Iconophilia: Perpetual Morphosis

(Zone Books, Princeton University Press.)

“Unframedness. Presentness. Immediateness. It is under these three titles — intimately related — that we now experience the image by means of those devices that constitute image-making strategies: virtual immersive environments.”

Andrea Pinotti

The title of this breathtakingly insightful book by Andrea Pinotti, At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality, should be taken quite literally. Consider it what rightly amounts to a veritable biography of the Image: its history, both overt and covert in all our lives, and as both a secret story communally shared and also an unimaginable one taunting us to keep going towards what used to be called the future. The book’s image-archive extends from a time long before any recorded history even existed, right through to a time after which history, at least as we once regarded it, may also have vanished. And perhaps owing to the sheer acceleration and amplification of our lives, the future of the real and recognizable image itself might even have ceased to exist at all. The most succinct and accurate synopsis of At the Threshold of the Image is equally breathless: this is an exploration of the impact of immersive experiences on visual practices from cave painting to virtual reality.

Dance You Want to Know: Small Screens, Post‑Pandemic Stages and the Pull of the Crowd

A still from CDK Company's dance video, Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

I’ve been noticing something. It started, as these things often do now, on my phone. One of my favourite pop laments, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, kept resurfacing not as a song, but as a dance: a viral clip of dozens of young bodies in retro office‑casual dress, swirling and lunging in tight formation across a pastel‑toned courtyard. The choreography by Netherlands-based CDK Company was sharp but not presentational, massed yet curiously intimate, as if a crowd scene from an old Hollywood musical had slipped into 2020s streetwear and discovered contemporary release technique. I watched it over and over, wondering: what am I looking at here? A music video? A fashion film? A new kind of ensemble dance built for the camera rather than the stage?

New from Criterion: Unforgettable Women

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

When David Lynch premiered his TV series Twin Peaks in 1990, no one had ever seen anything like it: a surrealist teen soap opera, Peyton Place or Splendor in the Grass reimagined by René Magritte. His fans couldn’t get enough of it, and Lynch couldn’t get it out of his system. He kept the series going for two seasons (though he only directed half a dozen episodes). He filmed a prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, in 1992 – the year after he made Mulholland Drive – and rebooted the series in 2017. It was the last major project he worked on before he died last year.

Movies and the Other Arts: Sentimental Value, The Choral, Hamnet

Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinste in Sentimental Value. (Photo: Neon.)

The house that provides the key setting in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a real beauty – a late 19th-century Oslo domicile in a Norwegian style known as Dragonstil (“dragon style”) that looks like a candy house, built of dark blue wood with cherry trim and a gabled roof. (In real life it’s called Villa Filipstad and belongs to Lars Lillo-Stenberg.) Luxuriously lit by Kasper Tuxen Andersen, it’s the most gorgeous house at the center of a movie since the gracious country residence in Olivier Assayas’s 2008 Summer Hours, loaded with the art made and collected by Edith Scob’s uncle, which she leaves to her three grown children when she dies early in the film. That picture could also have been called Sentimental Value; like Trier’s it’s about legacy, but of a different kind. Sentimental Value is about a famous filmmaker, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who inherited the house from his aunt; she lived there after Borg’s mother, a Resistance fighter during the Second World War who was imprisoned and tortured by the SS, hanged herself in it. When Borg and his wife divorced, his wife got it in the settlement, His two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), identify it with their childhood and especially with their mother, a therapist who has recently died of cancer. We see in a flashback that as kids they used to listen to her sessions with her patients through an old stove that carried their voices up to the second floor. Gustav, now seventy, wants to make a comeback film in this house, and he’s anxious for Nora, a well-known actress, to play the lead, a woman he insists is not based on his mother but whose story bears significant resemblance to her. Borg plans to end the movie with the protagonist’s suicide, by the same means and even in the same room as his mother’s. (When he makes the dramatic claim that she’ll even kick aside the same chair his mother did, Agnes comments quietly to her sister that the chair that now occupies that room came from IKEA.)

A Double Life: Frank O’Hara’s Amazing Versatility

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.”

--Frank O’Hara

Matthew Holman’s exhaustively researched and methodically written book, Frank O’Hara: New York Poet, Global Curator, manages to be not only a superlative biography of this gifted poet but also a revealing memoir of the heady times in which he lived, a detailed chronicle of the city he so loved, and a tender portrait of the important Museum of Modern Art that many people, myself included at first, did not realize counted him among its most effective ambassadors of contemporary visual art. This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that O’Hara undertook for MOMA in New York and abroad. The day after his premature death in 1966, The New York Times ran an ironic and slightly ambiguous headline: “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator/Exhibitions Aide at Museum of Modern Art Dies – also a poet.” Also a poet? That strikes some of us as a surprise, since we felt it might well have read “Frank O’Hara, 40, NY poet dies—also a curator.”

Molière & Menotti

Clockwise from left: Amber Gray, Matthew Broderick, and David Cross in Tartuffe. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

As Tartuffe, the titular character of Molière’s most famous comedy, Matthew Broderick is so preternaturally calm that he barely seems to be breathing. Nothing unsettles him; without blinking an eye, he absorbs any threat to his power over Orgon – who takes him in, offers him his daughter in marriage and even makes Tartuffe his heir –and simply applies to it a nonsense logic that makes you think of the discourse in Through the Looking-Glass. Tartuffe is a scam artist who uses Christian piety as both a façade and a weapon to control the credulous – Orgon and his ridiculous mother, Madame Pernelle. Broderick takes Tartuffe’s cold-heartedness literally: he’s so unmoved that he might have the body temperature of a reptile. The text tells us that Tartuffe enjoys good food and sex, but even when Orgon’s wife Elmire, in an effort to expose him while her oblivious husband is watching from under the table, comes on to him, he responds greedily to her overtures but there’s no evidence in his face or his tone that she’s given him an erection. We’d swear there was nothing remotely human going on under those Puritan bangs if we didn’t see the way his machinations turn Orgon’s family’s lives upside down.

Along the Spectrum: Recent Movies

Tracey Ullman and Cillian Murphy in Steve. (Photo: Robert Viglasky, Netflix.)

Cillian Murphy and the Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants are a superlative team. Last year Mielants directed Murphy in the beautiful Irish movie Small Things Like These, the best treatment so far of the subject of the Magdalene Sisters, the notorious Irish order that turned pregnant unwed teenage girls into workhorses and then put their babies up for adoption. I loved everything about this film: Enda Walsh’s subtle, precise screenplay, culled from a fine small novel by Claire Keegan; Frank van den Eeden’s moody, delicate lighting; and all the performances, but especially Murphy’s. He plays Bill Furlong, a family man who runs a coal business in an intimate Irish town where the Magdalene convent wields considerable power – they decide which of the local girls gains entrance to their prestigious school. Their backing not only guarantees a better education but guides the students’ path to college and a promising future. So when Bill finds, hiding in the coal bin, one of the girls whose families have dumped them in the convent to sidestep the shame of their situation and she begs him to help her get away, the Mother Superior (Emily Watson) has only to remind him, in a friendly tone, how well two of his five daughters are managing in their school and how much they’re looking forward to admitting the next one in line to secure his silence. (She seals the deal with a generous Christmas tip; this isn’t a prosperous town.) But Bill himself was raised by a single mother, and then, after her early death, by the kind woman she’d worked for as a domestic; he feels his life was blessed by his upbringing at the hands of one brave woman and one with the means and the independence of mind to stand against the social norms of this time and place.