DIANE ARBUS AT MET BREUER. I: 1923–1957

ANTHONY LANE, NEW YORKER

In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to buy three photographs by Diane Diane  (pronounced “Dee-ANN,” after the French heroine in a play her mother liked)  Arbus, for seventy-five dollars each. Wiser counsels prevailed, however, and a few months later the museum decided to take only two. Why splurge? The Museum of Modern Art was more daring; in 1964, it had acquired seven Arbus photos, including “Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C.”  Like so many artists, Arbus found real fame only after her death. Public fascination started to seethe, swelling far beyond the bounds of her profession.  A 1972 monograph of her work became one of the best-selling photography books of all time.

The swell has never slowed, and prices have followed suit. At Christie’s, in 2007, “Child with a toy hand grenade” sold for two hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. Last year, another print of it, this one signed by the artist, fetched seven hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. That’s quite a hike.

One coup, in  Arthur Lubow’s new biography, “Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer,” is an interview with Colin Wood, [the child with the toy hand grenade] conducted by Lubow in 2012. We learn that Wood was a Park Avenue kid, stranded at the time with nannies while his parents were busy divorcing, and “living primarily on powdered Junket straight from the box.” He brought his toy guns to school. Wood says of Arbus, “She saw in me the frustration, the anger at my surroundings, the kid wanting to explode but can’t because he’s constrained by his background.” If she did see all that, it was by instinct, with a touch of fellow-feeling; she had started out much like Colin, and continued that way.

[Her favorite subjects were the invisible, even if they were cute kids; the shunned, the aged, the pitiable, those of indeterminate gender. Those who we secretly feared.–Esco]

Yes,. you guessed right. Gloria Vanderbilt’s son, Anderson Cooper.

 She was a Russek, which to anyone who suddenly needed a mink stole, in the depths of the Great Depression, was a name to reach for. Russeks, founded by her maternal grandfather, was originally a furrier’s; by 1924, it was a department store on Fifth Avenue, selling not only furs but also gowns, coats, and, as an advertisement put it that year, “smart accessories for the correctly dressed woman.” In 1919, Diane’s mother, Gertrude, married a young window dresser at the store named David Nemerov. Their son, Howard, who grew up to become poet laureate, was born twenty-one weeks after the wedding. Diane was born in 1923, and her sister, Renee, in 1928.

They raised their three children on Park Avenue and then in a 14-room apartment in the San Remo on the Upper West Side;  She was cared for by a bevy of nannies and maids, driven by a chauffeur, cooked for by a professional.

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Brenda Frazier, pictured in 1966, twenty-eight years after she had been crowned “débutante of the year.” She appears to be held together by powder, paint, and pearls.

———————–

Gertrude, according to Lubow, “typically stayed in bed in the morning past eleven o’clock, smoking cigarettes, talking on the telephone, and applying cold cream and cosmetics to her face.” At one point, she fell into a ravine of depression and got stuck, sitting wordlessly at the family dinner table. She had suffered a nervous breakdown that left her unable to wash or dress for many months, while the children were cared for by the help. .“I stopped functioning. I was like a zombie,” she recalled later.

Her husband, meanwhile,…  smooth and frictionless, rose through the ranks of Russeks as if stepping into the elevator. By 1947, he had arrived at the position of president.

During this period, 11-year-old Diane locked herself in her bedroom for hours at a time.

Arbus did not endure her suffering alone, for her brother, Howard, was close to her.  Both were precocious students, and they shared other talents, too. Diane masturbated in the bathroom with the blinds up, to insure that people across the street could watch her, and as an adult she sat next to the patrons of porno cinemas, in the dark, and gave them a helping hand. (This charitable deed was observed by a friend, Buck Henry, the screenwriter of “The Graduate.”) Not to be outdone in these vigorous stakes was her brother, who later, in a book called “Journal of the Fictive Life,” defined his self-abuse as “worship.” He added, “My father once caught me at it, and said he would kill me if it ever happened again.” A friend of Gertrude’s once told Howard that reading Freud would make you sick. On the contrary, it would be like a day in the life of the Nemerovs.

The summit of this weirdness comes before Lubow has reached page twenty, with the disclosure, from Arbus, that “the sexual relationship with Howard that began in adolescence had never ended. She said that she last went to bed with him when he visited New York in July 1971. That was only a couple of weeks before her death.” The source for this is psychiatrist Helen Boigon, who treated Arbus in the last two years of her life, and who was interviewed—though not named—by Patricia Bosworth for her 1984 biography of Arbus. (The results are in an archive at Boston University.) William Todd Schultz, too, communicated with Boigon for “An Emergency in Slow Motion” (2011), his unblushing psychological portrait of Arbus. …The intimate rapport of brother and sister was apparently recounted to the psychiatrist in a casual manner, as though incest were no big deal—just a family habit that you kept up, like charades.

Howard Nemerov

And that otherworldly coolness drifts into Arbus’s art. What her admirers respond to is not so much the gallery of grotesques as her reluctance to be wowed or cowed by them, still less to censure them or to set them up for mockery. If she was a pilgrim on the fringes of society, it was fascination rather than compassion that drove her there, and many of the outcasts she discovered, far from being ground down, had elected to cast themselves out. The balding and shirtless figure who glares at us in “Tattooed man at a carnival, Md.” (1970) requests not an atom of our pity. Indeed, he puts our undistinguished bodies to scorn, brandishing the art work of his torso as thou

gh to holler, “Get a load of me.”

When Diane Nemerov was thirteen, she fell in love with Allan Arbus, who worked in the advertising department at Russeks .[They married] and Allan [gave] his wife a camera after their honeymoon, and she [took] a course with the photographer Berenice Abbott, at the New School. When the war ended, Allan and Diane, with the encouragement (and the financial assistance) of David Nemerov, went into business together.

Diane and Allan Arbus

 NEW YORK

 Diane, growing up on Central Park West; Allan, the city-college dropout five years her senior, working a menial job in the shop’s ad department. The pair transformed themselves into a duo of fashion photographers, shooting for magazines from Vogue to Glamour to Harper’s Bazaar for nearly a decade…. . After long hours in the studio, she’d hurry home to cook dinner for her husband and their two young daughters, Doon and Amy

If they were not completely monogamous — why be so bourgeois? — they were completely committed to each other.

