An Avatar in Films Directed by Joe Dante

avatar, Sanskrit avatara (“descent on earth”), in Hinduism, the incarnation of a deity in human or animal form to counteract some particular evil in the world.

In the opening sequences, the image-text in motion: studio’s logo, film title and credits

The opening sequences in Hollywood Boulevard (1976, directed by Joe Dante and Allan Arkush), in Innerspace (1987), The ‘Burbs (1989) and Gremlins 2, the New Batch (1990) have in common a prelude principle of things to come. All sequences are based on a zoom effect and a framing associated in a transitional process. All of them avoid abrupt breaks, include the text of a studio logo in an opening narration, and end in unexpected images showing a ‘landing’ at ground level.

Is this a repeated scheme? In Piranha (1978), Dante’s first solo experience, a prologue is conceived like a short film: assemblage differs. First image is animating “NEW WORLD PICTURES” (Roger Corman’s productions), the text’s rotation stops, a live-action starts. Opening scenes are showing two nocturnal hikers in a full moon light: the planet is framed, ‘eaten’ by dark clouds. A second text is zoomed on set and reads: “NO TRESPASSING”. The main event - convulsive death of the young couple in a pool-like -, precedes the image-text PIRANHA, a wave-like block of red letters, briefly descending. Moonlight reflects on a seawater surface, water turns red and the bold letters sink. “A New World Picture” is texted again in the end of the opening credits, not anymore an image in motion but a discreet and short phrase, texted in blue.

A repeated scheme

In Hollywood Boulevard (1976), first image is a cartoon-like card – word “MIRACLE” over a rainbow, underline “Pictures”, and “If it’s a good picture, it’s a MIRACLE”-, stick on the left side of a delivery car. Camera rotates, follows a young woman walking. Back to the car, we see a couple put one’s cloth back on. The girl’s bust is still nude when both join a crew surrounding an antique camera. Are we in a shooting for a documentary? Action turns into the progressive defect of a skydiving, an unfortunate descent on earth. While the parachute of the blue jumper named Susan - “the double” -, is said not to open, the director’s comment is “keep shooting”. We see the cast and crew excitement on the ground. The cookie-like silhouette of a human body into the depth of a dry field finally echoes the screams heard from above. The crew is struck, but the infamous director detached in focusing on the landing mark. Is this all deliberate? Was the event predictable, an amateurish failure or an intentional process, is he or are they kidding me? My attention is making all questions equal.

The film title now appears superimposing a “Hollywood and Vine” neon sign at the street’s junction. Credits run over a sidewalk visit by a blonde ‘she’, names marking the Walk of Fame are zoomed. Title of a book comes up: “how to break into the movies”. The final opening credit – “directed by Joe Dante and Allan Arkush” -, is texted over a progressive perspective of the HOLLYWOOD Sign. The giant letters are framed, seen from an oblique angle at ground level, where ‘she’ (Candice Rialson) is sitting… In the end of Hollywood Boulevard, the antique camera is back again an uninterrupted witness at horror, the blonde heroin in the film is now ready to be ‘eaten’ by a familiar creature, a dinosaur replica of her size. The end is symmetrical to the beginning. Memorable images emerge in our mind that can be taken from scenes in the original King Kong: the 1933 film project on the fantastic isle, a starving T-Rex, and scenes later the airplanes, Manhattan, the screams of women.

Opening the 1987 ambitious film – “Steven Spielberg presents” -, is a sophisticated title background designed by Wayne Fitzgerald and David Oliver. Non figurative, it enhances light refraction and polarization in a zoom of… ice cubes. The sound and visual effect – probably due to a metalized Pet film manipulated per se -, is impressive but the optical illusion ends in the filling of a real whiskey glass. The light lettering of the credits continues to run. Is the cocktail drink a reminder, a movie in-joke? Whiskey was a key word variously repeated in The Right Stuff (1983): from the codename of a space project to a glass and a toy capsule ‘drowned’ during a bar scene. The last opening credit – “directed by Joe Dante” –, superimposes the lead character’s first appearance. Expelled from a kitchen the actor Dennis Quaid - ex-Gordon Cooper, a test pilot and astronaut in The Right Stuff – is introducing Navy pilot Lt. Tuck Pendleton as a ‘goofy’ guest of honor, now provoking his new colleagues: “shit, I spilled my drink”. Innerspace confirms the part played by film memory - supporting actors Kathleen Freeman and Henry Gibson recall The Blues Brothers (1980), directed by John Landis -, in a washing up: “welcome home”?

