MY TOP 10 ART FILMS

EYE TO EYE

Dir. Isabel Hegner

1989

In 1989, Isabel Hegner asked Robert Mapplethorpe if she could make a documentary about him. He was really sick and at the end of his rope at that point, so he suggested she interview Jack Walls, his longtime lover and model, instead. Jack is in many of Mapplethorpe’s photos—he’s the guy in that one picture with the hard-on and the gun. Jack is really funny and insightful, and that’s what makes this film so interesting. He strolls around downtown Manhattan and then flips through Mapplethorpe’s book Certain People, dishing on everyone and telling funny anecdotes, like how Mapplethorpe never had an unlisted phone number and random people would call him up to get their picture taken all the time. Jack said that if they sounded even slightly black, Mapplethorpe would invite them over! The most important quote for me is when Jack is talking about how he deals with being photographed nude and he says, “I divorce myself from the image and after that it’s just a picture of a dick and a gun.” And it’s true, as a photographer I’ve noticed that after a while a photo begins to take on a life of its own and it stops being a picture of your friend or lover or whoever. It becomes simply an image.

UNTITLED (FALL ’95)

Dir. Alex Bag

1995

This is the one film that is shown in every experimental video-art class. It’s almost like an educational video. Every kid I know who has gone to art school has seen it. Bag portrays a stereotypical undergraduate student at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The eight confessional diary segments (one for each semester) trace an art student’s struggle to make sense of her experience at art school in “the big city.” She is annoying and pretentious, but so naïve that you mostly just feel bad for her. You see her disillusionment coming from a mile away and it just makes you cringe.

Between these confessions are other pieces in which Bag does a lot of mocking. She mocks a pretentious artist giving a lecture, a phone-sex-commercial girl, two London shopgirls discussing their punk band, a Ronald McDonald doll attempting to pick up a Hello Kitty doll, and Björk explaining how a television works, among others.

If you went to art school this film will make you laugh so hard. It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit geared toward art snobs. Bag really zeros in on her targets and is merciless in her ridicule.

KENNY & CO.

Dir. Don Coscarelli

1976

This isn’t an art film but it may as well be. I saw it on HBO when I was about five or six and it stuck in my mind for so long. It doesn’t really have much of a plot, it’s just four days in the life of some suburban 12-year-olds, all leading up to Halloween night, the most anticipated night of a boy’s life. It’s all about cherry bombs, pranks, homemade Halloween costumes, bullies, haunted houses, first crushes, pellet guns, M-80s in trash cans, running down railroad tracks, leaving flaming bags of dog shit on doorsteps—all the important kid stuff. It really captures the spirit of being young, and it reminds me how character-building everyday childhood experiences are. Also, some of the scenes were shot with a diffuser lens, causing the picture to appear hazy (like someone smeared Vaseline on the lens), so it’s extra 70s-looking.

LOVE BITES

Dir. Claudia Hielman

1995

I got this from a super-obsessed Morrissey collector. It’s so rare that it doesn’t even show up when you google it. I think she just made it and never did anything with it. It’s a documentary about Morrissey fans following him around England during the Boxers tour. It’s about all the things that happen on tour, from a fan’s perspective. I can totally relate to what they talk about, having followed Morrissey all over the world taking pictures of him. For instance, when they talk about being up front at the shows and having Morrissey make eye contact with you—I love when that happens. “It’s nice to be noticed by someone you really admire,” says one fan. They talk about the tradition of jumping onstage during the shows and how everyone in the audience is so happy to see someone make it up there. “We’ll always be there, we’ll always bloody be there, it’s too late now,” says another fan, and that’s exactly how I feel. It’s an addiction, going to those shows.

HAIR SHOES LOVE AND HONESTY

Dir. Mike Mills

1998

One day in 1998 I walked into Alleged Gallery on Spring Street and this film was playing on a bunch of TVs with headphones attached. I put the headphones on and listened to all these different kinds of people speaking genuinely and in depth on the subjects of hair, shoes, love, and honesty—and it was so good it made me want to cry. The people talk about truth in love, heartaches, highs and lows, being true to your lover, romantic messes, walking barefoot, hair transplants, classy shoes, loving selflessly, shaved heads, bald men, dishonesty, loneliness, feeling great in heels, compromise, and afros. It’s like watching a confessional, or a train of thought, and everyone seems so confident about what they’re saying. The film is shot in Mills’s trademark low-key style. The only thing that changes is the backdrop color when people talk about each of the different topics. It’s very subtle and beautiful.

