Issue 4

andreview
issue 4
03.01.11
Ryland Walker Knight, Guest Editor
MIDNIGHT SUN
By Jeanine Stevens
SUBTLE SARTORIALISM
By Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Matthew Flanagan on Peter
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Alyssa Volpigno
Gina Telaroli
Jeanine Stevens
Jovanna Tosello
Natalie Lomeli
Reina de Vries
Serrah Russell
Yvonne Most
Hutton
King lear
images from Justin Bland & Shauna Sanchez
andreview is published by Mia Nolting and Rachel Peddersen in Portland, Oregon and NY, NY. Excerpt from William Shakespeare's King Lear reprinted without permission. Screen captures printed without permission. Contributing
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(2011). Back page images from The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock (1963) and Sansho The Bailiff, Kenji Mizoguchi (1954). To
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We cover ourselves.
One way or another,
we wear the world. Fabrics fold, as do we, and what interests me is what punctuates our
tissue. Lace allows light while a pelt weighs a life’s leftovers on your back. Green chiffon against red wallpaper turns heads and cameras, sets certain desires vertiginous. The
agreement between a pair of socks and a vest can tickle me giddy. —Hell, I love to wear
socks as much as I don’t. Yes, this reeks of post-structuralists (who, in fact, loved to attend
to structure) and a certain chiasmus of ideas proposed by M. M-Ponty.
From couture to canvas, garments are more than simply clothing or costuming. They
come in layers, they lay light or weigh down; they are rolled en masse; you think “garment” and you think production, you think “garment district.” You don’t often think
of sharecroppers cutting holes in sheets to fashion dresses. But that’s a garment. So’s an
overall pronounced “overhaul” and so’s a crustacean’s home.
Mia and I were talking about how best to capture winter in a theme, though San Francisco is by now nearing spring, and we agreed that everybody has a different idea—often
based on value—of how to keep warm. Style-as-a-philosophy is old hat but still pertinent
and, well, prevalent. The internet’s odd mirrors of our everyday certainly help perpetuate postures. Such is the appeal of something like The Sartorialist: documenting a world
most of its audience will never know but through S. Schulman’s lens is a little narrative
most fluent in the internet must know. Any garment will tell you a story. As will any lack,
as did the sharecroppers’ pragmatism in W. Evans and J. Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men rend me mouth agape at times. (It was re-reading this book that gave us a final push
towards this topic.) Countenancing difference is the thrill of art and the aim of journalism, which is what elevates that book above so much sameness across these tubes we now
inhabit.
The aim here, in this issue, was to build a jigsaw. To lock together fabrics and ideas of
fabrics, to layer with layers and get things talking to each other. That’s how you outfit, I
figure, so that’s how I curated this array. That’s also just how I think. Thanks for seeing
our rhymes.
—Ryland Walker Knight, February 15, 2011
Still Life, Jia Zhang-ke (2006)
From the forthcoming mini book Shells, Justin Bland (2011)
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Subtle Sartorialism
A Short Note on Eugene Green and Clothes
Untitled, Shauna Sanchez (2010)
The films of Eugène Green are usually described in terms of sparseness and
bareness—not so much an “absence” of certain elements as an ostentatiously
stripped-down quality, a peculiar sort of asceticism.
His directorial technique—with its distinctly rudimentary editing, framing
and camera movement—is completely naked in its intentions, and almost
showily unshowy. The dialogue is recited more than it is acted, lending an antinaturalistic transparency to the language. Characters and locations are carefully
noted but never emphasized. But though, for instance, Le Monde Vivant—Green’s
2003 word-game fairy-tale, where knights are knights by name only and a dog is
cast as a lion—is often described as a film “without costuming,” Green’s as much
of a sartorial fetishist as Wes Anderson.
Look closely enough at the endless parade of attractive young people who
pass through Green’s films (sometimes repeatedly, like Alexis Loret and Adrien
Michaux) and you’ll find that, with only a subtle variation, the men in Green’s
films all wear Oxford shirts in muted colors (tucked in, with an unbuttoned
collar), jeans and khakis in unhip cuts and shades, dull boots and dress shoes, and
that the women all wear plain dresses (neither too long nor too short, sometimes
in subtle lace), unpatterned blouses, and cardigans, which are neither grungily
baggy nor fashionably tight. They wear their hair in plain (but never ugly) ways,
the men’s hair often longish but not shaggy, and they live in homes with bare
walls full of old furniture and very ordinary possessions. Everything about them is
unadorned, but—and this is key—not anonymous.