Opening The ‘Burbs (1989), a specific version of the Universal Pictures logo – “UNIVERSAL” alone -, is a starting point to a vertiginous descent on earth. Now wordless and enlarged the globe rotates before a focus on America. With zero defects in the process of enlargement and an uninterrupted vertical shot, the camera suggests that someone or something is watching us from above. Located outer space a digital reading scrutinize where somebody lives. Arriving at night in a provincial street - a quiet and dark cul-de-sac -, the God’s eye view finally becomes realistic. Still in a silent mode, the camera eye slowly stops at ground level in front of a poor state house – creepy? -, framing a pretty neighborhood. An organ melody – score’s contribution by Jerry Goldsmith – is a suspicious signal of “things to come”. Names texted are variously mapping the surface of the screen, credits superimpose the progressive appearance of a silent neighbor (Tom Hanks) going out in pajamas, naked feet and legs first. The final credit - “directed by Joe Dante”-, superimposes the last neighbor to announce, the eccentric veteran Lt. Mark Rumsfield (Bruce Dern).

In the 1990 film, the red “Warner Bros. Presents” card is introducing in its blue circle a joint appearance of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, a competitive team familiar to the Looney Tunes fans since the early 1940’s. The WB initials are a suggested throne to a reversed leadership: “Fifty years of you [Bugs] hogging the spotlight is enough”. It is Duck’s turn to direct spectatorship: “I’m taking charge here, that’s what’s up”. The Duck- Rabbit dialog and interplay – a winner versus looser debated status -, sounds like a mobile double-image, the animated figures are enlarged and then miniaturized. Bunny rabbit’s time out is brief: he is back an observer looking at the final dance of a doubtful duck, centered before a cartoon/film superimposition. “If I’m not gonna star in this cartoon, let’s just start the movie.” The film title appears over a progressive view of Manhattan skyscrapers. Is the spectator ready now to integrate cartoon characters with the live-action world coming soon? Coming later, a tender answer – a discreet spit -, slowly reveals a creature hidden inside a bird cage, next to a small TV set in a Chinese antique shop. A creature of animal form,… an AVATAR?

Favoring a no longer ascending view, is Joe Dante breaking a common rule?

Since the 1930’s most of science-fiction and horror movies are magnifying an “ascending view” shaping the frame. A formal relationship between image and text has been well-defined and variously represented in genre movies, in comics and horror magazines. Lettering, type fonts, speech bubbles and layout are following a dynamic rule. Titles and texts do not have to ‘sink’, neither in blood, nor in a cocktail drink. But blocks of characters can expand and make balloons. In the 1933 King Kong, the logo of RKO Pictures was revisited with triangle patterns, the titles and credits were holding up to introduce “the Eighth Wonder of the World”. Ascending principle remained the same in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), and Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956). Both sci-fi films were cited in commentaries by Joe Dante as unforgettable references, crediting Ray Harryhausen (b. 1920), his technical effects and creatures.

In the five sequences I depicted above (period 1976 and 1990), texts and lettering matter, both on set and in cards. The studio logos and imagery are involved in the dynamic of a continuous process: a descent. What is up and what is low, major and minor is undifferentiated all along a descending action. An arbitrary and premeditated concept is rejected - the studio’s corporate identity as a legendary and self-sufficient announce -, in favor of imaginative perception and humorous detachment, both stimulated before a narrative plot starts.