But Diane was growing dissatisfied. She dreamt up the concepts for their shoots — then spent her days handling the models, pinning their clothes in place, a role even Allan admitted was “demeaning.” Besides, she’d begun asking herself, what could she possibly learn by posing a person in borrowed clothes, inserting them as a human fill-in-the-blank into some art director’s fantasy?

Diane committed herself to wandering New York City with her 35mm Nikon, following strangers down the street or lying in wait in doorways until she saw someone she felt compelled to photograph. This was the onset of a lifelong addiction to experience, which would feed her and consume her in equal measure.

The exhibit at the Met Breuer, “diane arbus: in the beginning,” features about 70 never-before-seen prints, [covering] the experiments that immediately followed.

Allan helped find her a studio and darkroom, continued taking on commercial work under their joint name, and made sure their assistant developed her rolls before any of his magazine materials. “The most important work that goes on here,” he’d say, “is Diane’s.”

Her first move was to study with Lisette Model, who steered her away from the hazy (“I used to make very grainy things,” Arbus recalled) and toward a clarity that would specify rather than blur—confronting us with this person, in this place, wearing this outfit, or no outfit at all.

One day I said to her, and I think this was very crucial. I said, “Originality means coming from the source, not like [Harper’s Bazaar Art Director Alexey] Brodovitch–‘at any price to be different…’ And from there on, Diane was sitting there and–I’ve never in my life seen anybody–not listening to me but suddenly listening to herself through what was said.” [authors’ italics. Lisette Model, in an interview with Doon Arbus, Revelations, 2003, first paperback ed  p.141 ]

For Arbus, the advice was heaven-sent. It gave her permission to be the artist she was ready to be.

STUART DAVIS AT THE WHITNEY.

Swing Landscape  (1938)

NEW YORKER,  Peter Schjeldahl

Stuart Davis is best known, and rightly esteemed, for his later, tightly composed, hyperactive, flag-bright pictures, with crisp planes and emphatic lines, loops, and curlicues, often featuring gnomic words (“champion,” “pad,” “else”) and almost always incorporating his signature as a dashing pictorial element. Their musical rhythms and buttery textures appeal at a glance. If the works had a smell, it would be like that of a factory-fresh car—an echt American aura, from the country’s post-Second World War epoch of dazzling manufacture and soaring optimism. But, in this beautifully paced show, hung by the Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, Davis’s earlier phases prove most absorbing. They detail stages of a personal ambition in step with large ideals….Newness in art held precedence for Davis in all weather, and, like other leftist painters of the time, he adopted the belief that artistic progress is somehow inherently revolutionary.

Percolator” (1927).

Egg Beater No. 1 1927

Egg Beater No. 4” (1928)

Beginning in 1921, collage-like paintings of tobacco packages, light bulbs, and a mouthwash bottle wrestle with Cubism in what amounts to proto-Pop art. Four “Egg Beater” paintings, from 1927 and 1928, memorialize a concerted effort to transcend Cubism, and even to challenge Picasso, with rigorous variations on a tabletop array of household objects. The thirteen months that Davis spent in Paris, starting in 1928, yielded flattened, potently charming cityscapes in toothsome colors.

“Place Pasdeloup” (1928).

Report from Rockport, 1940

Back home, he fed his semi-abstracting campaign with motifs from summer sojourns in Gloucester, Massachusetts: signs, boat riggings, gas pumps. His sporadic output in the thirties ran to murals. The rioting shapes and hues of the more than fourteen-foot-long “Swing Landscape” (1938), made for a government-funded housing project in Brooklyn, leap beyond the compositional order—contained and balanced—of French predecessors, chiefly Fernand Léger. They jostle outward, anticipating the “all-over” principle that Jackson Pollock realized, with his drip paintings, a decade later.

Self-Portrait    1912

Davis was born in 1892 in Philadelphia, the first child of artists who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His father, Ed, working as a newspaper illustrator, became involved with the budding Ashcan-school illustrators-turned-painters, led by the charismatic Robert Henri. (A star of that cohort, John Sloan, became an early mentor and lifelong friend of Stuart’s.) The family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, in 1901, as Ed bounced between jobs. Stuart, at sixteen, persuaded his parents to let him quit high school and enroll in Henri’s art school, in Manhattan. He also began frequenting bars in Newark and Hoboken, where he commenced his habits as a prodigious drinker and a passionate jazz buff. As he later recalled, “You could hear the blues, or Tin Pan Alley tunes turned into real music, for the cost of a five-cent beer.” In 1910, after less than half a year of formal study, he showed realist work, with other members of the Henri circle. Two years later, he was illustrating for the socialist magazine The Masses. He had five watercolors in the 1913 Armory Show, which was, he later told a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, “the greatest single influence I have experienced.”

New York Mural   1932

Around that time, New York’s modernizing art world, small as it was, developed factions. The most sophisticated was that of the group that formed around Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, founded in 1905, which showed the European new masters and emphasized photography. More eclectic was the Whitney Studio Club, established in Greenwich Village in 1918 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Davis gravitated to the latter, which took on painters from the disbanded Henri school and whose most talented member was Edward Hopper. A stipend from Whitney and her director, Juliana Force, rescued Davis from poverty in the nineteen-twenties, and Whitney’s purchase of two of his paintings funded his trip to Paris.

He was devastated when, in 1932, his first wife, Bessie Chosak, died after a botched abortion. But, within weeks, he was at work on a chipper mural for the men’s lounge at Radio City Music Hall.

Seeing no contradiction between patriotism and radical politics, throughout the nineteen-thirties Davis all but set aside studio work, dismissing leftist demands for proletarian themes in art, to engage in labor-organizing activism.

 

Artists Against War and Fascism   1936

In the forties, Davis’s drinking reached a crisis level, which sharply reduced his productivity but still had no evident effect on his style. A painting that was key to the evolution of his late period, “The Mellow Pad,” begun in 1945, remained upbeat even though it took him six years to complete. Sobriety, following a collapse of his health in 1949, launched him on his prolific last phase, which accounts for more than half of the work in the Whitney show. His joyous art finally became authentic to a life of worldly success and domestic contentment with his second wife, Roselle Springer.

