« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »

It's Even Better Than He Said It Was

In this week's New York Times Book Review, Gerald Howard writes about Norman Mailer's movie Maidstone. Shot in the Hamptons in 1968, partly scripted and partly improved, Maidstone stars Mailer as Norman Kingsley, an art-film director contemplating a run for the presidency. Ultra Violet, Hervé Villechaize and Rip Torn, among others, also appear in the film.

Howard describes Maidstone as "a Norman Mailer version of a Rat Pack movie, albeit in the manner of Artaud." Mailer described it as “guerrilla raid on the nature of reality.� It all sounds like a big self-indulgent mess, until the ending, which Howard renders in detail:

Then came the last three minutes, which guarantee “Maidstone� a kind of immortality. The filming proper was supposed to have ended one very late night in a so-called “Assassination Ball,� where Mailer/Kingsley, in top hat and tails, delivered a vainglorious speech to the assembled cast, though disappointingly to many, no attempt on his life was staged. The next day the cast went to rustic Gardiners Island to decompress and use up some leftover film. [D.A.] Pennebaker’s camera captures them strolling about the fields and then focuses on Rip Torn, who removes a hammer from a backpack, strides over to Mailer and hits him on the head twice, announcing: “You are supposed to die, Mr. Kingsley. You must die, not Mailer. I don’t want to kill Mailer, but I must kill Kingsley in the picture.� Shocked, Mailer wrestles him to the ground, and they roll down the hill in an ugly tussle, Mailer biting Torn’s ear as Mailer’s wife and children scream.

Of course, YouTube has a clip of this climactic moment, which more than lives up to Howard's description.

Want more? There are stills from the ending, along with the script/transcript, here.

Posted on August 26, 2007, in Art Stuff.

The Missing Criticism: Papageorge on Evans and Frank

In 1981, Tod Papageorge curated an exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery that explored the influence of Walker Evans' American Photographs on Robert Frank's The Americans. The catalog for the show is out-of-print, taking with it Papageorge's essay "Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence."

That makes it an ideal candidate to inaugurate a new series, Photography: The Missing Criticism, which aims to bring great writing on photography back into print.

Download the essay here (PDF).

Papageorge's essay is an inspired reading of Frank's indebtedness to Evans, "a debt so profound that . . . we can observe not only the influence, but the way in which a brilliant young photographer embraced and comprehended a masterpiece."

Frank has always been upfront about Evans' influence on his work but, as Papageorge writes, that acknowledgment has mostly been ignored:

Although, since The Americans was published, Frank has consistently stated that Walker Evans . . . was the photographer who most influenced his work, the few writers who have discussed the two men in relation to one another generally have done so by setting them in a Manichaean opposition. In this equation, Evans, on the side of the angels, is seen as a moralist whose work unequivocally accepts and elevates the raw material of vernacular American culture, while Frank, in the devil's party, is seen as the photographic equivalent of Rimbaud — an anarchic poet who sings one brutal song, and then, in despair and exaltation, or whatever joy is found in conjunction with the creation of something incomparable, denies his gift by rejecting it. That the sorrowing world Frank's book describes has been set against Evans' lightstruck community, where, in at least a casual reading, everything possesses the clear gorgeousness of achieved fact, is unsurprising. But the suggestion that the two photographers are related only because they share the same general subject ignores the particular debt that The Americans owes to American Photographs, and, with that, disregards the most subtle triumphs of Frank's book, its transformation of Evans' vision.

Papageorge has been the director of Graduate Study in Photography at the Yale School of Art since 1979. A book of his work, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, was published this year by Steidl. In October, Aperture will publish his book American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam.

Caveat: The essay includes references to page numbers of particular photographs by Evans and Frank that appeared in the catalog; however, no photographs are included in this PDF.

Posted on August 02, 2007, in Art Stuff.

And It Really, Really Works

Two weeks ago I invoked the Lazy Web, hoping someone would find a way to republish photography criticism no longer in print, such as "Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on lnfluence," by photographer Tod Papageorge. Papageorge's essay is available via used book dealers, I noted then, but at collector's prices ($195 on up). "I just want to read [it]. A PDF would be fine."

A day later, a PDF of the essay landed in my inbox, courtesy of the author. Score another one for the Lazy Web.

But wait, there's more!

Now you can read it too. Papageorge's essay is the first in an occasional series, Photography: The Missing Criticism, which will bring back into print -- well, at least PDF -- great writing on photography.

Posted on August 02, 2007, in Web Stuff.