The camera movement and its frequent position at ground level, the elements the film director pieced together in an unseen order, the pictures puzzled have a peculiar impact on memory. All mixed, they provoke a questioning, they liberate potential readings: sequel smash, movie in-joke, parody, irreverence and documented mockery. This phenomenon belongs to Joe Dante’s inventiveness in filmmaking, after years under Roger Corman’s tutelage. In a rejection of isolated cards and credits and an incline to a continuous image and sound track resides a deal with the audience to restore a coherency. Motion pictures have to be a joyful and heavenly whole - including horrors from Inferno -, not a fragmented descent to hell.

Tracking cartoons and home-movie pieced together: double-images in a feeding moment

In the films “directed by Joe Dante” I cited, I didn’t notice a character interested in art masterpieces, painting or sculpture, contemporary, modern or ancient. In the third segment -written by Richard Matheson, from TV episode It’s a Good Life -, of Twilight Zone: the Movie (1983), the Warner classics archive is revisited and turns into what can be perceived a filmed ‘performance’ on set. Selected cartoons tracks from the 1940s are shown on TV sets in distinct rooms of the “cartoonland house”.

The school teacher Helen Foley (Kathleen Quilan) is invited by six-year-old Anthony (Jeremy Licht) to visit his home. Stopping in an X-hall, she pays attention to a painting in a decorative frame, briefly seen before in the staircase. The black-and-white family photo-portrait en pied is transposed a naïve abstract, faces are a white space, a ‘hole’. Then, Helen is looking at Sara stuck in front of a TV in her bedroom, the teenager’s mouth is erased and her eyes wide open: “she had an accident”. The antique cartoon excerpt is also a naïve abstract. Then, Anthony’s birthday scene – a home-movie-like which combines popular media -, turns into a progressive nightmare expressed with live-monsters suddenly introduced in a colored set.

Unreal characters - a raven at first -, we see on each TV screen are now stimulating the fast food dinner of the Fremont family we see excited on a colorful sofa. Camera focuses on shut one’s mouth, real live-action next to the unreal, the images double. Is this a relaxing TV karaoke, a typical American home feeding? The continuous feeling is now apprehensive: a close-up of a double-cheese hamburger anticipates something “HE” made happen. “A trick” is asked to Uncle Walt. Not anymore on set, Ethel is on screen, surrounded by cartoon hell excerpts. The wooden TV set cracks, explodes, a monster invades the set. Little brother Anthony is said by Helen to have a power, “a gift that makes him special”. Anxiety is at its best and vanishes in a monochrome land.

In 2003, real and known masterpieces are visited by ‘toons in Looney Tunes: Back in Action

In the ‘Louvre’ Museum scene: primitive cinema and animation, surrealism, expressionism, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge and pointillism

In 2003, announced by black-and-white stills of the city, some historical Gay Paris images are “back in action” with the Looney Tunes characters. Geographical assemblage is hybrid, and unseen before in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, directed by Robert Zemeckis), the film’s reference cited by Joe Dante in interviews. The so-called “Louvre Museum scene” is introduced a treasure-like visit to an exhibition of “Arte Fameuse” (famous art) by Brendan Fraser (DJ Drake), Jennan Elfman (Kate) and the company of ‘toons. Linked to the plot, the Mona Lisa (a framed reproduction) appears isolated in a room. In scenes earlier, her enigmatic and ambiguous smile was “a clue” printed on a “Queen of Diamonds” playing card given in Las Vegas. Now, La Joconde’s mystery is decoded by DJ Drake: the ‘card’ doubles as a viewing window. Leonardo da Vinci’s most popular painting (1503-06, oil on wood) is x-rayed from a distance by the young couple: bra and skeleton are revealed: “sorry”. The word AFRIKA is mapped: “maybe that’s where the diamond is”. Then, the film’s plot is having a parenthesis: Brendan slams into a large wooden door, live-action characters quit.