The Mellow Pad, (1945-1951)

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

For those who, like me, are longstanding and unwavering fans of Davis’s work, the current show at the Whitney, “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing”—put together by Barbara Haskell, that institution’s resident expert in prewar modernism and Harry Cooper, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art, where the show will travel in November—is a welcome occasion to re-experience his bracing achievement….the exhibition is a carefully conceived and expertly realized introduction Davis’s electrifying contribution.

Odel 1924

Visa (1951)

“Lucky Strike” (1921).

  The “spontaneity” of Davis’s paintings was as meticulously prepared and rehearsed as a Coleman Hawkins saxophone solo. The decade-wide parentheses in dating of Ultramarine (1942-1952) and American Painting (1932/1942-1954)—both almost mosaics of eccentrically cropped chromatic fragments—testify to the protracted gestation of works that look as if they’d been speedily and effortlessly knocked out.

American Painting   (1932/1942-1954)

 Davis was a man so imbued with the lust for life that he was incapable of producing dull or depressing art and plainly would have never understood how art as a deliberate denial of pleasure, could be “good for the cause”—any cause. From his breakthrough in the mid-1920s until his death at seventy-one in 1964, just as the wave of Pop artists—to whom he gave courage and taught ways of seeing and doing—crested, Davis concentrated single-mindedly on making art quiver with the energy he perceived around him. Jazz was an inherently urban music, but in Davis’s art its pulse could be felt everywhere, from Hudson River docks to small seaport towns in New England where swing bands and bebop combos—not to mention African-Americans—were few and far between.

Ultra Marine 1943

Seeing this Davis retrospective against the background of terrible events in the world at large and agonizing violence and divisiveness at home, [it exemplifies] how sustaining great art is even in the grimmest of times.

Owh! in San Pao” (1951).

NAN GOLDIN AT MoMA

“Trixie on the Ladder, NYC” (1979): Goldin “showed life as it was happening.”PHOTOGRAPH BY NAN GOLDIN /

HILTON ALS, NEW YORKER

Just as certain works of literature can radically alter our understanding of language and form, there are a select number of books that can transform our sense of what makes a photograph, and why. Between 1972 and 1992, the Aperture Foundation published three seminal photography books, all by women. “Diane Arbus” (1972), published a year after the photographer’s death, documented a world of hitherto unrecorded people—carnival figures and everyday folk—who lived, it seemed, somewhere between the natural world and the supernatural. Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” (1992), a collection of carefully composed images of Mann’s three young children being children—wetting the bed, swimming, squinting through an eyelid swollen by a bug bite—came out when the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibition was still fresh, and it reopened the question of what the limits should be when it comes to making art that can be considered emotionally pornographic.

Nestled between these two projects was Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1986). (An exhibition of the slide show and photographs from which the book was drawn opened this month, at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.) “The Ballad” was Goldin’s first book and remains her best known, a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call “being.” In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends.

What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to “The Ballad” ’s operatic sweep. In a 1996 interview, Goldin said of snapshots, “People take them out of love, and they take them to remember—people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history. And that’s exactly what my work is about.”

Goldin’s parents, Hyman and Lillian, grew up poor. They “were intellectual Jews, so they didn’t care about money,” she told me. “Most of all, my father cared about Harvard. He attended the university at a time when there was a kind of quota on Jews. It was a very small quota. Going to Harvard was the biggest thing in his life.” Hyman and Lillian met in Boston and married on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. Hyman went to work in the economics division of the Federal Communications Commission. Nancy was born, the youngest of four children, in 1953, and grew up, first, in the suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, a quiet, orderly place, where, Goldin has said, the main goal was not to reveal too much or pry into the well-manicured lives of your neighbors. As a girl, she longed to know what was behind those closed doors. She also longed to escape that world of convention, she told me, in her high-ceilinged, top-floor apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone—which she moved into, in part, because it’s O.K. to smoke there, an eighties vice that she has carried into the new millennium. (Goldin also lives in Berlin; she left the U.S. in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected.)

Her older brother Stephen, a psychiatrist who now lives in Sweden, was one of her first protectors, she said, but it was her older sister, Barbara, who claimed her emotional attention. Barbara confided in her and played music for her and had all the makings of an artist herself…. “There was a lot of bickering going on, and I wished they’d get divorced most of my childhood.”…. Barbara acted out and could not be controlled—she was, according to Stephen, often violent at home, breaking windows and throwing knives—and her parents had her committed to mental hospitals, on and off, for six years. …“Barbara said, ‘All I want to do is go home.’ She was fifteen. And my mother said, ‘If she comes home, I’m leaving.’ And my father just sat there with his head down….The one good shrink I’ve had says I survived because, by the age of four, my friends were more important to me than my family,”

“I was eleven when my sister committed suicide.”

I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control. By the time she was eighteen, she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C. It was an act of immense will.

In the week of mourning that followed, I was seduced by an older man. During this period of greatest pain and loss, I was simultaneously awakened to intense sexual excitement. In spite of the guilt I suffered, I was obsessed by my desire.

From the  introduction to “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” 

By the time Goldin was thirteen, she was reading The East Village Other, listening to the Velvet Underground, and aspiring to become a junkie, a “slum goddess,” a bad girl free of the limiting roles with which so many women define their social self—daughter, wife, mother. At fourteen, after being kicked out of a number of boarding schools “for smoking pot or some bullshit,” Goldin left home. For a time, she lived in communes and foster homes.

Suzanne with Mona Lisa, Mexico City” (1981). © NAN GOLDIN /

“I met Nan when she was fourteen,” the performer Suzanne Fletcher told me. “She was in a foster home in Massachusetts. I was aware of her because she was so cool.” The two became close friends the following year, when Goldin enrolled in the Satya Community School, where Fletcher was a student. ….There Goldin met David Armstrong, a gay fellow-student who eventually became a photographer, too, and was Goldin’s closest male friend for decades. (He died, of liver cancer, in 2014.)  The two were involved, from the first, in a kind of mariage blanc. They went to movies all the time, were fascinated by the women of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and in love with thirties stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. “We were really radical little kids, and we did cling to our friendships as an alternative family,” Fletcher told me. “Even at the time, we could have articulated that.”

