Rebecca Nemser

Thack­er­ay endows Rebec­ca Sharp — “that art­ful lit­tle minx — with all the qual­i­ties which make his own writ­ing so delight­ful. He por­trays Rebec­ca as an artist — the lost, bril­liant child of a singer and a painter, singing and danc­ing, schem­ing and dream­ing her way though life.

THE ELIMINATOR begins as a cop thriller, then turns into a spy movie, then a hor­ror movie with flesh-eat­ing zom­bies, then a myth­i­cal epic, and final­ly achieves tran­scen­dence with an iron­ic evo­ca­tion of William But­ler Yeats’ great line of poet­ry, “A ter­ri­ble beau­ty is born.” 

“It’s unful­filled long­ing. It’s being young. Meet me at 20. I don’t know what I want to do. I kind of want to write. You want to be a artist, to express what’s going on in your life. It’s a way to lose your­self in your dis­con­tent. Oth­er­wise you’d just go out and shoot and van­dal­ize. Art is more internal.” 

“The scene when BASQUIAT is paint­ing — the Char­lie Park­er and Max Roach riff is from his record col­lec­tion. It’s very heady at that moment…Success is when you’re mak­ing the work of art. The moment of per­fect sonorous bliss.”

BASQUIAT cap­tures the artist’s yearn­ing and anguish, moments of bliss and the sheer phys­i­cal plea­sure of mak­ing art. His lat­er descent into drugs, lone­li­ness, con­fu­sion and despair is tru­ly trag­ic — you feel him pur­sued by the Furies of greed, racism, and dis­ease, track­ing him inex­orably down.

Hol­ly­wood has fall­en in love with JANE AUSTEN. Her scripts fea­ture snap­py dia­logue; her plots fol­low the clas­sic for­mu­la of girl meets boy; girl los­es boy; girl gets boy; her sto­ry lines move deli­cious­ly from chaos and con­fu­sion to har­mo­ny and delight. The lat­est is EMMA, played to per­fec­tion by GWYNETH PALTROW in Wedg­wood col­ors, Empire dress­es and pearl-drop earrings. 

On film, JEAN ARTHUR is impul­sive, but truth­ful ‑‑ true to the moment, while the moment lasts. She is chaste, but not prud­ish; she tru­ly inhab­its her small, ath­let­ic body, and she moves like a dancer with an easy nat­ur­al volup­tuous­ness. Her soft, grav­el­ly voice is aston­ish­ly expres­sive. And some of her great­est lines aren’t words at all, but an aston­ish­ing reper­toire of whim­pers, sighs, sobs, gig­gles, and moans.

GENE KELLY was a great dancer because his danc­ing seemed to be an over­flow of his superb vital­i­ty — a nat­ur­al exten­sion of his per­son­al­i­ty. In all his movies, the tran­si­tions to dance are incred­i­bly smooth, because even when he’s not danc­ing he’s think­ing about dancing–his ath­let­ic body is flexed and lim­ber– and he’s ready to roll, even on an emp­ty set with 500,000 kilo­watts of elec­tric light mim­ic­k­ing star­dust and a giant fan cre­at­ing the sen­sa­tion of a moon­light breeze.

One of DAVID SALLE’s favorite movies is Dou­glas Sirk’s IMITATION OF LIFE. In one scene, all the char­ac­ters are jammed into a taxi, watch­ing a funer­al through the win­dows. In Salle’s paint­ings, too, many dif­fer­ent things are hap­pen­ing at once, every­thing is crammed togeth­er, noth­ing seems fin­ished, every­thing is seen in reflec­tion or jux­ta­po­si­tion or through a fil­ter or a pane of glass, and all of the con­tra­dic­tions are left unresolved.

The Sit­u­a­tion­ists called for an art of excess, delir­i­um, out­rage, and social change. They believed that cap­i­tal­ism had turned con­tem­po­rary life into a soci­ety of “spec­ta­cle” that its inhab­i­tants could only pas­sive­ly watch and con­sume. Sit­u­a­tion­ism would bring art out of the muse­ums and into the streets, and sab­o­tage the soci­ety of spec­ta­cle by cre­at­ing sit­u­a­tions in which peo­ple could turn their own lives into a cre­ative experience.

ROBERT FERRANDINI’s ear­ly work fea­tured fly­ing saucers and mon­sters, imagery drawn from a 1950’s child­hood spent watch­ing sci­ence-fic­tion movies like When Worlds Col­lide and The Thing. In his new paint­ings of imag­i­nary land­scapes and seascapes, he has come to some kind of terms with his past and is ready to move on. His space­ship has final­ly land­ed in a world of his own making.