Gay Nineties: pioneers were in Paris

Are we in a parody of Museum scenes in cinéma? Were the art works selected by Joe Dante, and who was involved in the idea? Animation is “directed by Eric Goldberg” (all credits are in the end). None of the four other pieces is in the Louvre collections. Reason is probably significant, a chronological backwards to make appearances: 1931-54, 1893, 1891 and 1884-86. Three visited paintings are from the years preceding the first public screening of projected motion pictures, December 1895 in the Parisian Grand Café. The period - relevant of the Musée d’Orsay -, is confirmed by musical excerpts. All artists are European: Leonardo da Vinci, Salvador Dali, Edvard Munch, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat. Leaving the photographic moment of introduction, we see in motion the Café de La Paix, Boulevard des Capucines, which is next to the location of the first ever cinematographic show. When Elmer is uncovered by playing cards, I was thinking of La Partie d’écarté, an early short by pioneer Louis Lumière, and to La Partie de cartes (1896) shot in a different way by his rival Georges Mélies.

Dante-esque reference: period 1884 and 1896

In the Gay Nineties, music-hall in Paris was at its best in richness, humor, licentiousness and extravaganza. Circus, shows, attractions in the streets were a part in everyday life. A pioneer in the Cinematographism, Emile Cohl had his first comic strips and caricature series published in 1886. Already in 1885, weekly magazine Le Rire (Laughter) published a photo-relief illustration by Eugène Bataille, titled Mona Lisa with a Pipe, yet exhibited at the “Incohérents”, an eccentric and successful group show. In 1883, “incoherent” works of art were advertised by the established publisher Jules Lévy for “an exhibition of drawings by people who don’t know how to draw”. A year later in a poster of the repeated event, an underline read: “Note: There Will Be No Ascent” (no assumption).

In 1889, the group – writers, composers, painters and illustrators -, had a catalog titled “L’Exposition Universelle des Arts Incohérents” (world’s fair of incoherent arts, illustr. by Jules Chéret). Writer and astronomer Camille Flammarion was in the group meetings at the Chat Noir cabaret. This was decades before Marcel Duchamp did write L.H.O.O.Q. (she has a hot ass) as a ‘title’ to a Mona Lisa postcard reproduction (1919, private collection). Production of the museum scene was documented in a Dante-esque period of time.

Curiously associated to a false Louvre entrance, decorated to excess - the fleur de lis motif is tilted on its side -, the Eiffel Tower is suggested the location of the following sequence. A panorama involves people coming in droves, the two-side view reminds me the site of the Exposition Universelle in 1889. A popular attraction in the French section of the World’s Fair was the Imperial (or Great White) Diamond, found in South Africa. Was the film’s production documenting a list of particular Merveilles (marvels) exhibited at the Champ de Mars? Colored balloons recall both an inaugural moment of the fantastic Tower and the final scene in The Red Balloon (1956, directed by Albert Lamorisse).

The American timing in a visit to European art

Parenthesis in the 2003 film: are we invited to an aesthetic narrative (Michelangelo Antonioni, John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick), or to a curatorial choice (Jean-Luc Godard, Tim Burton)? The entirely animated chase – Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck jumping and running through a suggested ‘Louvre’ museum -, recalls a memorable trio of runners, Arthur, Odile and Franz shot in the Italian Grande Galerie -, in 1964 Band of Outsiders (Bande à part) directed by Jean-Luc Godard. At the time of “the Louvre race”, the huge room was little crowded, a real guard was involved. Its perspective is now empty and endless, benches are modern.

Slowing down and walking back and forth, Bugs and Daffy initiate the first in-and-out of paintings. American ‘toons have time to visit great European art. They enter a surrealistic Dali from 1931 (The Persistence of Memory, Museum of Modern Art, New York), the one so famous for its melting watches frequently referenced in films, cartoons and comics. Animation includes transformative effects and change of aspect. Bunny gets a thin moustache: “this is surreal”. Cheese-like, the figures expand in an extended landscape featuring fishing boats. Action cites a ‘sequel’ of the painting: the bullets falling on the ‘sand’ from Elmer’s melted rifle are probably extracted from The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954.

