September 4-10, 2003

screen picks

by Sam Adams

Gillian Wearing: Mass Observation (Sep. 4-Dec. 14, Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St., 215-898-5911, www.icaphila.org) In case it wasn't clear from the Cremaster review, a deep skepticism of video art reigns at ScreenPicks HQ. But based on a small sampling and a smattering of research, Gillian Wearing's viddys seem worth a peep, even if the thought of sitting on ICA's bouncy balls fills us with feelings we'd rather not describe. 2 into 1, a brief piece provided for review, features a mother and her sons eerily lip-syncing their descriptions of each other; mother recites the children's criticism that she doesn't know how to dress, while the boys parrot her admission of her taste for "dominating" men. It's two things that most video art isn't: conceptually clear and well-executed. Thursday's opening is hailed with a lecture by former CP film critic Stuart Semmel: "Mass Observation and the Solo Artist," 4 p.m. at the Penn Humanities Forum, 3619 Locust Walk. E-mail humanities@sas.upenn.edu or call 215-898-8220 to register.

Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, Take Two (Fri., Sept. 5 and Mon.-Fri., Sept. 8-12, 5:30 p.m.-2 a.m.; Sat.-Sun., Sept. 6-7 and Sat., Sept. 13, noon-2 a.m., $5, The Hub, 205 Race St., www.armcinema25.com) OK, so Andrew McElhinney's "surrealist pornography" wasn't quite completed in time for last weekend's scheduled Fringe gig. But the Fringe has another weekend, and so does he. Check out these rescheduled times.

Targets/Paper Moon ($9.99/$14.99 DVD) There's a moment in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968) that's too good not to use against him. A young director, played by Bogdanovich himself, has come to the room of an aging horror star, played by the aging horror star Boris Karloff, to try and talk him out of his abrupt decision to retire and into starring in the director's next film. But as he sits, or rather falls, down (they are both roaring drunk), the director catches sight of a movie on the television: Howard Hawks' The Criminal Code (1931), which featured Karloff in his first major role. Though the director has come to have one of the most important conversations of his young career -- he's convinced that the script he has written will allow him, and his intended star, to step away from the low-grade shockers they've been making -- he is transfixed instead by the image on the screen, evidently preferring the filmed image of the actor to the real person in the room with him. As the actor tries to continue their conversation, the director silences him with increasing frustration, hissing almost like an animal: "Shhhhh!"

It is perhaps too easy to say that as a director, Bogdanovich seems to prefer the simulation of life to the real thing, not least because no one has yet managed to transfer the latter onto the screen without some degree of distortion. And of course, it's only fair to note that the above scene takes place in a movie written, directed and edited by Bogdanovich himself, which surely has to indicate some kind of self-consciousness on his part. In fact, it may be the only time an artist has produced a critique of his own oeuvre in advance of said oeuvre's creation.

On the commentary track to Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich notes how, as in most of his films, the only music heard on the soundtrack is music that might plausibly have originated in the scene; when, towards the movie's conclusion, Ryan O'Neal's down-on-his-luck con man trades his shiny auto for a rattletrap pickup truck, Bogdanovich makes sure to have the character note that the truck's radio still works, so that music can play as the truck drives off into the distance. Such concern for realism is evident, too, in the movie's use of the same deep-focus technique Orson Welles used on Citizen Kane, which allows many scenes to play out in single shots, without shifts of perspective or focus. But such low-key realism only makes the self-consciously cutesy performances Bogdanovich wrings out of his cast seem more contrived; the '30s-hick dialogue is the kind of stuff Preston Sturges shredded three decades earlier. It's as if by filming a movie story like a real story, Bogdanovich hoped to convince us (and maybe himself) that the two were one and the same.

At least the far more energized Targets cops to its own artificiality. Given two leftover days with Boris Karloff by boss Roger Corman, Bogdanovich -- with a hefty uncredited assist from Samuel Fuller, whom he'd met during his career as a journalist -- cooked up a two-part story that brings together Karloff's actor (a doppelgänger named Byron Orlok) and a clean-cut, tightly-wound young man (Tim O'Kelly) who goes on a sniper rampage. Climaxing with a shootout at a drive-in theater, Targets plays incessantly, if somewhat mechanically, with the boundary between film and life. (You have to wonder if Bogdanovich knew what Fuller had given him.) Though in the commentary, Bogdanovich announces his distaste for horror movies, it's possible that it's just that lack of affection that makes Targets the better movie; it doesn't have the creeping fondness that keeps threatening to blur Paper Moon's deep focus into mush.

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there