Voyeurism? or the naked truth?
The naked truth about Crazy Horse
Geoffrey Macnab, writing on The Guardian Film Blog (Wed 19 Oct 2011), published an article on American documentary film director Frederick Wiseman on his then current film project CRAZY HORSE:
Frederick Wiseman is talking about the talents dancers need to make the grade at the Crazy Horse, the Paris strip club that is the subject of his new feature documentary. "At the risk of sounding crude, it has to do with whether they can stick their rear ends out in the right position," says the 81-year-old American director.
The Wikipedia article on Frederick Wiseman acknowledges the claim made in the New York Times article The Filmaker Who Shows Us Ourselves, that he is "one of the most important and original filmmakers working today".
CRAZY HORSE Trailer - Documentary by Frederick Wiseman from Zipporah Films on Vimeo.
The Guardian Film Blog sets out a context for Wiseman's choice of subject:
In 2009, he decided to make a film about the club, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. He places Crazy Horse alongside his earlier movies about dance and boxing. "I am obviously interested in the various uses to which the human body is put."
Suggest that there is something inherently exploitative about filming nude women, and he bristles. "There are some people who think that the only subjects that are proper subjects for me are about poor people being exploited by the state. That represents a misunderstanding of what I do. What I am trying to do is make movies about as many different aspects of the human experience as I can."
His film captures the artistry of the dancers (many of them trained in ballet conservatories) and the brilliance of the choreography. In its grimmer moments, notably a prolonged audition scene, it shows would-be dancers being lined up, invited to wiggle about, and then judged summarily on the basis of their body shapes.
Regarding Wisemans artistic philosophy Wikipedia mentions how in numerous interviews, Wiseman has emphasized that his films are not and cannot be unbiased. In spite of the inescapable bias that is introduced in the process of "making a movie", he still feels he has certain ethical obligations as to how he portrays events:
[My films are] based on unstaged, un-manipulated actions... The editing is highly manipulative and the shooting is highly manipulative... What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it... all of those things... represent subjective choices that you have to make. In [Belfast, Maine] I had 110 hours of material ... I only used 4 hours – near nothing. The compression within a sequence represents choice and then the way the sequences are arranged in relationship to the other represents choice.
All aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are therefore manipulative. But the ethical ... aspect of it is that you have to ... try to make [a film that] is true to the spirit of your sense of what was going on. ... My view is that these films are biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed but fair. I think what I do is make movies that are not accurate in any objective sense, but accurate in the sense that I think they're a fair account of the experience I've had in making the movie.
I think I have an obligation to the people who have consented to be in the film, ... to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time in the original event.
The Guardian Film Blog says of Wiseman's approach to the CRAZY HORSE project:
Wiseman filmed at the club with a tiny crew for 10 weeks. "I was there at least six days a week for at least 12 to 15 hours a day," he says.
Judging by the intimacy of the backstage scenes he captures, the dancers weren't suspicious of him. Two, Fiamma and Loa, even accompanied him to the film's premiere in Venice. How did he win their trust? "No bullshit. Their bullshit meter is just as good as mine. I had a meeting with them all and explained how I worked, the same thing I did with the ballet company."
He made available copies of his earlier films. The dancers realised he had made docs with the Paris Opera Ballet and the Comédie Française, and were quickly convinced he wasn't an ageing satyr out to exploit them.
"I thought the rehearsals, in most instances, were a lot more sexual and erotic than the performances," he says. "In the rehearsals, the dancers are more natural."
Wiseman's methods often result in creating over a 100 hours of raw footage that is then pored over intensively in the editing process. For the CRAZY HORSE film he shot 150 hours of film that becomes the source material for the devising of a dramatic structure, absolutely necessary in order to "make a movie":
I'm trying to make a movie. A movie has to have dramatic sequence and structure. I don't have a very precise definition about what constitutes drama, but I'm gambling that I'm going to get dramatic episodes. Otherwise, it becomes Empire.
Note
Empire is a 1964 black-and-white silent film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of the Empire State Building.
... I am looking for drama, though I'm not necessarily looking for people beating each other up, shooting each other. There's a lot of drama in ordinary experiences.
As Wiseman says, for The Guardian Film Blog:
"Sometimes it gets boring, but there is no way of avoiding studying the material," he says of his painstaking film-making process. "I can literally recite the dialogue from my all my movies that I've made over 40 years because I've looked at them so often in the editing."
He says his films come together in the editing, which he likens to writing a novel or a play. "You're involved in the same issues, even though the form is different. You're involved in issues of characterisation, passage of time, creation of metaphor, abstraction."
Behind the scenes at the Sphinx
. . . and "up front" looking in the mirror
Paris by Night
The photojournalism of Frank Horvat backstage at the Parisian Sphinx Club in 1956. His approach to photo journalism informed his work as a fashion photographer, as in the setting for a shoot in a bar called "The Dog who Smokes".
A set up?
Chorus girls Diane Van Alst, Mara Williams & Mary Mullens in the dressing room backstage at the Copacabana nightclub. Photo by Eileen Darby/Time Life
Working . . .
. . . in front of the camera as actor?
Pictures of Lili . . .
. . . the camera in front of the actor?
Lili St. Cyr
"a voyeurs delight"
PAPERClaire Valentine
29 January 2018
dOP, the Berlin-based, French house trio with roots in Parisian hip-hop, may be known for their wild live performances, but they're also creators in the visual space. To accompany their single "The Dying Night," dOP teamed up with Belgian artist Clara de Gobert to shoot an 11-minute "manifesto" exploring the behind-the-scene moments at Jumbo's, a strip club in LA.
De Gobert says they discovered the spot on "a quiet Monday night," and were "taken by the atmosphere of the place and the skills and aura of the dancers."
She added, "I wanted something real and the dancers gave me more than I expected they would. It is for me close to a manifesto of what feminism should be today as we step into 2018. It talks about the freedom to enjoy one's femininity and express it through any form we like. To accept our sexuality and its expressions, not as something dirty or shameful but as something light and fun and beautiful."
"I think it is important to say those things in the light of the recent events and sex scandals spreading across the media at the moment," de Gobert added. "This film is for me 11 minutes of condensed, super powerful female energy."
No comments:
Post a Comment