Emilia and Ilya Kabakov discuss their life and work in new documentary (photo by Jacques De Melo)
ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE (Amei Wallach, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 13-26
212-727-8110
www.kabakovfilm.com
www.filmforum.org
“Epic and boring,” Russian newspaper Vedomosti wrote in a review of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s highly anticipated 2008 Moscow exhibition; the same can be said about Amei Wallach’s documentary about the renowned Russian art couple, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here. Wallach assembled the same team she worked with on 2008’s Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (except for her late codirector, Marion Cajori) to follow the Kabakovs as they prepare for a major series of shows in six venues in Moscow, marking Ilya’s return to the city for the first time since fleeing the country twenty years earlier. Wallach is given virtually unlimited access to Ilya, a soft-spoken conceptual artist filled with fascinating and unusual ideas, and Emilia, whom he married in 1992 and who handles his business affairs and assists her husband in the studio. Wallach delves into Ilya’s past as a struggling artist who was rarely allowed to show his work publicly and became part of an underground avant-garde that also included Oleg Vassiliev, Igor Makarevich, and Andrei Monastyrsky, all of whom appear in the film, as does Robert Storr, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and other scholars. Much of Ilya’s work is innately, if not overtly, political, evoking a changing Russia / Soviet Union as it evolved through such leaders as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, quietly exploring many sociopolitical elements of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The film’s emotional high point involves a voiceover reading a letter from Ilya’s mother that she wrote to him when she was eighty, as the camera takes viewers through such monumental yet intimate and personal installations as “Red Wagon” and “The Toilet.” Among the other works featured are “The Palace of Projects,” “Life of Flies,” “Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album),” “School No. 6,” “How to Meet an Angel,” and “Alternative History of Art,” in which Ilya is joined by his past and future alter egos, Charles Rosenthal and Igor Spivak.
The Kabakovs attend the opening of their 2008 Moscow exhibition, marking their highly anticipated return to the city
Unlike such other recent art documentaries as Cutie and the Boxer and Gerhard Richter Painting, which focused on unique and engaging characters, the Kabakovs are not particularly entertaining in and of themselves; it’s their work that makes them fascinating, so some stretches of the documentary drag on a bit, and it is difficult for Wallach and editor-cinematographer Ken Kobland to capture on film the feeling of what it is like to experience one of the Kabakovs’ massive installations. (However, it is possible for New Yorkers to see “Catch the Little White Man,” which is on view along with seven paintings at Pace Gallery in Midtown through December 21.) But Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here is still a treat, offering an inside look at a husband and wife who are considered the most important Russian artists alive today. “The first thing to say is that art is another world,” Ilya explains early on. “And one must leave one’s body and one’s mentality, and one’s blah, blah, blah . . . and one’s everyday element, and enter another world. This is the major purpose and aim of our work. Leave and come with me to another world.” That’s a difficult offer to pass up. Enter Here begins a two-week run at Film Forum on November 13, with Ilya and Emilia on hand to talk about the film at select screenings on November 13, 16, 23, and 24; the 7:50 show on November 23 will be followed by a Q&A with Wallach and Kobland.
Photographer Edward Burtynsky has been traveling the world with his large-format viewfinder camera, taking remarkable photographs of environmental landscapes undergoing industrial change. For Manufactured Landscapes, cinematographer Peter Mettler and director Jennifer Baichwal joined Burtynsky on his journey as he documented ships being broken down in Chittagong, Bangladesh; the controversial development of the Three Gorges Dam Project in China, which displaced more than a million people; the uniformity at a factory in Cankun that makes irons and the Deda Chicken Processing Plant in Dehui City; as well as various mines and quarries. Burtynsky’s photos, which were on view at the Brooklyn Museum in late 2005 and often can be seen in New York City galleries (two shows just closed last week), are filled with gorgeous colors and a horrible sadness at the lack of humanity they portray. As in the exhibit, the audience is not hit over the head with facts and figures and environmental rhetoric; instead, the pictures pretty much speak for themselves, although Burtynsky does give some limited narration. Baichwal lets the camera linger on its subject, as in the remarkable opening shot, a long, slow pan across a seemingly endless factory. She is also able to get inside the photographs, making them appear to be three-dimensional as Mettler slowly pulls away. Manufactured Landscapes is screening November 12 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Peter Mettler: Pictures of Light,” a midcareer retrospective of the innovative Canadian artist that also features eight shorts and full-length documentaries he directed, including Picture of Light, The End of Time, Plastikman, Petropolis, and Gambling, Gods, and LSD, with Mettler on hand to talk about his work at most shows. In addition, Mettler will participate in the free White Light Festival panel discussion “It’s a Matter of Time” on November 9 at 4:30 with Sylvia Boorstein, Daniel Casasanto, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Alan Lightman and a performance of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” by Alan Pierson and Chris Thompson, moderated by John Schaefer.
Woody Allen’s best film in years, Blue Jasmine is a modern-day Streetcar Named Desire filtered through the Bernie Madoff scandal. Cate Blanchett gives a marvelously nuanced and deeply textured performance as Jasmine French, an elegant socialite whose immensely wealthy husband, Hal (a wonderfully smarmy Alec Baldwin), amassed his fortune the new-fashioned way: by lying and cheating—only he was the rare financier who got caught and ended up in jail. Now broke and distraught, Jasmine moves in with her sister, Ginger (the delightful Sally Hawkins), a single mother with two kids living in a cramped apartment in San Francisco. Ginger and her ex-husband, Augie (an excellent Andrew Dice Clay), lost all their money by investing with Hal, and she is now trying to rebuild her life, working as a cashier and dating the gruff but dedicated Chili (a strong Bobby Cannavale). Not used to taking care of herself, Jasmine seems lost in a world that no longer treats her like a princess; she takes a job working for a dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and attends a computer class, but she is determined to regain her previous status. And that chance comes when she meets Dwight (a gentle Peter Sarsgaard), a man with grand plans who just might be the one to lead her back to the level to which she is accustomed.
