson and Henry explained that “Ken Burns realized he could just hang on a still picture, providing he could infuse that picture with meaning.” How elegantly stated is that!

Let’s face it the speed of modern life is exhilarating. Kundera says “Our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed.” It is exciting, however tragic, to live our lives so fast we don’t have any time left to just take a breath and see that sometimes what we care about the most is just zipping past, what my new friend the poet calls, “speeding windows.” But, SLOWNESS, dear reader, is where you can really amp up the quality of life. Any good lover knows that slow-fast-slow is sexy stuff. I think part of our capacity for happiness, is knowing how to put some adagio into an otherwise frenetic existence.

Given that I’ve run out of time with you here, what shall we do to solve this fundamental flaw with our Blog? Give me some examples of your favorite methods of capturing real enjoyment from your life with Slowness. Share your mental health secrets with the (virtual) room. Apply it to art or film or music. Your cogent, sincere and mind expanding insight on this topic is respectfully requested and deeply appreciated.

Until next time, I remain your,

Tommaso

Reaching for Art Power

It’s next time again. I was gifted a great new idea for the Blog and I need your help to make this work. The idea is brilliant. Sometimes you go to a really great dinner party where you meet really smart and charming new people. The conversation is thrilling and is somehow more satisfying than even the best food. You leave feeling smarter and genuinely nourished. Haven’t we all wished to be a fly on the wall at the Café de Flore in Paris when Sartre, Hemingway or Capote was hanging out or to have been a guest at one of the great salons in Europe where great minds mingled together to knock around great ideas? Well, this is what a Blog ought to be; a place for new ideas and provocations. Well the genius of this idea for my Blog is that the people, like you, who are most likely to read this thing, are genuinely fascinating people. Hundreds of them. All over the world. So the plan is to generate some sparks with discussions about art and music and film and ideas and to make this a really fun place for you to find some interesting ideas and write a comment or two to share your devastating brilliance with the rest of us.

Against the advice of the gifter of this great idea I am going to start with a really esoteric topic, one with which I am genuinely struggling. The gifter and I discussed this idea briefly and it was deemed too complicated and too convoluted, especially for this first small step on this new alien landscape of the blogosphere. He suggested sheepishly that I might blog about the recent well-publicized poll about how everybody hates clowns. We all agree on this. What is there to discuss? But a greater mind than even his said, “Follow your bliss.” So I’m goin’ for it and trust me, you can handle this.

Note: The blog went up over the weekend and there are already fascinating comments posted, most are better than the entry itself, which is just what I was hoping would happen. Check out Marcie Bergman’s (she is the head of the Cleveland Arts Prize). Dana Ivey (the Tony nominated Broadway actress) takes the discussion to sculpture. Steven Fong (former dean of Architecture at Kent State Univ.) takes it to Architecture. John Ziegler (Construction Project Manager for the massive Whitman College complex at Princeton University) takes the discussion to hockey.  Bob Woods, the founder of Telarc Records takes the discussion digital with some really profound insight.  Sarah Gridley, the Poet in Residence at Case Western Reserve University, takes the discussion to her own hugely sophisticated and transcendent “other.”  What is so impressive to me in everyones responses is the sincerity of thought and feeling!  It is really powerful. To get in on this just click over on the comments box on someone’s name and then you access the comments page – which also includes the original blog entry – to contribute your genius gems.

I write this filled with fear, because an art curator who read the first self-serving entry on this blog bravely said, “Nice job but keep it short.” Eeeeeek! Easy to say, really tough to do. I wonder which of you will have the guts to say, “Make it longer!” I bet nobody, which is the genius of her tough love admonition.

So here goes. Ahem. There is a pre-Renaissance artist who is no one’s favorite. Poor guy. This pioneer gets two paltry slides in any survey course and gets immediately forgotten in the wake of Botticelli and Mantegna. So, when Catherine suggested, on this last Italian trip, that we make the trek to Ferrara to the Palazzo Diamante to see the show on Cosmè Tura, I was less than excited. However, the Palazzo Diamante always has wonderful exhibitions and I invariably push back from the table of their exhibitions feeling sated and delighted with what their curators serve. What I don’t know about Cosmè Tura is huge so I got onto the Web Gallery of Art (which had the best selection I could find of his stuff.) Check out this link with the fancy name: Cosmè Tura Miscellaneous polyptychs!

I did my homework and got even less excited about seeing his work. Cosmè Tura is a Northern influenced Italian painter (1430-1495) from – duh! Ferarra, and the people in his paintings have boney hands and feet and there is sort of a Durer graphic quality to the work but it doesn’t make you sing or dance or shriek in abject joy. I saw all his masterworks on the big color computer monitor and I was sorta bored.

