REVIEW: Ragnar Kjartansson at the Barbican (14 July-4 September 2016)

The Visitors (2012)

All I knew about Ragnar Kjartansson before this glorious exhibition was that he once got American indie heroes The National to play their song Sorrow over and over again for six hours. Feats of endurance are a recurring theme during the Kjartansson retrospective at the Barbican, but these aren’t just stunts, they’re part of a body of work that treats popular culture with both reverence and scorn (often simultaneously), deals with deadly serious subjects like familial strife and mortality with a beguiling playfulness, and manages to tread that line between being dully prescriptive about what we take from the work and seeming to be about nothing much at all.

It begins with an installation called Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage, in which we stroll between 10 unkempt troubadours strumming guitars on crumpled beds, as in the background a soft-core sex-scene featuring Kjartansson’s parents is projected onto the wall: they’re actors and he was conceived during the projection of the movie. This performance is eight hours long, and the sound from this and every other room – most simply walled off with curtains – bleeds from one to the next. It’s not necessarily intentional, probably a happy accident, but it gives an added feeling of coherence and continuity to his ruminations and investigations.


Publicity shot for S.S. Hangover (2013)

The show mixes films, paintings, live performances and the debris of the artist’s life (from beer bottles to notebooks) to tell its story. There are diversions, including a soothing film showing two-and-a-half-hours from a six-month project in which a brass band on an old-fashioned wooden boat simply moved steadily around a picturesque Icelandic canal, playing music for whoever gathered, but most of the work is more complex and ambitious.

There are miniatures of Kjartansson’s sets for an hour-long opera with no performers, in which he embraces the visceral, comforting escapism of that world, without the challenging, cerebral bit – touched by genius, close to God – that allows the artform to transcend its setting. There’s a charming, funny monochrome film, worth of Truffaut, that examines childhood and children’s attitude to mortality and the afterlife, by the artist giving some kids on a summer camp a tour of a cemetery, dressing as Death. They’re slightly giddy from being both amused and a little scared, and flit between observations and objections. “Are you Satan?” asks one. “You are God’s enemy,” says another. “You’re not Death, you’re an elf with a stick,” contends a third.


God (2006)

A film upstairs has the chameleonic Kjartansson as a ‘50s-style crooner in a tuxedo, amidst a garish pink curtain (which also surrounds you, in the Barbican’s staging): his idea was that by extending the performance interminably, he could transform it from something transient into something eternal and solemn, like a mass. But by singing only the melancholy mantra, “Sorrows conquers happiness”, he also subverts the banality, transience and vapidity of easy listening, while investing the film with incentives to keep up watching: though the text is identical, the music ebbs and flows, as the string and brass sections periodically drop out and come back in.


A Lot of Sorrow (2013)

When the artist requested that The National play Sorrow for six hours, he was essentially asking them to pay homage to his own artwork, and once more there are mini-dramas and triumphs: the effect like a documentary (in its depiction of the chemistry between the band members and with their audience) and also a scripted film, with a cycle of narratives. The bit I watched saw the band attempting to pace themselves, as the drummer tended to his hands, then – once he’d picked up the sticks again – unable to stop themselves crescendoing amidst crashing cymbals and furious fretwork, no matter how many more hours of this they had left.


Behind the scenes in 2009

A couple of the exhibits are less compelling: endless paintings of Páll Haukur Björnsson (done for the Venice Biennale in 2009) contain only a couple worth remembering, while the room showcasing his attempts to play at being an Impressionist is rather redundant, but the latter is next to one in which four Ragnars of different ages stage a row with his mother, where she spits in his face. The text is brutal if satirical, but the emotions that underscore it – the bond between mother and son, their mutual trust and status as co-conspirators, toying with art – are a vivid counterpoint, and the action itself is in flux both thematically and stylistically: the first is furthest away, the second in close-up and with more advanced editing; in the earliest video they’re laughing and joking, in the next it’s more Expressionist, the third is realistic, then the last slightly offbeat and absurdist: Ragnar’s lacquered hair and deadpan expression like something from a mid-‘00s indie.


The Visitors (2012)

The piece de resistance (or "stykki de viðnám" in Icelandic), though, is The Visitors, a gorgeous meditation on music, communality and individuality, as eight musicians in separate rooms of a historic building some miles from New York perform a song together, build once more around a single mantra, this time heartbreakingly beautiful: "Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” I experienced it walking round and round, as in turn each screen came to life, and then each performer began to make music, accentuated as you reached them, from the professionalism of the drummer to the pianist’s classical flourishes, the artist himself crooningly in a bubble bath (a slightly glib gesture) and, best of all, the accordion player singing in an unaffected, Joanne Newsom-ish squeak. It’s an absolutely devastating, exultant and euphoric piece of work: a manifesto, memoir and concert film that you experience in a new way each time, and in a completely unique way based simply on where you stand and where you walk.

That unique, accessible but also labyrinthine, multi-layered work is emblematic of this stunning show, which gave me a lot to think about while slinging my emotions around the Barbican Centre. (4/4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Review: Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet

Friday, 2 October 2015
at the Barbican Centre



Hamlet was fairly good, but no better than that: a curious, tonally awkward production that accentuated the absurdism of the character's descent into madness, drawing attention to the play’s odd lurches in mood, which doesn’t always play well to a modern mind.