Goldin became the school photographer and found her voice, both through the camera, she says now, and through Armstrong, who taught her that humor could be a survival mechanism. She became able to joke and laugh; before that, she said, she barely spoke above a whisper. (Goldin also told me that, for her, the camera was a seductive tool, a way of becoming socialized.) Fletcher remembers Goldin’s “passion to document”: “She kept journals, then the photography became a visual journal,” recording the lives of her friends. (Fletcher is one of the most memorable subjects in “The Ballad.” )

By the time Goldin was eighteen, she was living in Boston with a much older man…. Eventually, she fell in with a group of drag queens, who hung out in a bar called the Other Side, and began to photograph them. She wanted to memorialize the queens, get them on the cover of Vogue. She had no interest in trying to show who they were under the feathers and the fantasy: she was in love with the bravery of their self-creation, their otherness.

Goldin never had any real truck with camera culture—the predominantly straight-male world of photography in the sixties and seventies, when dudes stood around talking about apertures and stroking their tripods, in an effort to butch up that sissy job, otherwise known as “making art.” She took a few courses at the New England School of Photography, but was less engaged by the technical instruction than by a class taught by the photographer Henry Horenstein, who recognized the originality of her work. He turned her on to Larry Clark, who had photographed teen-agers having sex and shooting up in sixties Tulsa. The intimacy of Clark’s pictures—you can almost smell the musk—inspired Goldin. Here were noncommercial images that promoted not glamour but lawless bohemianism, or just lawlessness.

In 1974, she enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, where she studied alongside Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Mark Morrisroe—photographers driven by their color fantasies of relationship drama and alienated youth.

In the summer of 1976, Goldin rented a house with Armstrong and his lover in Provincetown, where she met the writer and actress Cookie Mueller, who appeared in a number of John Waters’s films, and whom she photographed extensively. In her 1991 book, “Cookie Mueller,” Goldin writes:

She was a cross between Tobacco Road and a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen. . . . That summer I kept meeting her at the bars, at parties and at barbecues with her family—her girlfriend Sharon, her son Max, and her dog Beauty. Part of how we got close was through me photographing her—the photos were intimate and then we were.

 (Mueller died, of aids, in 1989.)

Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City” (1983). © NAN GOLDIN

At the end of that Provincetown summer, Goldin had image after image of her friends in the dunes, partying, living their lives as if they had all the time in the world.

Nan Goldin and Marvin Heiferman

The curator Marvin Heiferman was working in New York then, at Castelli Graphics, a business run by the art dealer Leo Castelli’s wife, Antoinette. While Leo dealt with artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg in then funky SoHo, Antoinette helped push graphics and photographs—which weren’t always considered “real” art—in a stuffy Upper East Side town house. One day, Heiferman got a call from a young woman who said that the photographer Joel Meyerowitz had referred her. Heiferman told her that he wasn’t looking at new work, but the voice on the phone was insistent. “Then this person shows up in a blue polka-dot dress with a whole lot of crinolines and wacky hair and a box under her arm,” Heiferman recalled. “She shows me this box of pictures, and they’re really weird and curiously made, with a very strange color sense about them, and they were of everything from people smoking cigarettes to fucking. There were probably twenty to twenty-five pictures. And I had never seen anything like that, in terms of their density and their connection with the people in them.” Heiferman told Goldin to bring more work the next time she came. A few months later, she arrived with a wooden crate full of photographs. “Again, I’m thinking, This is extraordinary work, right? I loved them and wanted to show them, but Mrs. Castelli thought they were too raw. She worried that they would upset people, that Ellsworth Kelly wouldn’t like them.”

Although Heiferman eventually included Goldin in a group show, it was almost a decade before she got her due as an artist. There’s an unspoken rule in photography, not to mention in art in general, that women are not supposed to be, technically speaking, voyeurs—they’re supposed to be what voyeurs look at.

“ ‘The Ballad’ was a brilliant solution for someone who shoots like her,” Heiferman said. “It showed life as it was happening, and she wound up with something that was an amalgam of diaristic and family pictures and fashion photography and anthropology and celebrity photography and news photography and photojournalism. And nobody had done that before.

“Nan on Brian’s Lap, Nan’s Birthday, New York City” (1981). © NAN GOLDIN

Goldin was tending bar at Tin Pan Alley, an “Iceman Cometh” type of watering hole on West Forty-ninth Street, when she met an office worker and ex-marine named Brian, a lonesome Manhattan cowboy with a crooked-toothed smile, who eventually fell into acting. Goldin ended their first date by asking him to cop heroin for her in Harlem. He did. Drugs consumed them, as did their physical attraction to each other. In “The Ballad,” we see Brian sitting on the edge of Goldin’s bed, smoking a cigarette, or staring at the camera with lust, certainly, but wariness, too, his hairy chest a sort of costume of masculinity.

Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City” (1983). © NAN GOLDIN

[Writer and friend Darryl] Pinckney describes Goldin’s lover as “tall but uncertain.” He adds, “His only asset seemed to be that he was a man, but it was his physical advantage as a man that allowed him to convert into a weapon his sense of entitlement and injury, his resentment at being the backstage husband.” In 1984, the couple were in Berlin, and, Goldin told me, “Brian was dope-sick. We were staying at a pensione, and he started beating me, and he went for my eyes, and later they had to stitch my eye back up, because it was about to fall out of the socket. He burned my journals, and the sick thing was that there were people around who knew us and who wouldn’t help me. He wrote ‘Jewish-American Princess’ in lipstick on the mirror.”

Goldin made it back to the U.S., where Fletcher helped get her to a hospital so that her eye could be saved. While recovering, she made a self-portrait, “Nan one month after being battered” (1984), which is, perhaps, the most harrowing image in “The Ballad.” We see Goldin’s blackened eyes and swollen nose and, in a stroke of pure genius, her red-lipsticked lips. It’s the tender femininity of those lips that brings the horror into focus.

“Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984). © NAN GOLDIN

Goldin was physically afraid of men for a long time after the beating, and her drug use became less and less controlled.

Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, first saw “The Ballad” in 1985, at the Whitney Biennial. He went back to his office thinking that it was among the most powerful visual experiences he’d ever had. “It was not something that would have happened at that point within the Museum of Modern Art,” he told me. “And I welcomed that. I felt that, as much as I respected this great lineage that was being established at moma—Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander—in a sense, it was coming to its conclusion.” Goldin, he said, was not making work that responded to other photographers’ work: “She had her own visual language, and this was unusual.” Holborn, Heiferman, and Goldin decided to make a book out of “The Ballad.” Many images were considered, discarded, picked up again. (Fletcher was very involved with the selection.) As the project progressed, so did Holborn’s relationship with Goldin, which became emotionally intense, though Holborn was married and a father.

