[Frameworks] Jungle scenarios

[Fred Camper]

Sorry, Arindam, I /did /mean my response about /Gabriel /to be sent to 
the list. Thanks for replying. /Gabriel/ interested me as a record of 
what interested Martin. I don't like//Smithson's film as a film but it 
is interesting too as a document of his work. Serra's films are actually 
pretty good as films, in my view. So there is no obvious pattern here. I 
agree that even an aesthetically bad film by a great artist can be 
interesting.

Of course I am not trying to control what gets posted here. A curator 
dealing with putting together a subject-oriented program can use this 
list as a resource. It's just that personally I don't choose to see 
films because of their subjects, but because they might offer good cinema.

Fred Camper
Chicago

On 4/29/2024 11:19 AM, Arindam Sen wrote:
> I agree that Gabriel is by no means a great film.
> Having seen it once, I had only partial recollection of the scenery 
> which I thought to be the jungle. The film is a lot of things that 
> Martin otherwise would consciously avoid while painting.
>
> Artist films get a lot of attention not because of the films’ merit 
> but because they are perceived as some noble adventure of an artist 
> who usually is reputed as a painter, sculptor, or a musician. But that 
> doesn’t make their films good or bad by itself, and not many of these 
> artists are setting out to make aesthetically distinguished work when 
> working with film (which is absolutely fine). Smithson is a great 
> artist and film is integral to his practice, he is not just trying out 
> a new media, as perhaps is the case with Agnes Martin. Same goes for 
> Carolee Schneemann or Richard Serra. Their films are fascinating.
>
> On Mon, 29 Apr 2024 at 17:52, Fred Camper <f at fredcamper.com> wrote:
>
>
>     On 4/29/2024 6:16 AM, Arindam Sen wrote:
>>     Also perhaps Agnes Martin's /Gabriel /could be added to the list.
>>
>     Was this not shot entirely in the Northern New Mexico she lived
>     in? This region can be quite beautiful, but is in no way a jungle.
>
>     While reading these I was reflecting on why I personally dislike
>     these threads, looking for films based on subject matter. Unlike
>     most, I don't like most films. I look for films of great aesthetic
>     merit, films that, to paraphrase Paul Strand writing on
>     photography in 1923, can stand alongside the best paintings in
>     museums. Such values have nothing to do with subject matter; any
>     subject can make a great film, wheras most films of all types show
>     little or no sense of using cinema with that level of complexity.
>     Agnes Marin is a sublimely great artist; I think I hold her in
>     higher esteem than even most of her admirers do./Gabriel, /unless
>     I missed something on my one viewing, is a worthlessly bad film,
>     simply artless pictures of the rural scenes that might have
>     inspired her to her great abstract paintings, and with the cloying
>     cliche of a young boy as surrogate for the viewer. Like some other
>     great twentieth-century artists (Robert Smithson comes to mind),
>     she had zero understanding of how to use the film medium.
>
>     Fred Camper
>     Chicago
>
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