There are essentially two schools of thought about costuming films--that
costuming is production design and that costuming is characterization—and
the latter school in turn subdivides into two tendencies: the first is to put the
characters through an endless succession of costumes in order to emphasize
the character not through the clothes they wear, but through the way they wear
clothes (see: Jean Seberg’s endless array of colorful swimsuits in Bonjour Tristesse;
the 46 cheongsam dresses worn by Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love, an
average of one costume change every two minutes); the second, of which Wes
Anderson is the most prominent and imitated modern exponent, turns particular
items of clothing into details as integral to the characters as the ways in which
they speak or how they carry themselves (it should be noted that in Anderson’s
films, not only is costuming characterization, but so is production design, and
every set serves as an extension / history / obstacle for the characters). Green’s,
then, is a middle way, in which a very particular set of carefully-picked articles is
worn indifferently, because what Green wants his young men and women to be
is people who don’t care about fashion, who shop and dress on autopilot because
their minds are preoccupied with other things: love, cinema, etc.
Green’s directorial aesthetic is based around a belief that certain aspects of
film style can’t co-exist with certain ideas (that he can’t, for instance, approach
his subject matter with a handheld camera), and because his idealistic plots
(all, essentially, romances) revolve around what he deems to be mental and
spiritual action—art, imagination, curiosity, love—the unadornment and
fashion-neutrality of his characters is symptomatic of another non-co-existence:
that of what he deems “higher pursuits” (music, and the aforementioned art,
imagination, curiosity and love) and the fleeting aspects of modern living (unless,
of course, those “fleeting aspects” are in the service of “higher pursuits”—
technology is largely absent from Green’s films, though in his 2007 short film,
Correspondences, he re-purposes e-mail in order to tell what is essentially an 18th
century epistolary romance). He can’t believe, and he doesn’t believe that his
audience could believe, that a person who pays attention to fashion can really be
fully devoted to something. Which creates a certain irony: a precise control of
objects is used to drive home the idea that the characters don’t care about objects,
only ideas.
135
140
145
150
ˉ
Lódz Symphony,
Peter Hutton (1991-1993)
́
155
for D.H. Lawrence
For my evening walk, I choose
white gossamer, one shape
wandering among slender black
cypress and arching ferns.
You prefer a rougher
sleep shirt, legs roaming free
You say, “Sheep sheering
makes me steamy.”
At dusk, hedgerows breathe
heavy and steep.
We drink ginger tea
in porcelain cups.
You seem transfigured—dipping
and bounding toward the sea,
then turn,
galloping strangely toward me.
I say, “We are all nude
in the midnight sun.”
—Jeanine Stevens
160
165
ˉ
Midnight Sun
Too often nowadays, we receive movies in degraded form. We might get
to see more, but what we see in them lacks light and weight—it’s getting
more difficult to talk about anything material. But sometimes objects retain something of their real mass. An instance here, in a shot at the end of
a film by Peter Hutton. It’s a third-hand encode, but for once, in the curl
of fabric, there’s a memory of ribboned film, the pastness of an event:...
for we see that everything grows less and seems to melt away with the
lapse of time and withdraw its old age from our eyes. And yet we see no
diminution in the sum of things (Lucretius). The film’s about the city of
́
Lódz, its everyday sights and sounds: streets, walls, industry, workers, vagabonds, monuments. Hutton’s made many of these on 16mm, portraits of
cities, rivers, the sea: always silent, without narrative, never minimalist.
Occasionally they’re projected at festivals or in galleries, but the rest of
the time they circulate underground in this basest of forms—unspooling
as variable bitrates, not shadowplays. What remains is a mutable image
pointed to an opening between two rooms, a camera in one and open to
the other. The surface of the screen is greyed, faint, veiled by analogue
flickers and colour warp, functioning like gauze. A net curtain billows in
the wind, once and twice: at last, a semblance of light, a bleached sheet, a
ghost of movement, a travelling of atoms. Clothes, curtains, leaves, they’re
the only way you can see the wind in movies. And the only way we’ll
remember them too.
—Matthew Falanagan
170
LEAR
I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me? No, do thy worst, blind Cupid! I’ll not love.
Read thou this challenge; mark but the penning of it. GLOUCESTER
Were all the letters suns, I could not see one.(155) EDGAR [aside]
I would not take this from report: it is, And my heart breaks at it. LEAR
Read. GLOUCESTER
What? With the case of eyes? LEAR
O, ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your
head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes. GLOUCESTER
I see it feelingly. LEAR
What, art mad? A man may see how this world
goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief ? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?
GLOUCESTER
Ay, sir. LEAR
And the creature run from the cur – there thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office. Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand;
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back, Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener. Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks: Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it. None does offend, none, I say, none; I’ll able ‘em: Take that of me, my friend, who have the power To seal the accuser’s lips. Get thee glass eyes; And like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not. Now, now, now, now, pull off my boots: harder, harder: so.