The book came out in 1986. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote, “What Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950’s, Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is to the 1980’s.” Goldin was not unaware of the contradiction involved in her iconic work’s, so wild in spirit, becoming, to a certain extent, institutionalized. For me, “The Ballad” is poised at the threshold of doom; it’s a last dance before aids swallowed that world. (Goldin also recorded the aids era, in her 2003 book, “The Devil’s Playground.”)

She recently put out a new book, “Diving for Pearls,” a series of photographs of art works linked to her own work from the past. In the introduction, she explains the title:

Since David Armstrong and I were young he always referred to photography as “diving for pearls.” If you took a million pictures you were lucky to come out with one or two gems. . . . I never learned control over my machines. I made every mistake in the book. But the technical mistakes allowed for magic. . . . Random psychological subtexts that I never would have thought to intentionally create. The subconscious made visible—though whether mine or the camera’s I don’t know. . . .

DANNY LYON AT THE WHITNEY

A photograph taken by Danny Lyon on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington.

VINCE ALETTI, NEW YORKER

Danny Lyon’s career would make a great bio-pic. The New York City photographer, who, at seventy-four, is the subject of the Whitney’s terrific survey “Message to the Future,” has led an improbably adventurous life, beginning with his involvement in the civil-rights movement. In 1963, when he was twenty-one, he became the staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The year before, on his first trip to the South, Lyon ended up in a Georgia jail, with Martin Luther King, Jr., in a nearby cell. Over the next few years, he documented marches, sit-ins, arrests, and the aftermaths of bombings.

Danny Lyon: Arrest of Taylor Washington, Atlanta, 1963

USA. Birmingham, Alabama. 1963. Members of the Alabama Highway Patrol

Lyon’s 1963 picture of a boy shouting while confined in a choke hold by an Atlanta policeman became an icon of the civil-rights movement and a breakthrough for the photographer. “I had fallen into one of the great stories of our times,” he later wrote, and he continued to find them. After his work with the S.N.C.C., Lyon, already a biker himself, joined the Outlaws, a Chicago motorcycle club, whose members he photographed at their homes and on the road. The series provided an insider’s view of the outsider life: the camaraderie and competition, the alcohol-fueled oblivion, and the glamour of life on the edge.

Danny Lyon: Cal on the Springfield Run, Illinois, 1966

Crossing the Ohio, Louisville 1966

In 1967, Lyon talked his way into the Texas prison system, where he spent fourteen months taking pictures in six different prisons. At the Whitney, the selections from that project (accompanied by two brief silent videos) are shockingly matter-of-fact studies of institutional inhumanity and the men who endure it. At the time, the work confirmed Lyon’s position as a concerned photographer in the classic mold of W. Eugene Smith and Gordon Parks. But he has remained a maverick throughout his long career—an irritant to the system and an ally to the outcast. Lyon made lifelong friends of some of the Texas inmates.

Danny Lyon: Weight lifters, Ramsey Unit, Texas, 1968

He was in New York City in 1966, when demolition began on the sixty acres below Canal Street that would include the World Trade Center; he spent the next year recording some of the city’s oldest buildings before and after they fell to the wrecking ball. … The restraint of these images, which were published in the 1969 book “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan,” is unexpectedly moving.

185 West Street at Chambers 1967

West Street at Beach 1967

Lyon, ever restless, threw himself back into the great, troubled world, and he has continued to empathize with the displaced and the dispossessed, insuring that their struggles don’t go unseen. 

Boy against a yellow platform at the Kosciusko Swimming Pool in the Bedford-Stuyvesant District of Brooklyn, New York, July 1974 NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

Danny Lyon’s still pictures—the work for which this restless photographer, filmmaker, and writer has always been best known—often center on people hanging out and killing time. Since 1962, when he hitchhiked from Chicago to segregated Illinois to take the first of the incendiary civil rights protest photographs that earned him his initial acclaim, Lyon has spent much of his career making intimate images of marginal, working-class, and outlaw communities. Many of the most striking pictures in the Whitney Museum’s new survey, “Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” organized by the San Francisco-based curator Julian Cox and overseen by the Whitney’s Elisabeth Sussman, come from these milieus:

Clifford Vaughs, another SNCC photographer, is arrested by the National Guard

Lyon has always taken risks to earn the status of sympathetic insider in the communities he shoots. The photographs he took across the South in his early twenties were forceful enough visions of outrage and disgust—a group of young black women languishing in the Leesburg stockade; a protestor splayed out in midair as the object of a violent tug-of-war contest between an onlooker and a pack of riot police—that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) soon made Lyon their staff photographer. (One of his pictures, of a grim-looking cop crossing his arms, appeared on the organization’s posters emblazoned with the slogan “Is He Protecting You?”) Lyon would never align himself so completely with another group’s mission and goals, but most of his subsequent projects have involved a similar degree of intense, life-consuming commitment. To make The Bikeriders (1968), the first book of photographs for which he had sole credit, he spent a year as a member of the Chicago Outlaws; for Conversations with the Dead (1971), his third book, he lived in Texas for still longer taking pictures in the state’s prisons.

Mary, Santa Marta, Columbia, from the portfolio “Danny Lyon” Lyon, Danny 1972, portfolio 1979

Between 1965 and 1973, he photographed poor Appalachian transplants in Chicago, prostitutes and homeless children in Santa Marta, Colombia, trans women of color in Galveston, and undocumented workers in New Mexico, one of whom he helped cross a roadblock while the two of them were building an adobe house.

Maricopa County, Arizona, 1977

A deeply ingrained curiosity; a readiness to put himself in dangerous or unfamiliar settings; a sometimes ethically perilous refusal to judge—the qualities that emerge in Lyon’s work on view at the Whitney make one wonder how he gained the degree of confidence with his subjects he seems to enjoy.

Danny Lyon: Tesca, Cartagena, Colombia, 1966

But the greatest revelations in the show come from another body of Lyon’s work Cox and his collaborators have prominently featured—his little-known documentary films.