Animated language game: hybrid elements in a rebus

A “moving image-text” comes over the sky: an animated rebus. Combined to a STOP sign, the elements are read by Elmer “Stop or I’ll fire”. It recalls a dialog in the opening sequence of the film. Elmer’s voice vanishes, as does the rebus. Elements are hybrid. The reading has to focus on a sound (eye = I), on a familiar spelling (letters ‘LL), on a substitute to a word: the picture of a wood fire. The ocular globe is similar to eyes Salvador Dali executed in Hollywood for a dream sequence and a painted backdrop in Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Then the cutaway from one canvas to another is memorable: undifferentiated Bugs and Daffy can be perceived as sub-rampant insects issued from Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930). Miniaturized, they leave the Dali to join a Norwegian Munch – Edvard stayed 1895 in Paris -, a painted reference in horror and anxiety. The expressionist motif of The Scream (1893, National Gallery in Oslo), was spoofed for decades by diverse artists. Here, eyes are becoming globes, the head is enlarged, distorted and morphed into Elmer’s figure. Aggressive, a hunter’s foot can be taken as anti-Hitchcockian and makes me think to a black shoe crushing fingers on a rock in the final scene – shot in a real and unreal Mount Rushmore -, in North by Northwest (1959). After a jump-out, the following French-cancan animation stands in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithograph Moulin Rouge, La Goulue (1891), framed. An intense red shoe is pointed by Elmer. Yet on stage, Bugs and Daffy are dressed with titillating costumes: “hello”. Elmer is now a victim to kick. The duo’s chahut recalls John Houston’s Moulin Rouge (1953): the frou-frou opening scene.

Joe Dante has aesthetic concerns? Active memory, perceptual experience, imaginative reading, exciting suggestions, sense and nonsense in cinema

The final trio visit is inside Georges Seurat’s Un Dimanche à La Grande Jatte (1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago). Action begins in denying its pointillist fixity: silhouettes move, a dog sniffs grass. Progressive additions in the motif of the painting: a bearded painter at his easel is looking like Paul Signac; Duck is a nanny wearing a top hat; Bunny is crying in a ‘high society’ stroller; umbrellas are hold up. Does this recall a springtime Bois de Boulogne scene in Gigi (1958), directed by Vicente Minelli? Action is also mocking a mimetic behavior of visitors, and can refer the high school trio visit (centennial) in John Hugues Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), the scene shot in the Art Institute of Chicago. Then all have a stand-by down the Seurat, Bugs Bunny is a guide giving a pointillist lesson – “…individual dots of pigments which taken together make an image”-, he makes it turn into un blanc (memory lapse) blasting Elmer. Daffy Duck sketches himself with black lines intersecting numbered dots, assemblage and numbers are disordered.

Memory, illusion and documented rumpus …, in a fictitious assemblage

“Memory” and illusion are mutual key words to the static art works selected. The same to the characters animated, but “documented”, and French chahut (rumpus) can complete. Pieced together, art and animation avoid any interpretative meaning: please, no trains of thought, it is about views and viewing, it is educational. Spectators will refresh an imaginative reading of art works through exciting suggestions, and give sense-and-nonsense to a metamorphosis. The Looney Tunes Museum scene exploits possibilities for fantasy inherent to film, and de facto turns into a perceptual experience. It establishes a non-contemplative dialog – including mockery, spoof, smash and homage -, in-between distinct media, cartoon, painting, print, film.

Dante, Godard,… Bertolucci

All options are interactive and were rejected in the Godard film sequence from 1964. On their way to break a so-called American's world record (9’45”) by “Jimmy Johnson” for shortest visit to the Louvre, the real runners never stopped, art works in situ remained almost indistinct and indeterminate. Once, the camera’s eye quitted the trio, in front of Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (Le Serment des Horaces, 1785), a pre-Revolution theme in David’s work. Final descent was down the Greek Victoire de Samothrace (Winged Victory). Narrator’s voice (by Jean-Luc Godard) announces: “in 9’43”, Arthur, Odile and Franz…”. Are those elements a postwar combination of numbers and names, are they easy to assemble?

Four decades later is a reversal choice: the last painting we see from a distance on a wall is a woman portrait, late XIXth century, high society style. The genre painting, by an American painter, is on view - a two-point perspective - but doesn’t deserve a stop. Crossing ‘boundaries’, fictitious and disordered, the dynamic assemblage in Joe Dante’s scene constitutes the most interested and hilarious visit to the Louvre in an American film.

