Two filmmakers are on stage. I mean two women. I mean two people, I mean I. Joanna Hogg and Kelly Reichardt are on stage with Dennis Lim.
Small, deriving from the Latin word for “bad” and the Greek for “goat” : comparatively small in size : minor in rank or ability : GENTLE, SOFT : little in a way that is objectively measurable : consisting of small pieces or units : HUMILIATED, HUMBLED : I never felt so small in my life.
Joanna says it’s difficult to retrospect. To know how one thing might emerge from another.
People still wonder about Arthur Dove’s Abstraction No. 2, painted between 1910 and 1911, just 8 ½ by 10 ½ inches in size. It is unusual, for its time, in being so unapologetically abstract.
Kelly just wants to move on. She always thinks she’s going to do something different.
How great it would be to not be so linear.
It’s interesting, Joanna says, she has a sense that she herself would like more story. But the way she makes her films will not allow for this.
It has to come about so naturally, she says. Like a flower maybe, or a vase you shape without your eyes.
The lenses on Dennis Lim’s glasses. Glints of light from the overhead lamps.
Nothing needs to come about for this to work. Holding a finger before the light. Broken as the ground is dark.
Clement Greenberg thought Paul Klee was a major minor painter. Beethoven’s string quartet No. 15, his opus 132, is in the minor key of A.
There appears to be a relationship between Manny Farber’s notion of termite art and Theodor Adorno’s conception of articulation.
Arthur Dove’s paintings are often quite small.
Small is not equivalent to minor.
Dennis is asking questions about their process.
Joanna says it’s really difficult to describe what she does. It takes her as long to write her story or whatever you might call it as it does to write a script.
Kelly says writing scripts involves a lot of hanging out. Taking things apart and rearranging and connecting things.
Joanna says there’s always too much in her brain to fit into any one film. All the things we’re told not to do. These are the things that she does.
Kelly’s next film, in which an American “loser” living in 1970s New England steals four Arthur Dove paintings from the fictional Framingham Museum of Art, will be titled The Mastermind.
Abstraction No. 2 reflects Dove’s intention to abstract from carefully observed nature, to capture a fleeting moment or event in the physical world.
As an American director Kelly can’t help thinking about money.
Translations of experience, Joanna says, full of beginnings without ends. Initiations riddled with losses.
In the late 1920’s, Arthur Dove was searching for something in color, something he referred to as “a condition of light.”
A fleeting moment of a small moving thing glimpsed only for a second in its sudden bursts of bright yellow and deep pink.
marginalamericannotes.com 