A DAY WITH THE BOYS

Dir. Clu Gulager

1969

A group of preteen boys lure a businessman into the woods and then bury him alive in a pit. They mark the grave with the man’s briefcase, and then the camera pans to reveal three similar graves marked with an umbrella, a basket, and a child’s doll. SCARY! It’s like a horror movie in disguise, because for the first half of the film the boys are frolicking and playing around all innocently, and then suddenly they’re murderers. There’s no dialogue, just marching music, which makes it seem kind of like a Vietnam allegory. It’s very Lord of the Flies—a celebration of childhood innocence and an examination of its darkest extremes. Legendary cinematographer László Kovács really makes this film what it is. It’s so psychedelic—saturated with slow-motion sequences, solarization, and freeze-frames. Images dissolve and bleed into one another and turn into paintings. It’s a great example of super-creative late-60s avant-garde filmmaking. You can see it on the DVD special features of David Gordon Green’s film George Washington. It’s an experience watching this, really.

MIXTAPE

Dir. Oliver Payne and Nick Relph

2002

When I first saw this at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise I remember seeing Ollie and Nick there wearing crazy, brightly colored pants. I think they were electric green. I was fascinated by the way they looked. Then I saw this film, and I thought how much it looked just like them. Mixtape is visually exhausting in the best way. It shows vignettes of children playing in a garage band interspersed with a teenage girl in a Starbucks uniform covering her facial piercings with Band-Aids (a reference to the Starbucks rule that employees cover their piercings while on the job). There is an absurd shot of kids playing on a small scooter while riding a treadmill (thus, the kids are “going nowhere”—get it?) and an image of a scally (a British thug type) in a puffy coat painted with clouds, walking a bedazzled tortoise on a leash. At one point a kid in a Jar Jar Binks mask gives us the middle finger. This is all set to Terry Riley’s remix of Harvey Averne’s 60s soul hit “You’re No Good” (a message that was constantly repeated to me as a teenager by teachers and everyone else). Mixtape is a mix of contradictions—part documentary, part music video, and part surveillance tape. Payne and Relph are chroniclers of contemporary British youth culture. It’s all about wild kid energy.

TIME PIECE

Dir. Jim Henson

1965

Before the Muppets, Jim Henson made these bizarre experimental films. Time Piece is nine very weird, sort of beatnik minutes of fast-paced, scattered imagery and sounds all set to the beat of a hi-hat. He makes music out of everyday sounds. So you get tapping, tick-tocks, footsteps, drumbeats, car zooms, whistles, screeches, pogo sticks, high heels, typewriters, on/off switches, dings, buzzes, bowling balls, elevators, champagne pops, zippers, dogs panting, rocking chairs, beers opening, tea kettles, crackers, coughing, and a shot of Henson painting an elephant pink. The only word used in the whole thing is “help,” which Henson yelps five times throughout the film. It’s mysterious and kind of creepy. Henson keeps running back and forth across the screen, in a striped prisoner’s costume, or in a Tarzan suit, or dressed as Abe Lincoln, or on a bike. I guess it’s about trying to outrun time, but failing.

THE SOUL OF TAMMI TERRELL

Dir. Jonathan Horowitz

2001

This is a double projection. One of the screens shows scenes from the 1998 tearjerker Stepmom, and the other screen shows Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell on a TV show singing the song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” In Stepmom, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is a recurring song throughout the film. Jena Malone and Julia Roberts sing it together while driving in a Range Rover and then later on Jena sings it again with Susan Sarandon while goofing around in her bedroom. What Jonathan Horowitz does is that he syncs both screens up so that they’re all singing together. It’s very funny to see the suburban mothers and daughters singing along with the 60s soul singers. It’s like bad karaoke. But it’s also pretty dark because in Stepmom, Susan Sarandon dies of cancer, and in real life Tammi Terrell died suddenly of brain cancer. Horowitz juxtaposes the scene where Sarandon is getting an MRI with shots of news clippings about Terrell’s death. Horowitz’s work is always somewhat obsessed with death, and it’s always very, very clever.

BARBARIANS AT THE GATE

Dir. Foundation Skateboards

1994

The trailer for this skateboard video had the tagline “What happens when two professional skateboarders drive across the country with their boss’s truck, cellular phone, and platinum card?” The answer, of course, involves a lot of reckless driving, drunk chicks, and crack. The video opens with the two teenage skateboarders, Josh Beagle and Heath Kirchart, launching their Land Rover off a dirt jump ten feet into the air Dukes of Hazzard-style while the theme song from Vacation plays in the background. From there on it’s all wild adventures and stupid shit like golfing into the Grand Canyon and drinking 40s with Crips. They make hairspray fireballs in hotel rooms and have beer delivered to them in a limo packed with drunk teenage girls stripping to Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do.” “How did this get made?” is the question I always ask myself whenever I watch this.

There’s a beautiful shot, which has been very influential for me, of six or seven hometown girls hanging out of the back of a station wagon that’s flying down the highway. It’s an inspirational depiction of America—like Robert Frank’s The Americans or Richard Avedon’s In the American West—but coming from a teenage skateboarder’s point of view. What I love about it the most is that it has absolutely nothing to do with actual skateboarding.