For The Dreamers, released the same year (!), director Bernardo Bertolucci decided to film a precise remake of Godard’s “Louvre race”, he then assembled in editing to the original. Contemporary colored images double black-and-white images from the past. Record is again broken. A French way of saying a filmmaker in-joke is “la réponse du berger à la bergère”. How is this said in Italian, in Rome?

Joe Dante, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and the duck-rabbit illusion: it is a painting, no, it is an animation,… no, it’s a film

Genre, epics, creatures, sequel, language games, double-images, optical illusions, dreams and nightmares certainly had equivalence in art works and films from the past. But how do they have now? What makes a difference between such a substance in recent art works and such a substance in recent films? What about image-and-text in motion? The animated rebus flashing over the surrealistic beach is an answer: Elmer’s voice reads “Stop or I’ll fire”. Who can be fired? The film director can be. Joe Dante - who said later “the film was not a very pleasant experience”, maybe “an unfortunate mistake on my part”-, doesn’t seem to pay attention: then, eclectic and silent creatures are getting out a dozen of canvases, figures jump and dance like in a ballroom. Implicit in 2003, a statement of the filmmaker could have been “a deflation or artistic ambitions, question mark, that’s all folks.”

In an interview in his Santa Monica studio (April 2004 with Nicole Davis, question “What is inspiring your work right now?”), conceptual artist John Baldessari (b. 1931) expressed a concern:

“One of the questions I’ve always pursued or has pursued me is why is something art and why is something else not art? That I always find fascinating. And, then another thing is that I never want to copy myself or repeat successes.”

To me, “something is” and “something else is not” echoes the scene and its humorous content. In the field of research I am working on – film and art, art and film in the second half of the XXth century -, another echo can be noticed: “I can see art in a film, I can see film in an art work, but how ‘something’ belongs to art history, how ‘something else’ doesn’t belong to art history?”

In the duck-rabbit illusion (XIXth century engravings), the duck can be perceived a rabbit, but they can’t be recognized both at the same time: it’s either a rabbit or a duck. Looking at three very similar illustrations put side by side to exemplify the phenomenon - in “Communication: Paranoiac Face”, an article by Salvador Dali in Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, issue numéro 3, December 1931 -, it took me a few seconds to make a decision for a forward-backward. Describing in a caption the link between the images, Dali reminds his process. He “explains that [at first] he had mistaken the photograph of an African Village viewed on its [vertical] side for an unknown painting by Picasso representing a head.” The way Joe Dante and Eric Goldberg are co-directing a re-animation of the Looney Tunes characters in the museum seems motivated by the same initial mistake: it is that, no, it is this. “It’s Rabbit season, [no,] it’s Duck season” (opening sequence), it’s the past, no, it’s the present, it’s a painting, no, it’s an animation, no, it’s a film. It is art, no, it is not. It is l’art pour deux sous (art for cheap) in the Gay Nineties.

A text-painting and a silent film cited in a visit at LACMA

In a recorded visit with Calvin Tomkins (article published in The New Yorker, October 18) to his 2010 retrospective exhibition (Pure Beauty, at LACMA, Los Angeles), John Baldessari stayed in front of his 1966-68 text painting Semi-close-up of Girl by Geranium (Soft View) (Basle, Kstmus.) and said:

"It's probably my all-time favorite piece. I just think it's perfect-very simple, and you can imagine it so easily. David Foster Wallace once said that the duty of the writer is to make the reader[s] feel intelligent, and let them fill in the gaps. I feel that way, too."

The viewer in front of such a painting re-creates mental images. When reading the black text on canvas describing an interaction going on, "a very brief moment of time", I imagine a scene. It’s a text, no, it’s an image. It’s a moment on a canvas, no, it’s a painting purged from everything but art. The text of the title is identical to the phrase introducing five regular lines over a little-gray surface. (SOFT VIEW) is centered, subtitle-like but not bottom-like. Type font is medium-light in a geometrical family, all capital characters, aspect is mechanical and “lifeless”. To his documented visitor, Baldessari referred "The hopeful geranium" scene in Intolerance, a 1916 silent movie by D.W. Griffith, in which short phrases on black cards precedes epic live-action. There, the young girl named “The Dear One” (actress Lillian Gish) watering a plant. His comments to Tomkins favor an in-and-out of painted phrases, a deliberate and premeditated lift out, through an absented and historical image-source, a non-epic moment in the film.