Lyon made Soc. Sci. 127 (1969)—the mischievous study of a Texas tattoo artist that became his first film….since the early Seventies his films have taken up much of his energy. For Lyon, filmmaking has become a chance to capture the drift and tempo of the hangout sessions, conversations, and daily interactions from which his photographs come.

Danny Lyon: Bill Sanders, Tattoo Artist, Houston, Texas, 1968

Character portraits of irregular lengths and digressive shapes, Lyon’s films have never enjoyed as bright a profile as his photographs. And yet they are secret treasures of nonfiction cinema—plainspoken, offhandedly beautiful, rich, and troubling …Like Lyon’s photographs, these movies consist largely of characters rambling, whiling away time, and going about their business seemingly unhindered. For the homeless children at the center of Los Niños Abandonados (1975), which Lyon shot in Santa Marta, that business involves sleeping outside churches, collecting leftovers from the tables of cafes, swimming in rivers and cooking what look like chicken feet.

The primary characters in Willie (1985), some of whom Lyon earlier filmed in Llanito(1971) and Little Boy (1977)—a mentally unstable New Mexico ex-convict named Willie Jaramillo, his brother, his young nephew, and the prisoners with whom he served time—spend the film riding in pickup trucks, listening to music, and, in the case of the inmates, lifting weights in a break room Lyon depicts as a chaotic, noisy social center. (The Whitney is showing Willie, Soc. Sci. 127, and Dear Mark (1981), a jokey short view of Lyon’s friend Mark di Suvero making one of his large sculptures, looped in two cordoned-off rooms.)

Not all of Lyon’s film work concerns particular characters and communities. He has also made forthrightly autobiographical movies like Media Man (1994) and Born to Film, ..;Recalling the scrapbook-like photo collages—he calls them “montages”—Lyon has made since the late Sixties, Born to Film is a poignant glimpse of the home life Lyon has sustained amid many trips and re-locations. But it’s pictures like the ones in Conversations with the Dead and films like Willie and Los Niños Abandonados that best suggest what makes Lyon such a thrilling artist: his intense impulse to familiarize himself with lives wildly different from his own.

“Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” is on view at the Whitney Museum in New York through September 25. Excerpts of his films can be found on Lyon’s website, BleakBeauty.com.

Danny Lyon, MTA Subway, NYC, 1966

Union Square station. New York City, 1966

TRUMP & CLINTON, BY THE NUMBERS.

 According to recent polls, Hillary Clinton is up double digits in three states that Trump can’t afford to lose: Colorado, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Four new NBC News/Marist College polls released Friday show Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leading her Republican rival by five points in Florida, nine points in North Carolina and double digits in Colorado (14) and Virginia (13). All four states have been battlegrounds in recent presidential elections.

And really, it’s those last two numbers that show just how massively difficult Trump’s path to the presidency is right now. Because without Colorado and Virginia — and a third state where he trails by double digits, Pennsylvania — he’s all but sunk.

Trump has actually polled quite competitively in Florida, with most recent polls showing a virtual tie. But even if he wins there, he can’t survive losing Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Losing all three and New Mexico would put Clinton at 269 electoral votes — just one shy of victory.  Trump continues to trail by double digits in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

From there, all Clinton would need to do is win one of the following: Nevada (6 electoral votes), Iowa (6), Ohio (18), New Hampshire (4) or North Carolina (15). Oh, and remember that the new NBC/Marist polls shows Clinton up nine points in North Carolina, and a poll this week showed Clinton up 17 (!) in New Hampshire.

And if you throw in New Hampshire and give Clinton every battleground state in which she currently leads by double digits in the most recent poll, she’s already won with 273 electoral votes.

 

Trump is doing worse with Hispanic voters than any Republican since 1996. Which isn’t good news given the percentage of Hispanic voters is growing. “In 1976, exit polls suggest that 1 percent of voters were Hispanic,” reports The Fix’s Philip Bump. “By 1996, that figure had only risen to 5 percent. In this election cycle, Pew projects that Hispanics will make up 12 percent of all voters, meaning that a poor Trump performance would overlap with heavy turnout.”

Education Level Emerges as Sharp Dividing Line in Clinton-Trump Race by Bloomberg Politics’ John McCormick

Clinton wins the college-educated segment by 25 percentage points, 59 percent to 34 percent. Trump’s edge among those without a college education is 10 points, 52 percent to 42 percent. Trump’s lead is 4-to-1 among white men with less than a college degree, 76 percent to 19 percent. Clinton’s advantage with college-educated women is 64 percent to 31 percent. That’s vastly different from what was recorded in the 2012 presidential election…President Barack Obama only narrowly beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney among college graduates, 50 percent to 48 percent.

For those who listen to Donald Trump frequently, his Thursday interview on CNBC started out routinely: The Republican presidential nominee slammed Mexico and China here, mentioned Crooked Hillary there. But then the candidate of bluster, extra-large crowd size, and scorn for losers said he’d be OK if he lost! It was one of his most shocking statements yet. Was he signaling—amid defecting Republicans, horrified down-ballot candidates, plummeting polls, slow ground game, and absolutely fed up GOP leadership—that he knew things were going badly? The rumors that he could be replaced on the ticket may be far-fetched. But if even Trump is copping to the mess, just how much trouble could he be in?

Meanwhile, as we find out that hacks of Democrats and top national security figures have broadened, and Trump might—might—have run out of scandals, at least temporarily, could Clinton soon feel a level of scrutiny that her rival has so far helped her avoid, particularly with reports emerging from CNN of a tussle between the Department of Justice and the FBI over investigating the Clinton Foundation?  [FBI officials wanted to investigate whether there was a criminal conflict of interest with the State Department and the Clinton Foundation during Clinton’s tenure. The Department of Justice had looked into allegations surrounding the foundation a year earlier after the release of the controversial book “Clinton Cash,” but found them to be unsubstantiated .].. Or can she continue to put pressure on Trump with her Friday release of yet another tax return, which shows that she and her husband made $10.6 million and paid an effective tax rate of about 34 percent in 2015, even as Trump continues to avoid disclosure?

 

KIAROSTAMI VI: HIGHLIGHTS FROM AN INTERVIEW.

