Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
Directed by Arne Glimcher

The early cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque are on display in art dealer Arne Glimcher’s Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies, a one-hour assortment of talking heads and actualités that places the French fathers of modern painting into a fruitful, informed dialogue with the burgeoning cinema. These talking heads—Martin Scorsese, film scholar Tom Gunning, Julian Schnabel and Chuck Close among them—describe the early motion pictures’ formative influence on the fine arts of the period, presenting Braque and Picasso as figures conversant with—and indeed inspired by—the rhythms, speeds and mechanical possibilities of the new medium.

At one end of Glimcher’s film is an earnest, well-intentioned effort to clarify important aesthetic intersections between cinema and painting, between a new technology and older visual forms. We are asked to consider links between Edison’s 1894 short of the Great Sandow, stretching and flexing his arms and torso, and the five elongated, pointedly postured bodies of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from 1907. Similarly, Braque’s highly segmented, pale-toned cubist formations, fragmented by eclipsing figures and shapes, give the newfound optical tricks of the motion-picture camera their static incarnation on the canvas. An ongoing exchange between the two mediums allowed for the development of a newer, more provocative aesthetic vocabulary, one that encouraged Braque and Picasso to pursue radical alternatives to the previous century’s ideas about pictorial representation, and to fashion images unabashedly mediated by the motion picture camera’s insistence on speed and multiple perspectives.

However, at the other end of Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies is an ill-fitted, somewhat fashionable interest in the collapsibility of cinema into genres of all shapes and sizes. Glimcher’s film is most convincing when it avoids such comparisons between twentieth-century painting and early cinema, and when it instead develops a relatively useful aesthetic history of fin de siècle Europe at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. This newly mechanized age—its technological advancements, its novelties and amusements—was itself a living, working manifestation of the sprockets and motors of the motion-picture camera; just as one may not be able to think of Picasso without the movies, so we cannot think of the movies without considering the radical processes of reorientation underway during the turn of the century. It is precisely during those few moments when Gilmicher’s documentary acknowledges the pervasive effects of modern experience on the arts at large that the film feels most honest, most useful. Without these moments, Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies is an instance of Art History 101 for the film school, headed by Professor Scorsese, naïve in its dictum that “everything is cinema,” and irresponsible in its desire to convert art forms with long and rich histories into objects ready for conversion by the film camera. 

Opens May 28

My Führer
Directed by Dani Levy

Think of it: the 20th Century’s mustached exemplar of human suffering, kneeling and barking before a bespectacled Jew, asked to imagine his head reaching into the heavens, his body filling with tension, his voice resounding with affection. The man with the mustache, of course, is Adolf Hitler (Helge Schneider); the Jew (Ulrich Mühe), a celebrated actor, recruited from Sachsenhausen by the Nazis to coach the Führer in his last attempt to publicly galvanize the German people.

But as director Dani Levy’s sluggish and hoarse-throated leader of the German fatherland prepares for what is intended to be a speech of consolation, Berlin’s streets lay in ruins, the Allies are rounding Europe, and Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and company are growing increasingly paranoid. The setting — carnivorous, window-lit, panoptic — is Hitler’s study, a space that the pallid and shaven Jewish actor enters each morning, reluctantly training the Führer to stand straight, enunciate and gesticulate, while hoping to save his family from extermination.

There are enough tracking shots along corridors, enough images of sparse rooms and side-lit faces, enough moments of sexual humor and provocation that this film plays like a shelved Buñuel-Chaplin script, rediscovered and directed by Kubrick acolyte, and scored by a composer decommissioned from The Hours. The final speech, a reference to The Great Dictator without the earnestness or conviction of its message, is one last show for the road, an abrupt, bombastic ending to a film that has spent its first ninety minutes just getting started.