A spectator watching the animated visit in the Paris museum, I “fill in the gaps” too, and I “feel intelligent”. But this time through the documented and organized “Orgy” of moving images and sounds I have just seen, heard and read. After looking at scenes in the film, what can I say about my movie-going experience, how to purge, how to erase, how to refresh, how to connect and disconnect? Since the mid 1960’s (American artists Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari), conceptual art works are showing radical answers about language, depiction and interaction. Something on the wall is responding to something else on the floor. Released in the same decade, a few films did it also. When Elmer’s image gets blasted by a fan and disappears, I hesitate, is he fired? An authorship in making the 2003 film was at risk to collapse. Am I mistaken?

Los Angeles Pacific Time in 2011: a ‘standard pen’ in writing art history?

A black silhouette of Simon Rodia‘s Watts Towers (1921-54) is making the cover of the 2011 art exhibition catalog titled Pacific Standard Time. Image is historical – “birth of the L.A. art scene”? -, and its treatment repeats the traditional “ascending view” I remarked above. Title is vertical, a reading tilts. The first image inside is a 1957 black-and-white photo (cropped) showing in front an abstract-expressionism-like painting on canvas, scale is larger than the young painter (Arthur Richter wearing glasses) sitting on his butt at ground level in a studio (in the original photo, artist Wallace Berman is a witness sitting at right). The following double-page shows a photo-like painting (Freeway, 1966, by Vija Celmins): a daily traffic instantané taken from a car on a Los Angeles freeway. Car position is right lane and framing includes a windshield mapping down the black-and-white surface. Wordless, the generic image shows a one-point perspective in a Freeway sight. Such a grounded subject has been variously represented in distinct media: photo, video, cartoon, film, prints and painting.

Titled “Shifting the Standard”, the writing of the introduction – a collective signature -, pre-supposes “a narrative” interplay in American art history, expressed through a debated status: East Coast (New York) versus West Coast (Los Angeles). Is this a double-image? Is “the new aesthetic” emergence in Southern California established through a chronological and convincing demonstration, or through a deliberate focus: CA’s season versus NY’s season?

Is “NEW AESTHETIC” an image-text in motion over a multidimensional panorama?

In its Index pages, the volume – underline Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980 -, is listing more than a thousand references, names and items. Photographers and videographers are included, filmmakers and cartoonists are not. The exceptions are historical names - Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, Luis Bunuel and Jean Renoir -, not contemporaries. Referenced in the index is “art house cinemas”. “Salvador Dali” is associated to a cartoon (Destino, 1946) and a film (Spellbound, 1945), the words “film” and “movies” are associated to “video” and “industry”, but not to imagination, “materials” and “techniques”, not to writers, composers and art collectors (actor Vincent Price in 1947). Is it, is it not?... The Looney Tunes are not cited, but “Peter Lorre”, “mass culture” and The Joy of Painting (a non-commercial TV show, 1983-94, hosted by painter Bob Ross at his easel), are. Despite a chapter 26 titled “Postmodernism between Art and Film: Jack Goldstein Portrait of Père Tanguy”, items in the survey of “the vibrant postwar California art scene” remain understudied: film memory, cinematic persistence, transformative sequel and filmic medium in the period, a precise track back.

Is the subject matter relevant of irreverence to contemporary art? Ask Joe Dante a visit…

The exhibition catalog’s back cover is illustrated by an equivalent of The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali featured by Joe Dante in a museum scene. Topping the layout, the reproduced Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas - a 1963 oil painting by Edward Ruscha, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover -, functions like an opening//ending credit: it associates an ascending (to the left) view to a descending (to the right) view. It signals a word alone (STANDARD, up to the left), which magnifies a two-point perspective and pre-supposes a viewer position at ground level.

