All My Stars (14)

By: Joanne McNeil
April 7, 2016

One in a weekly series in which Joanne McNeil recommends books, films, exhibitions, and more. You can also subscribe to the All My Stars newsletter here.

I left a party in Tribeca on Friday evening, tipsy and in a curious mood — not quite ready to go home but not up to party-hop until the end of the night either. After a bite to eat, I remembered I was a few blocks away from Dream House, the La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela apartment / installation that is a Dia Foundation project. Several times before, I intended to stop by, but it was closed when I meant to go (open seven months out of the year, and four days a week, the odds it is up are just better than a flip of a coin.) I am glad I got to see it this way: just leisurely strolling in with no advance plans.

It is a sound and light environment and the thing that I really liked about it is you can take what you want from it. A group of young women speaking what I think was Portuguese were taking turns giving each other massages near the back. There were two couples, one on what appeared to be a first — maybe a Tinder facilita-ed — date (they seemed very cautious about how close they sat together), the other couple just stared into each other’s eyes their entire visit. A teenaged girl scribbled in her notebook in the corner. I wish I had a place to go like Dream House when I was in college. Then there was me. Lying on the ground and letting the noise wash away my worries that week. When I got up I stretched out in a downward dog for a few minutes because why not? I didn’t stay long. Maybe a half hour. I’ll probably go back now that I’ve properly noted what days and months it’s open.

The next day, I considered that after several years living in New York (albeit off-and-on) it was ridiculous I had yet to visit Walter De Maria’s Earth Room and the Broken Kilometer, two other Dia projects in Manhattan. So I added them to my list of errands for the day. It is embarrassing to think how many times I have been just a handful of broken kilometer pieces from the Broken Kilometer shopping at COS, when I could have been having a moment with this. But now I have and don’t be like me. If you find yourself in New York, go see them (and Max Neuhaus’s Times Square.)

I also went to see The Devil, Probably at Metrograph, the beautiful new revival house on the Lower East Side. It’s a peculiar one. Most of my thoughts about the film pertain to the ending, which I keep thinking about. On the surface, it is about how hard it is to be a beautiful white boy in Paris with too many girlfriends but its worth pointing out that Bresson was in his 70s when he made it and perhaps even more concerned with matters of life being finite. (Another film he made around that time, Four Nights of a Dreamer, about more beautiful self-destructive twentysomethings, has a similar compelling energy.) Bresson films might sound like dull ponderous bleakness; but I find them gripping — I will be hanging on each decision the characters make. Perhaps the relative idleness of the protagonist let me focus on his motives.

From Senses of Cinema:

In Bresson… a character will state an intention, and in the very next scene will do the opposite. Characters who appear to be out-and-out rogues will unaccountably do something good, an example being the sacked camera-shop assistant in L’Argent who gives his ill-gotten gains to charity. At the same time it should be stressed that Bresson did not predetermine how his films would finally emerge; it was a process of discovery for him to see what would be revealed by his non-professional actors (‘models’ he designated them) after he trained them for their part.

One thing not so great about the screening — people laughed through the movie. It was weird. Last week, Jean Eustache’s very hilarious The Mother and the Whore played and I wondered if audience members confused the two? There was a lot of laughter through the most emotional scenes. This is something Aaron Stewart-Ahn has talked about — here, here, and here — it is as if audiences think they need to be above a film to get a film.

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