By all accounts, My Führer is a tasteless film, a grotesque model of a deadened, contemporary sensibility, grounded in irony and steeped in a sense of pastlessness that turns history into theatre. That’s not to say that all films should be transparent representations of historical reality, unfettered by playfulness or exaggeration. But it is to say that My Führer doesn’t have the awareness of a larger historical situation, that its myopic humor often feels incongruous and transportable to other eras, other wars, other dictators and their prisoners. By not finding larger connections between the situations of its characters and the milieu of the Third Reich, the film suffers from an irredeemable lack of imagination and purpose, stumbling its way toward gratuitousness.

Opens August 14

Quiet Chaos
Directed by Antonio Luigi Grimaldi

Waves are the first thing we see in Quiet Chaos, director Antonio Luigi Grimaldi’s adaptation of Sandro Veronesi’s novel of the same name. But the waves — for all their suggestiveness of High Seriousness — appear in a film that prefers the warmth and charm of lakeside sentimentality to the moral gusto of Oceanic Feeling. And this is precisely how Grimaldi’s film often feels: playful, but not too much; earnest, but not too often.

Schmaltz and swollen soulfulness is, however, the operating tone here. On the same afternoon he rescues two women from drowning, Pietro (Nanni Moretti) learns of his wife’s death, leaving him a widowed father to a ten year-old girl (Blu Di Martino) whose implied emotional vulnerability he tries to temper by stationing himself outside her school each morning. In the process, father Moretti spends nearly a year watching the same locals, dining at the same restaurant and sitting at the same bench while the seasons change and Paolo Buonvino’s score twinkles and drones. A subplot involving the merging of his company with a large American outfit gives the film its sense of ethical finesse (Pietro must decide whether or not to replace his recently ousted best friend), but the scenario plays like a diminutive narrative parenthesis stuck inside a potentially larger human story.

The story, from a script by Laura Paoulucci, Francesco Piccolo and Moretti, becomes less redeemable as a touching chronicle of one man’s spiritual healing and more convincing as an arc that runs the course of middle-aged sexual anxieties, beginning once Pietro’s willing sister-in-law (Valeria Golino) strips down to her bra in a concerted reminder of their short-lived love affair, and ending with rough living room sex and breast-licking between Moretti and the blonde whose life he saved (Isabella Ferrari). Perhaps the most startling feature of Grimaldi’s film is the confidence and ease it has in turning Frank Capra into Adrian Lyne.

Opens June 26

Offshore
Directed by Diane Cheklich

The global economy shrinks to the size of a Detroit call center in Offshore, director Diane Cheklich’s tepid, altogether lackluster indictment of corporate outsourcing. A trio of young Mumbai employees arrives in the U.S. for training by the same beleaguered, middle-aged Americans whose jobs they will soon be eclipsing. Carol (Deb Tunis), however, wants to keep her job. Her co-workers, a group of hapless and dowdy aspiring professionals (read: Americans), join her in putting their equally hapless conspiratorial energies to use, struggling to keep their precocious Indian replacements off their phones and out of their cubicles.

Cheklich’s film, completed in 2006 but only now released theatrically in New York, wants desperately to have the relevance of a more successful post-9/11 globalization vehicle. And yet the script is too reluctant to back away from the once-prescient, now-belabored claims about the consequences of moving jobs overseas for it to feel like anything more than a bout of retrograde fist waving. What attempts are made to enlarge the scope of the film’s relevance, however, feel unconvincing, as when Carol refers to the visitors from Mumbai as “evil-doers” in Cheklich’s threadbare effort to make George W. Bush’s America an important foundation for her film’s thematic preoccupations.

But Bush’s America isn’t the foundation of this film, nor can it be. Perhaps Offshore is too aesthetically lopsided to touch the surface of the zeitgeist: cinematographer Gregg McNeil keeps the images clumsy, avoiding any earnest aesthetic decision-making. Cheklich’s film suffers precisely because it too often confuses surfaces with depth, touching with exploration, politics with cinema.

Opens May 29