DAVID STERRITT, FILM COMMENT

A surprising amount of debate surfaced over the ending of Taste of Cherry,wherein the film’s fascinatingly discursive story—centering on a man’s long discussions with three strangers about his wish to end his life—is followed by a video epilogue showing the actors and filmmakers preparing their final take in the pleasant hillside location where the suicide scene is set. Supporters saw this as a bold extension of Kiarostami’s self-referential complexity, detractors labeled it a confusing cop-out that dodges narrative issues instead of resolving them. The latter group was back in action when The Wind Will Carry Us screened at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, complaining that its reliance on familiar moves—driving scenes, front-seat talkathons, God’s-eye views of Iranian countryside—prove the director is literally spinning his wheels.

 

Such arguments notwithstanding, it’s plain to anyone who has seriously engaged with Iranian film in general or Kiarostami’s work in particular that Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us are full-fledged masterpieces, and that the master who created them deserves any throne he might choose to occupy. Far from repeating a series of trademarked gestures, The Wind Will Carry Us finds Kiarostami weaving one of his most suggestive philosophical webs around the deceptively simple tale of a filmmaker who barges into a rural town, hoping to record a folk ritual that will take place after an old woman’s impending death. One of the movie’s feet is planted firmly in the earthbound world of the village and its inhabitants, while the other roams as freely as the protagonist’s ever-present cell phone—which isn’t so freely, it turns out, since the phone refuses to function unless he climbs into his Land Rover and races to the top of a distant hill. There he chats with a ditch-digger whose face is never seen and finds a human bone that becomes his talisman, signaling that while the wind may carry us, the earth remains our home and our destination.

 

“Most people want simplicity, they want to get excited, cry, laugh… and we can’t expect the same level of enthusiasm for [poetic] cinema. I’m not comparing my works with theirs, but if you had the paintings of Kandinsky or Braque or Picasso on auction in a park, how many people would buy them, even at $100 apiece? One must have a realistic expectation for art that is real art, as opposed to what is entertainment. The general public won’t pay for a picture if they can’t quite understand what’s in it and what it says.”

“The poetic film is like a puzzle where you put the pieces together and they don’t necessarily match. You can make whatever arrangement you yourself would like. Contrary to what the general public is used to, it doesn’t give you a clear result at the end. And it doesn’t give you advice!””On-the-spot creation of dialogue has been necessary because it’s the only way I could work with people who are not professional actors, and some of the moments you see in my movies have surprised me as well as others. I don’t give dialogue to the actors, but once you explain the scene to them, they just start talking, beyond what I would have imagined. It’s like a cycle, and I don’t know where it starts and ends: I don’t know whether I’m teaching them what to say, or they’re teaching me what to receive!”

ABC Africa

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Those who compared Kiarostami to De Sica or Ray always missed the foundations of his cinema, which only pretended to be narratives in the conventional sense, and were much closer to being agnostic philosophical treatises disguised as stories. Most of Kiarostami’s imitators phrase their films as statements; Kiarostami’s are phrased as questions, explorations and journeys without clearly marked destinations or conclusions. For anyone who relies on the satisfying closures of conventional narratives, this can clearly be maddening.

KIAROSTAMI V: TEN / THE FINAL MOVIES

Stuart Jeffries

Saturday April 16, 2005

Guardian

Since Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or, Kiarostami has made several highly regarded films: In 1999, he directed The Wind Will Carry Us, a feature unusual because many of the characters are heard but not seen; at least thirteen to fourteen speaking characters in the film are not seen.^[30]   

Geoff Andrew, TimeOut: Another subtle, deceptively simple and richly rewarding work of genius from Kiarostami, this Venice prizewinner opens on a long shot of a car negotiating a dusty mountain road, with driver and passengers arguing about where they are. Once the car reaches the Kurdistan village of Siaf Dareh, the ambiguities and mysteries proliferate and interweave. Are the men treasure-hunters, as they tell a boy, the telecom engineers the villagers assume them to be, or something more sinister? Why is their apparent leader curious about the boy’s dying grandma? And why, when Tehran calls on his mobile and he needs to move to higher ground, does he always drive to the cemetery, where an invisible man sings from a hole in the ground? This engrossing and beautiful film succeeds on many levels. As witty, almost absurdist comedy, it offers lovely visual and verbal gags. And as an ethnographic/philosophical study of the relationships between ancient and modern, rural and urban, devotion and directionlessness, it’s intriguing and illuminating.

Invited by the U.N.to document the fate of Uganda’s nearly two million AIDS orphans, Kiarostami made ABC AFRICA (2001). He turns his first feature shot on video into a reflective work that considers his own position as a privileged filmmaker in impoverished circumstances—not unlike the central characters in Life and Nothing More through to The Wind Will Carry Us. Made over ten days, this journey uncovers an indomitable life force in the children, their joy conveyed by a nearly goofy looseness in front of the camera, and group performances that can’t help but transfix the viewer.

In Ten (2002) Kiarostami made a film that used digital cameras to virtually eliminate the director. Kiarostami fastened cameras to the dashboard of a car, and then allowed his actors to act. There was no film crew in the car, and no director. There is no camera movement, other than the movement of the car which carries the camera. There is minimal cutting and editing.[31]  For Geoff Andrew, whose book on the film is published by the British Film Institute, this is Kiarostami’s best. It consists of 10 scenes set in the front of a car, shot in digital video as a woman drives around Tehran with various passengers – her son, a friend, a prostitute and an old woman. It is, on the face of it, the most overtly political of the Iranian’s feature films. The driver, who has divorced her husband, at one point complains about Iran’s “stupid laws” that forbid her to divorce unless she charges her husband with abuse or drug addiction. And it depicts, upsettingly, the consequence of that divorce in the form of her aggressive son who treats his mother disrespectfully from the passenger seat, having seemingly internalised the licence of a sexist society.

Ten

Was the film drawn from your own marital experiences? “Definitely,” says Kiarostami. “I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself. I divorced 22 years ago.” In Iran, while women can sue for divorce, they are not economically able to look after their children afterwards and as a result often see their children only rarely. “Women, after divorce, lose their independence and therefore they are less and less able to take responsibility for their children. It often results in tragedy for all concerned and I was trying to explore that.”