On the train, sitting next to Tudy, (see blog entry Dec 2007) she showed me black and white photos of his and other Ferrarese painters from a cherished and well thumbed 1930’s era blue cloth-covered hardback. All the plates were in black and white. She said the great art historian and connoisseur, Bernard Berenson told her to always study Black and White reproductions – that they were somehow better than color. I shrugged and thought this was antique advice from the era when color printing was often cockeyed. Her observation, however, is dead on point.

Well, if you’ve been paying attention, now is where you expect me to tell you how devastatingly overpowering this show was and how important this artist has become for me. Well you have a surprise coming. He did not bowl me over with some giant masterpiece. He instead snuck in the back door of my heart with a charming little painting 30% smaller than the cover of a Time magazine. The best thing I ever read about Cosmè Tura was that he was “a man of the Renaissance but the ingredients of his taste were still medieval.” His temperament was described as “Dynamism, even violence, combined with almost feminine sentimentality.”

 

This was the image and, in reproduction, it is totally underwhelming. Look again. See her wonderful hands. Really look at them and isolate them from the composition. The blacks in the painting reproduce without any of the gloomy charm of the original. But then take another look at the star of the show down there! When was the last time you saw a baby Jesus in that particular pose? Hysterical! What the hell is doing? He looks like he’s posing for Playgirl or something naughty. He cracks me up!

The whole thing, in reproduction, is dull and lifeless and an excuse to yawn. In person, like so many things in life and art, it is a completely transcendent “other.” This small painting is you-had–to-be-there drop dead gorgeous. So, dear reader, what is it about the actual object that gives it such gravitas and power? Well, you cluck, this is an old and tired question. This is so obvious! But is it really? High definition video of this image would have come a lot closer to impressing you with its power than a photograph. Would it have been the same as the original? Of course not, but would it have done the job more thoroughly? I think the obvious answer is yes. So what’s the deal? Is it a question of digital and other kinds of information?

I come to find out, through a lecture by dear friend and former head of Art History at Case Western Reserve University, Harvey Buchanan, that the entire joint program of the University and the Cleveland Museum of Art was in a way built upon this sort of self evident idea; the study of art is hugely impacted by the study of the objects themselves. Well DUH! He and the great Asian Art scholar Sherman Lee (who Harvey explained was the first PhD in Art History from Case Western Reserve!) started the joint program 40 years ago inspired by this simple/stupid/complex/profound idea. In subsequent discussion with the new head of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Timothy Rub, he explained to me that there are entire new schools of Art History who don’t study the objects at all! Whaaaa? How is that even possible? Well, Dr. Rub explained, they study the sociology, the gender conflicts, the deconstructed meanings, the conceptual frameworks, and the actual experience of the object itself is not the overarching focus anymore. This came as a total shock and seemed as unlikely and counter intuitive as a deaf man composing great music, which we all know is impossible.

So, my question to you is, What is it about the actual object of art that contains such power? What is that power? Can it ever be effectively captured? (Remember that is sort of what I attempt to do for a living.) Is it some mystical mind force or concentrated essence of the artist, as is posited in Indian philosophy, that somehow resides in the object and is then mysteriously communicated to the viewer? Is it photographable, filmable, otherwise describable? This idea has huge implications for the study of Architecture. I now see the coy genius of great Architects, whom I have interviewed, who hedge their bets telling me in a qualifying tone about this or that design, “But, I have not actually been inside that space . . . time will tell.” The space in Architecture, of course, being equivalent to the actual object, the actual experience of the “art.”

Don’t be shy. Don’t fumble around and put this off. Post a comment and give me, and everyone else, the benefit of your insight. Tell us about some object you saw, or own, or that changed your life and what you think is the true source of its power? What is it specifically about the object that a reproduction cannot capture? I hope you will post a comment or an insight. Or – maybe I should just stop reaching beyond my grasp and send in the clowns!

Until next time, I remain, your,

Tommaso

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Gehry/Lewis Film Shown at Venice Architecture School

The bell tower of the church of Angelo Raffaele in Venice

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

It’s next time again.

One of the best parts of living here in Venice is where we actually live. If you draw a tight circle around St. Mark’s square and then concentric circles around that first one, the number of tourists (can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em) diminishes by half the further out you get. By the time you get out to the circle enclosing the church of San Sebastiano, and the Angelo Raffaele, which you overlook from our windows, the only tourists you get are curious Brits with sensible shoes and a guidebook on a quest for Veroneses. (Veronese is buried in San Sebastiano and the 500 year old church is filled with his works.) Our neighborhood, on the far western edge of the Zattere, is filled with run down fisherman’s houses and some people we know call it “the real Venice.” A “contessa” we know, who used to live in a very wonderful building up on the top floor of a palazzo on the grand canal, used to call it that. Her “sofito” (loft) was a gorgeous space, filled with books and pictures; her bed, in a low ceilinged dormer, looked out over the world famous domes of San Salute, but when the hundred or so wicked spiral stone steps, some of them with risers over a foot, got to be too much for her, she decided to move over to “the real Venice” and has become our neighbor and guide to all things authentically Venetian.