Let’s say sooner or later the large scale canvas (65x121 inches, actually on view at the Getty Center, Crosscurrents in LA) will be visited and rendered liquid (oily?) by the Looney Tunes characters. A tumultuous episode shot in a Venice “cool school” will feature pioneer in animation Emile Cohl, as a sooner Hydropathes. A filmed moment will probably be based on a transformative narration, a God’s eye view will show a transposition from a black and white photograph to a colored oil painting through a miniaturization. Will a scene – title card “ASSUMPTION”, underline “declassified avatar”-, include a Greco-Roman mythology gag, insert the word EYE as a visual palindrome, and animate jumps in-and-out the William Leavitt Painted Image (1972, MOCA Los Angeles collection)?

Will this be directed by Joe Dante, “a friendly and encyclopedic person”?

L. de La Hire

November 2011 in Los Angeles

Film stills and assemblage are courtesy of the author.

Bibliography

(selected in the book collection of L. de La Hire)

Actes du colloque Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, 1992.

Art and Film Since 1945, Hall of Mirrors, by Kerry Brougher, Los Angeles, 1996.

Arts incohérents, académie du dérisoire, by Luc Abeles and Catherine Charpin, Les Dossiers du Musée d’Orsay, issue 46, Paris, 1992.

California Video: Artists and Histories, by Glenn Phillips, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2008.

Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film, by Donald Crafton, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, 1990.

Comics U.S.A., by Marc Duveau, Paris, 1975.

Le Comique à l’écran, by Francoise Puaux, CinémAction, issue 82, Paris,1997.

Dali & Film, by Mathew Gale editors, London, 2007. Catalog of an exhibition at Tate Modern, LACMA, Salvador Dali Museum, MoMA.

don luis bunuel, by Marcel Olms, Paris, 1985.

Film as a Subversive Art, by Amos Vogel, New York, 1974.

Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, by Stéphanie Barron and Michel Draguet, LACMA and Ludion, Los Angeles, 2006.

Le Manifeste esthétique in situ de John Cassavetes (in Shadows, second version, 1959), by Emmanuel Herbulot, in Cahiers du MNAM, issue 52, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1995.

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, New York, 1950.

Les Merveilles de l’’Exposition de 1889, ouvrage rédigé par des écrivains spéciaux et des ingénieurs, illustr. by Clerget, Clerice, Deroy, Ferat, Fichot, Gilbert, Fraipont, Lanos, Lix, Paris, 1889.

Métamorphoses d’Ovide en Rondeaux, “à Monseigneur le Dauphin”, by Isaac de Benserade, Paris, 1676, and Amsterdam, 1679, illustr. Le Clerc, Chauveau, and Le Brun.

Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980, by the Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2011. Title refers “60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene.”

Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art, by Dario Gamboni, London, 2002. Citations and research about the “duck-rabbit illusion” in my article are issued from distinct chapters.

La Promenade du critique influent, Anthologie de la critique d’art en France, 1850-1900, Paris, 1990.

Rebel Visions, the Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975, by Patrick Rosenkranz, Seattle, 2002.

Le Rire (Laughter), Journal humoristique paraissant le Samedi, illustr. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (and many others), Paris, period October 1894 and October 1897.

Les Salons caricaturaux, by Thierry Chabanne, Les Dossiers du Musée d’Orsay, issue 41, Paris, 1990.

La Science pour tous, by Bruno Bréguet, Maryline Cantor, Ségolene Le Mel, Les Dossiers du Musée d’Orsay, issue 52, Paris, 1994.

Tex Avery, by Patrick Brion, Paris,1984.

Visiteurs du Louvre, by Jean Galard, Paris, 1993.

Published online

Joe Dante’s interviews: with Dennis Cozzalio in 2008 and 2009, with Simon Brew in 2008, with David Cairns in 2009.

Joe Dante Calls the Toon, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, published first in the Chicago Reader, November 21, 2003.

I… Is Another: Godard >>< Antonioni. A 1990’s Discrete Conversation in Films, by L. de La Hire, in La Furia Umana, issue number 10, October-December 2011.