Ten

Following Ten, Kiarostami directed one of his most daring experiments. FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU (2003)  comprises five sections, all in fixed continuous shots focusing on moments with microscopic detail. The camera trains on driftwood floating in the water, or human passersby at the beach crossing paths with ducks, a moonlit pond whose serenity is disrupted by the croaking of unseen frogs. or a finale landscape before dawn where slivers of light become the stuff of pure visual drama.“Five” had neither character, plot nor dialogue.

Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is “more than just pretty pictures”. He adds, “Assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration.”He notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery.[36]

Mr. Kiarostami’s “Five,” a video piece dedicated to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.CreditMuseum of Modern Art

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

In fact, Five proved to be a pivotal work for Kiarostami in many respects. It marked the beginning of an extended period during which Kiarostami escaped from the world of theatrical art cinema and into the world of museums and galleries, where he exhibited many of his own landscape photographs and created many film-related installations (including a series of video “letters” exchanged with Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice). And when he started to make his way back to theatrical filmmaking with Shirin (2008), he significantly did so by focusing on theatrical filmgoing as a subject.
But first Kiarostami further explored his new-found fascination with digital video in 10 ON Ten (2004)  as he returns to the locations of his international breakthrough hit The Wind Will Carry Us. Always an artist unafraid of turning the camera on himself—or at least an alter-ego—he carries on a kind of dialogue with the audience, egging them on to ask questions about the cinema and its purposes, either as a means to uncover a new reality, or as a powerful way of telling a story. In his inimitable way, the filmmaker’s questions only open up further questions.

Tickets

 Tickets (2005): One segment of a three-part film, each of which concerns numerous characters riding a rail train through Europe. Ermanno Olmi and Kenneth Loach directed the other episodes. In Kiarostami’s story,  a woman in late middle-age, with white hair and a string of pearls, boards the  train with a host of suitcases gamely carried by a young assistant. She treats him as a lover, a toyboy, a kept man; but it later transpires that he appears to be on some form of national service, and that she is a widow on the way to a memorial service for her army-general husband. Silvana De Santis plays the woman with sweaty, angry energy; nothing will stand in her way and she will co-operate with no one she considers beneath her. The young man, played by Filippo Trojano, has a sad expression and beautiful eyes, which are later accentuated by the flat lighting Kiarostami deploys when the man is talking to a young friend of his sister whom he meets in the corridor (and of whom De Santis’ character is jealous).

By the conclusion De Santis and Trojano’s characters have argued and separated. She leaves the train alone and unaided, but not before one of the best sequences in the film, which harks back to one of the Iranian director’s longstanding obsessions and involves an argument over mobile phones (Kiarostami considers them a curse of modernity).

In Shirin (2008), over 100 Iranian female actors of the stage and screen, and one notable European star, are observed as they witness the (off-screen and thus unseen, but heard) performance of a live drama based on a 12th century work by Nazami Ganjavi, the master of romantic epic Persian poetry. There’s an unmistakable link, for Western viewers at least, to Shakespeare in both the play’s thematic anticipation of the tragedy of doomed young love in Romeo and Juliet and the way Kiarostami honors the place and power of actors.
We watch their reactions and hear only the soundtrack of the film, using their expressions to help us imagine the story. Here are defiant women from a strict Islamic society revealing their faces, and their emotions, with a few menacing out-of-focus glimpses of men in the background.

 

Agri Ismaïl for 3:AM on Shirin: “What makes Kiarostami’s movie interesting with regard to the mutable Shirin myth is the fact—never disclosed in the movie—that the actresses weren’t actually watching a Khosrow & Shirin adaptation at all. The film’s soundtrack was recorded only later, and the women are in fact looking at some dots above the camera, responding to the director’s prompts. That the story of Khosrow and Shirin was ultimately selected was a fortuitous fluke: an early sketch of the movie shown at Cannes used the soundtrack from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet instead, before Kiarostami decided to switch to his own country’s equivalent.”

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

 Shirin which in some ways I regard as his most radical film. The limitations in this case, at least for me, is that its achievements are mainly theoretical and technical rather than emotional or philosophical.

In 2010 he made “Certified Copy.” in Tuscany…An antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche) and a philosopher (British opera star William Shimell) appear to meet for the first time following one of his lectures, but soon we begin to suspect that there is more to this couple than meets the eye. Are they in fact husband and wife engaging in an elaborate charade?
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: …persistently baffling, contrived, and often simply bizarre – a highbrow misfire of the most peculiar sort. …the simple human inter-relation between the two characters is never in the smallest way convincing,

His final film, “Like Someone in Love,” (2012)  filmed in Japan, was an elliptical study of identity, its main characters a Japanese student moonlighting as a prostitute and her elderly client.

Ian Buruma NYR 11/13/12

The call girl (Takanashi Rin) is on her way to the apartment of an elderly professor (Okuno Tadashi). They have never met before. He doesn’t want to sleep with her. They make small talk. He has laid the table and opened a bottle of champagne, as if to recreate a long-ago scene of romance before he dies. The girl falls asleep in bed. The dinner is never consumed.

The professor drives the girl to her college the following morning. Her jealous boyfriend watches them arrive. The girl brushes him off. While she is taking an exam inside, the boy steps into the car, mistaking the professor for her grandfather. Later, when the boy finds out who the professor really is, he launches a violent attack on his home. What happens after that we will never know. What the professor wanted remains a mystery. In fact, we don’t know very much about the lives of the main characters at all. Pasts are only hinted at. And yet we pick up a great deal, from their conversations, their habits, their fears, their obsessions. Knowing little, we still feel at the end of the film that we know them.

This is the peculiar genius of Kiarostami. He explores human character, and the vagaries of human lives, without explaining, without turning the lives into neat stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Life isn’t logical, nor are our encounters with others. People are rarely what they seem to be—to themselves, or to others. Which is why Kiarostami’s films, though often detached, even artificial, still feel like life.

One way he achieves this effect is to withhold the story from his actors even as they are making the film. They are given their lines on a daily basis. As in real life, they never know what will happen next. The most extraordinary performance in Like Someone in Love is given by Okuno Tadashi, a professional film extra who had no idea he was being cast for a main part. His confrontation with the jealous lover, in the car, has all the tentative awkwardness and misleading intimacy of a real close encounter with a stranger.