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All the Vermeers in New York
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These girls, these paintings, as eternal as they suggest themselves to
be …
All the Vermeers in New York – a low-budget feature funded (somewhat surprisingly) within PBS’
American Playhouse series (1982-1996) – is very concretely about art and
society: the material world that surrounds art, including literally the picture frames, the floors, the guards and galleries
… And, above all, capital itself:
deals, off-shore investments, loans. In its expanding, concentric circles, it’s
also about the art world as a space of lifestyles and manners, interpersonal
hustles. At the centre of all this, is the art itself just a blank?
The film has a style that appears offhand but is, in
fact, fantastically elaborated and sophisticated: a combo we see in several of
Jon Jost’s narrative projects of the 1970s and ‘80s. There are wonky camera
moves, overlap-replay edits (Godard), a wandering lens-gaze and focus, raw
sound recording, long takes, shots held after the actors exit (Ozu) … Form, and
our awareness of it, is a total adventure here. Jon A. English’s modern jazz
score is almost overwhelming, in the best possible way.
Jost and his actors (collaborating and improvising
somewhat in the Rivettean mode) create a pleasing serendipity of
plot-and-character structure. An artist is introduced into the story, and then
dropped; certain charter trajectories converge; a woman’s singing practise is
gradually revealed. A scene of a friend’s crying is particularly well done. Emmanuelle
Chaulet from Éric Rohmer’s L’Ami de mon
amie (Girlfriends and Boyfriends,
1987) and Claire Denis’ Chocolat (1988) is well
cast as Anne, a spaced-out denizen of the art/celebrity scene. Stephen Lack
(remember his exploding veins from David Cronenberg’s Scanners [1981]?) is also good as Mark, a loquacious broker (those
monologues!) who falls for the woman (Anne) who looks like a woman in a Vermeer
painting …
The fictive impulse here is intriguing. In Jost’s
films, the fictional drive deliberately comes and goes, pulses and ebbs (in
much of his subsequent work, it ebbs away altogether, alas). All the Vermeers offers an initial
set-up (man picking up a woman in a museum) that is like an anthological scene
from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) but suitably emptied out, attenuated, abstracted. A similar ambivalence
– a cagey and generative trouble with
fiction, as I’ve called it elsewhere – attends the ultimate haemorrhage and
possible death of Mark (an echo of Godard’s Masculin féminin [1966]); or the final (and missed) romantic dash cued by a phone call …
Thematically, it’s an elusive project; there’s nothing
– mercifully – particularly schematic about it. The intersections of personal
and social life are not presented as high satire but, by the same token, it’s
neither a purely humanist-individualist portrait nor a rigidly materialist,
sociological dissection. There is a social world viewed from a clear-sighted
political perspective and, alongside that, people’s messy drives and
behaviours: one never cancels out the other, and the various levels and their
articulations float pleasingly. Babette Mangolte’s fascinating The Cold Eye (1980) gives us more of an
insider’s tart view of the art world (criticism and theory included in its
daisy-chain, hump-along workings of desire, production and possession); Jost’s
angle is more indirect and distant, but still scores a bullseye.
It comes around (after the stunning final
sequence-shot, the one element Jost always had in his mind from the start) to
what seems to be an art history quotation: that so much can hardly be contained
in the name of Vermeer. Jost’s intention is not merely to parody the
nothingness at the centre of the contemporary art world (subject of a hundred
facile parodies – most of them well deserved!), but to actually value the
sublime beauty of art such as Vermeer’s.
Jost is one of those avant-gardists who left his heart
in the annals of that art (in painting, sculpture, music, etc.) he sincerely
and passionately holds to be great and masterful. By comparison with that, so
much cinema – even its art and experimental spheres, let alone the commercial,
mainstream ones – turns out to be so much empty junk. It’s not a world-view I
share, but it sure gets Jost’s creative juices going in this remarkable period
of his career.
MORE Jost: The Bed You Sleep In, Last Chants for a Slow Dance, Angel City © Adrian Martin 1991 |