Benedict Cumberbatch, of course, is the sweet prince who becomes markedly less sweet upon learning of his father’s murder: as the king was poisoned, now his son’s mind is poisoned: flitting from revenge fantasies to abusive rants to (in this adaptation) playing in a toy castle. The show begins with him listening to Nat ‘King’ Cole’s Nature Boy on a gramophone, before the curtain rises to reveal a stunning set depicting a castle hall and centring on a banqueting table set at an angle, guests descending a stately, statuesque staircase along one wall. It’s a magnificent moment, but it soon becomes clear that the film has traded a basic, thrilling intimacy for these fleeting instances of theatrical splendour, as everyone is just rather far away. And for some reason that one could probably imaginatively justify at a stretch, but which I’m not going to, the table is littered with the antlers of recently deceased deer. In another curious bit of staging, the set also goes way, way back. It’s a design pregnant with possibilities, but it’s not generally used as imaginatively or intelligently as it might be: mostly for chase sequences or to suggest the size of the building. Indeed, the only moment when it really comes into its own is during Ophelia’s touching departure from this planet.

That’s also the only part of the play in which Ophelia works as a character, since Sian Brooke has apparently never encountered a mentally ill person before, or, indeed, a person. Her wretched, inane twitching is like every stylised approximation of madness you’ve ever seen, but somehow worse. The rest of the supporting cast struggles too (though not quite so much), aside from Ciarán Hinds’ dangerous, repentant, rather bluff Claudius, Karl Johnson – an effective ghost, particularly when appearing within the players’ stage – and Matthew Steer, an amusingly apprehensive, confused Rosencrantz. I don’t know why Kobna Holdbrook-Smith was cast as Laertes: there does seem to be a tendency in London theatre to incongruously bestow black actors with traditionally non-black roles to which they’re not very well-suited; and unless I’m missing something, it’s not done for purely artistic reasons.

At times, though, this adaptation really does work. “What a piece of work is a man” remains one of the most remarkable speeches ever written, with a vast scope and an overpowering emotional pull, and Cumberbatch draws out much of its haunting power. He’s good, throughout, actually: less drenched in spit-flecked venom than Maxine Peake’s recent genderblind characterisation and lacking her manic, vituperative if one-note comic energy, but committed to the legendary role, finding flashes of anger and shards of sorrow that illuminate the stage, and drawing the eye even when the action is elsewhere on that rather cavernous stage. Having said that, I’m not sure that what he offers us is Hamlet: it’s more a fusion of the character and his stock persona, which can be a little too knowing and in control to suggest true pain, true passion and true madness.

He’s also undermined by an oddly silly, adolescent touch in which people act in slow motion while he delivers his solliloquys, an approach that distracts from several of the play’s most important moments. That kind of am-dram silliness is one reason that this production is unlikely to satisfy Shakespeare buffs, but then neither is what I’m about to say, which is that a lot of Hamlet is quite silly. I wouldn’t actually mind some judicious cutting of the text and not just for reasons of length: keep the killer dialogue, but dump the signet ring, the poisoned blade and the comic longeuers in which Hamlet turns into a kind of wankerish clown. Doubtless some pseud will tell me that Shakespeare is subverting the very nature of plotting (just like he’s a feminist and not an anti-Semite), but I really think that if someone made a TV drama that hinged on these self-same elements, everyone would say it was shit.

The play probably will appeal to Cumberbatch fans, though, as it’s as close to a star vehicle as a Shakespeare play is ever going to be, and because he gives them what they want: charm, charisma, effort and Sherlock-ish comedy, dressed informally or in mocking, post-modern military garb, striding around a stage on which no expense has been spared – would that similar effort had been spent finding a cast – and interspersed with a handful of knockout moments. The most notable of all is a magnificent pièce de théâtre at the end of the second act, which informs the impractical but intriguing staging of the rest of the play. It’s an effect that I won’t spoil for those likely to see it: a very exciting, engaging bit of theatre in a schizophrenic, ultimately disappointing production. (2.5)

Let's re-appraise Lillian Gish

Thoughts on:
Annie Laurie (John S. Roberton, 1927) - Tue, 28 April
La Bohème (King Vidor, 1926) - Sun, 17 May



The Lillian Gish reappraisal starts here – who’s with me?

You wouldn’t have thought that Lillian Gish needed re-appraising. After all, she did virtually invent modern screen acting, in collaboration with noted bigot and revolutionary filmmaker D. W. Griffith, starring in his notorious Birth of a Nation, and the follow-up, Intolerance (contrary to popular rumour, that film wasn’t a mea culpa for the racist sentiment of his earlier film, but a response to people he thought were being intolerant of his worldview. Lol).

She does, though.