The Lion column in front of the church of Nicolo dei Mendicoli dates from the 7th Century. The Architecture school is in the background housed in an old cotton mill

Another great thing about the neighborhood is the University and a big part of the University is the Architecture School. (see clarification below) There are lots of young people here, with their heavy backpacks and portfolios and long drafting tubes and often you see them in small groups carrying the pieces of architectural site plans to present in class. Think about it. If you had worked on your project model and it was the size of a medium sized carpet how would you get it to class without a car? You would have designed it in pieces and called up your friends to help you carry it to class on this distinctive architectural pilgrimage. After living here more than a decade, I am finally going to present one of my films about Frank Gehry and the odyssey of the Peter Lewis House to the Architecture School and it seemed like a perfect topic to write up and share as the first installment of a regular Blog. The film is all about the significant support which Peter Lewis (former CEO of Progressive Insurance and former Chairman of the Guggenheim) gave to Frank Gehry in a crucial decade of Gehry’s development. The house project was never completed but the research conducted through the patronage of Lewis found its way into built projects around the world.

 

The bridge over the canal leads over to the 7th Century church of Nicolo dei Mendicoli

The Architecture School is housed in an old cotton mill. I went over there the other day to find a bustling academic city within a gigantic building. Wayfinding signage was well done with characteristic European architectural charm. Giant letters of the alphabet mark the various sectors of the city; getting around in this hubbub is sort of like visiting an aeroporto. I came last week to make sure the technical aspect of things was going to work. We found section “F” and the proper group of teachers and entered a gigantic one story classroom under a twenty foot ceiling and broad well-designed desk platforms which stretched in rows from one side of the bare brick room to the other. The room was filled with about 50 architecture students busy with notes and books and models and drafting supplies. My film on Frank Gehry was set up to play at the front of the room off of a Dell computer that had cheap big speakers attached. I was informed this computer was the only machine that would play back an American DVD. (DVD’s come in various flavors and there are sometimes compatibility boundaries, and the inevitable hacks around them.)

They put on the film, the students looked up from their desktops and I walked to the back of the classroom to see how bad the playback audio sounded. The picture looked OK, not great and, as expected, the audio was terrible. I came back up to my welcoming committee and politely asked how many students we expected for the showing. They said, “About a hundred.” I, as diplomatically as I could, said the setup was not really up to such a big job and inquired about the possibility of an auditorium space? I had the foresight to ask the question in architectural terms. I suppose I had sort of picked up the intellectual vibes in the room. “Is there maybe a space where we could show the film which was architecturally designed for presentations to one hundred or more people?” “You mean like the auditorium?” I nodded. Lots of head bobbing, whispering, gnashing of teeth and the inevitable accompanying hand gestures. “You mean to show the film?” Another nod from me and considerably more frenetic consultation. The clouds of indecision and confusion parted, the rays of light shone from above, and in a minor miracle of inspiration, off we went to check out the auditorium! A very serious and important conference was underway but we tip-toed in to take an ochiatta (little look) and without a doubt this was the preferred way to go. Pressing my good fortune I asked if there was an actual DVD player to use for the job and miraculously one of those appeared and after the testing it was pronounced adequate for the job.The auditorium of the Architecture school is a terrible room for acoustics.

The balcony of the Venice Architecture school auditorium with the 60 ft. ceiling and the acoustics of a barn

The 60-foot ceiling and the counter-intuitive reverse sloping main floor make if far from ideal, but at least it seemed professional. It was also a challenge for those outside the school to find. I provided church directions for friends who wanted to attend the screening. Church directions are always reliable and it is a part of life over here. Instead of saying, “Three blocks past the Dunkin’ Donuts” or, “You know where the Starbucks is?” You say, “Right across from the church of San Nicolo dei Mendicoli. . .”San Nicolo is literally one of the oldest churches in Venice. It dates from the 7th century. (more correctly the twelfth century – see qualification below) It seems sort of shabby to ignore the first fourteen hundred years of its history and jump into the age of Hollywood but the church was more recently made famous with the horror film Don’t Look Now starring a brooding Julie Christie and a hirsute Donald Sutherland in a dreamy wonderfully scary film set in Venice by Nicholas Roeg (1974). Donald Sutherland plays an art restorer who is working on the Church of San Nicolo. The Brit organization, Venice in Peril (great name) was restoring the church and one assumes the film makers gave them a huge contribution to include their actual restoration project in the plot. Here is a Netflix link to the film, if you haven’t seen it, order it. It is moody, scary, well acted and has foggy, evocative scenes of Venice. The entire film is worth the profile shot of Julie Christie (her perfect posture never more gorgeously displayed) dressed all in black mourning clothes, standing in a funeral gondola on her way to the cemetery island of San Michele.

