Recent Faves:  Two Films About Movement

The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge)
1987. 30 min.

In the Way Things Go, Swiss conceptual artists Peter Fischili and David Weiss invoke both the spirit of dada and a panoply of thermodynamic laws to create a truly astounding visual experience. Using scrap wood, old tires, balloons, sundry household goods, industrial castoffs, and a battery of dangerously incendiary chemical solutions, Fischili and Weiss (who have been called “the merry pranksters of contemporary art”) have constructed a huge, lumbering, weirdly beautiful infernal machine, propelled by gravity and chemical reactions alone. The chain-reactive workings of this goofy kinetic sculpture are shot pretty much in real time, and there is no sound other than the hilarious whirring, clanking, fizzing, and groaning of the mechanical beast at work. The proceedings are filled with as much suspense and humor as any film I’ve seen in the past several years, and it’s impossible not to be filled with awe at the perverse genius it took to plan and assemble the contraption. Somewhere in heaven Rube Goldberg, Marcel Duchamp, Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci are most certainly smiling down beatifically on both artists. (By the way, the last time I looked, some copyright miscreant had put parts of this film on YouTube.

Media Center: DVD 1335

Ballets Russes.
2005. 118 min.

I admit it: until very recently, I was a shamefully hard-core balletophobe. I’ve got to say, however, that screening filmmakers Dayna Goldfine’s and Dan Geller’s delightful history of the several ground-breaking dance troupes performing under the name Ballet Russe, has caused me to do at least a partial pirouette on the subject. Using bountiful archival performance footage and interviews with surviving principle dancers from the company (most in their 80s and 90s at the time of filming), the documentary traces the progress of the group from its founding in Paris in 1909 by dance visionary Sergei Diaghilev, to its resurrection in the 1930s as the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, to its rancorous split in 1937 into two separate, fiercely competing troupes. The real dramatic core of this story, however, lies in the generally fond recollections of the ballerinas and premier danseurs. Seeing the group of elderly performers assembled on stage at a 2005 reunion is like gazing upon the proud inhabitants of a beautiful lost age. In perhaps the most moving sequence of the film, former principles George Zoritch and Nathalie Krassovska gingerly walk through a pas de deux from Giselle, and we can clearly see that the passion, grace, and love of the dance are still there after 70 years.

Media Center:  DVD 6562