The mighty Gish wasn’t name-checked at all in Paul Merton’s most recent series on the history of silent film, appearing just once as he made a facile point about over-acting. In the book I’m reading at the moment, William J. Mann’s Wisecracker, the author gleefully notes that Gish had been excluded from a contemporary list of people with a commodity known as ‘It’ (broadly sex appeal), writing that she “was widely presumed to have no sex drive at all”. Even in the introduction to Annie Laurie at London’s Barbican Centre on Sunday, the marketing person from the Hippodrome Festival who presented the film had just three things to say about Gish: that she had made Annie Laurie to try to change her screen image to something sexier, that she was one of the hardest working actresses in silent cinema, and that when she emoted, people outside the studio walls often came running to see if she was OK, as she was so loud they thought she was in genuine distress. Aside from the fact I’m calling bullshit on that, since post-1920 soundstages were almost all indoors, and encased in massive studio lots, there’s a more important point at stake here – the reputation of arguably the greatest actress who ever lived.

Louise Brooks, who was no-one in terms of popularity in the heyday of silent film but is now an iconic figure across the Western world, wrote a superb essay on Gish in the 1970s, where she cast the actress as a proto-feminist who bought and adapted her own stories, chose her directors, starred in them and even handled the publicity. She argued, very persuasively, that Gish’s career as a leading actress was wrecked not by changing tastes but by sexist studio heads who resented her power and her pay packet. (Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the ass-kicking, non-conformist Gish was also a staunch Republican who was vehemently opposed to child labour laws, having gone on the stage as a kid to support her family!)

Beyond the trendsetting, though, there’s something just as important: the sheer acting talent of the woman. There are only a handful of artists in the field of acting whose mastery of the medium is so complete that they seem to be doing something utterly new: Jason Robards, Emily Watson, Wendy Hiller – it doesn’t happen very often. Gish is one of those. You can see it in Annie Laurie. Everything that works here does so because of her.

The plotting is perfunctory – some fictionialised, Hollywoodised rubbish based broadly around the Glencoe Massacre, as Gish’s aristocrat falls in love with the world’s burliest man (Norman Kerry) and finds herself caught between warring Scottish clans – and the first half is frankly quite boring, but the second has some magical moments, including tremendous use of the titular song, and two action scenes in which Gish loses her shit. The idea that she was melodramatic simply isn’t true: hysteria was just a card she could play, and play beautifully. Here she does it for, what, 15 seconds, then 20, across two hours? It’s in keeping with the plot, and artfully done, creating two of the best sequences in the movie.

The second is one of the few times that director John S. Robertson actually does anything half decent: a thrilling, high-octane chase, with a wide-eyed Gish legging it up a mountainside, pursued by a dude with a gun, the camera scurrying ahead of her, framed on her face and frame. An interesting footnote, though: Robertson was later the local, Stetson-wearing eccentric in the small Los Angeles town where Byrds songwriter Chris Hillman grew up, and the band’s song Old John Robertson (from their classic Notorious Byrd Brothers record) is about how he was ridiculed by the local kids, who knew nothing of his past as a Hollywood director. Here, the music accompanying his film came from Shona Mooney’s folk trio, playing their specially commissioned score for just the second time, which was both inventive and familiar, in all the right places.

And throughout, Gish – while plagued by personal problems that meant she saw this one as simply a job of work – is transcendent. Take the moment where the plot promotes that pernicious myth that, whatever they say, women do want you to kiss them. A load of dangerous, sexist bollocks, but her character’s conflicted emotions: fear of him, fear of herself, anger, confusion, arousal and joy, are beautifully conveyed in just a few flickers of a moment. It’s not sexless, she’s not over-acting, and there’s no-one rushing from outside a studio wall to check she’s OK. It’s art, pure and simple.

And no-one rocks a Tam o'Shanter like Lillian Gish.

***



The main ethical problem with La Bohème - based on the same stories as Puccini's opera - is that it's a romance in which the hero (John Gilbert) is a violent, suspicious and abusive bully who spends the first hour gaslighting his girlfriend.

Its main technical problems are that the script is alternately melodramatic or lacking in incident, that the sets are largely dull, and that most of the cast is mediocre.

Lillian Gish, though, is absolutely mesmerising, as another of her gentle, selfless heroines tortured by an unkind world, exhibiting a range of complex emotion, rendered both subtly and explosively, that's pretty much off-the-scale in terms of artistic genius.

And King Vidor, while never approaching the lyrical, ironic brilliance he displays in something like The Crowd, does stud this sometimes clunky-looking film with a handful of gorgeous shots, most utilising windows, railings or Gish's beautiful, matchlessly expressive visage.

Gilbert's performance, by contrast, is pretty big and unfulfilling: like a parody of silent movie acting by someone who's only seen two of them.

But in the end the film's myriad flaws won't be what stay in the mind. It won't even be Edward Everett Horton looking terrifyingly young as one of Gilbert's bohemian cohorts. Instead it'll be Gish telling her lover that he's foolish to be jealous, a look of fond, intense compassion on her funny little 1920s face.

Annie Laurie: (2.5)
La Bohème: (3)

***

Thanks for reading. #GishFest15 continues with A Romance of Happy Valley and True Heart Susie (both screening as part of BFI Southbank's D. W. Griffith season) over the next couple of weeks.