http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Don_t_Look_Now/60024023?trkid=189530&strkid=1751672936_0_0 – afternavigation

The lecture and film showing about Gehry was made possible by our neighbor who is a fascinating woman and seems to know everyone in Venice. She is a Venetian aristocrat, the Contessa Theodora Samartini, is known as Tudy. Tudy is a total trip and gets you in anywhere; closed churches, restricted palazzos, cloistered masterpieces in restoration. Off Limits! Vorshicht Bitte! No Access! Bring it on! Closed to the public doesn’t mean a damn thing Tudy, she’s NOT the public; she brought Bernard Berenson his tea at his Florentine villa I Tatti when she was twelve. She lived on a plantation in Africa and had a monkey named Bobo. She goes where she wants when she wants. Show Tudy a velvet rope and she gives a totally Italian shrug, combined with a gutteral “phssaug”- she waves her magic wand of a cigarette and suddenly you are inside with an astonished looking guard blinking back at you wondering what hit him.Tudy is old enough to give you anecdotes about anyone you would care to know about. Her name-dropping is as charming as it is awe-inspiring. “I don’t know where I put those sketches of a mule Le Corbusier gave to me.” “I don’t know why they asked me to pose with supermodel Suzie Parker in California.” “Where on earth did Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni find that case of peasant Calvados brandy to give to me?” You get the idea.

Tudy arranged the lecture with consummate skill. First was the gracious lunch with the prestigious retired professors in their living room with the 15th c. gothic windows overlooking the Piazza Santa Margherita. Then calls to the newspapers. Then introductions to her classmate from the Architecture school. This was a done deal before it even began. With the two large combined classes of Architecture students and the friends and guests and the curious, the auditorium was filled on both the main floor and the balcony with about 150 people.I have attended lots of lectures here in Italy for various art events and cultural gatherings. They usually involve a long table of experts who drone on and on in rapid fire Italian with bad microphone technique. See me now, bewildered, as I look up into a sea of expectant and attentive faces with the recognition I have become one of these boring droners on a dais. Thank god for the lovely and brilliant, Gilda, sitting next to me. She is a slim and attractive architecture student with close cropped dark hair who looks at me with attentive brown eyes and who has been assigned to me as a translator and speaks better English than I do.

For copies of the DVD visit A Constructive Madness.com or send an email to tom@telos.tv

The professors up on the dais all have long insight-filled comments about the film delivered in Italian which blurs past me like looking at scenery from the window of a high speed train. Gilda, in sotto voce whispers, only translates the last part of the long journey of their comments, as they finally slow down and pull into a question. “Do you think Gehry’s interiors feel as provocative as his curvy exteriors?” “Do you think the theatricality of Gehry’s buildings overwhelms their function?”Gilda does an amazing job with my often convoluted answers. She has no problem with difficult phrases like, “interstitial spaces” or “peripheral vision.” As I stumble along trying to find the right English word for the digitizing wand Gehry’s people use to translate his physical models into the computer, she cleverly suggests “un braccio mechanico” – a mechanical arm. Brilliant! We discuss how a Gehry building relates to the existing buildings around him (Gehry is a very good neighbor). We examine Gehry’s use of materials (more stone than you think). We discuss how an architect for a house is often making lifestyle decisions for a client (although Gehry denies this). We talk about the similarities between making a film and designing a building (the devil is in the details). It is this last question which perhaps deserves some further explanation.

There is a simpatico feeling I get working with architects. I suppose, one cannot have had the profound privilege of working with, interviewing and editing such an impressive architect as Frank Gehry and not have something rub off on you. It is one of the perks of the job to spend so much time with these people; both real time and electronic time in the edit suite. Architects and Filmmakers both have clients, they design, they create and they build. There is a similar intellectual component to the job and a whole bunch of decision making, hoping that your work creates the effect for which you are striving. Alfred Hitchcock said after he made the film in his mind actually making it was always a compromise. This got a chuckle from the students. It seems an appropriate thought for a documentary about an unbuilt house.

After sitting through an entire hour of the film with its heavy concept and horrible sounding audio, the brave audience sits and attentively asks questions for more than another hour! The professoressa is shocked. “Usually, they just get up and leave after the movie.” It reminds me of what is so darned attractive about architects and students of architecture; it is their “enthusiasmo!”, their intellectual curiosity and their marvelous attention span. Realizing I’ve stretched yours beyond my welcome . . .

Until next time, with enthusiasmo!