"Mistress X - Downtown Las Vegas, 2009" Laurenn McCubbin, 2009

Laurenn McCubbin, a professional graphic artist and MFA student at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is developing an ambitious performance and gallery show entitled Speaking to Las Vegas in the Language of Las Vegas. The gallery show is scheduled to open in February 2010. Click here for more details.

Laurenn describes the project as follows: “This is going to be an art installation that combines sculptural elements, performance, audio, video, photo documentation, and illustrated portraits of Las Vegas sex workers. The purpose of this show is to investigate the connections between the Las Vegas economy & the legal & illegal sex work that happens there.” Among other things, Laurenn’s project will entail creating her own “hooker cards”–those full color escort service cards that men pass out on the Strip–directing interested parties to a phone number and website which Laurenn is creating beforehand. Thanks to Gary Tognetti for bringing this show to my attention. It’s a shame I’ll be back in Atlanta at that time, because I would have loved to see it.

I have a question for all you Vegas natives: when did “hooker cards” first make their appearance on the Strip? In the Seventies I remember seeing the newspaper dispensers with free black-and-white tabloids advertising escort services, but I don’t recall the cards. Those must have started in the Eighties or Nineties.

Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman. Courtesy Paradise Films.

A new 35mm print of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)–an avant-garde cult hit about a housewife keeping a very tight schedule–is showing this Friday, October 23, 7:00 p.m. at Emory University, in White Hall 205. The running time is 200 minutes. Admission is free. For more details see Andy Ditzler’s Film Love.

I have to confess that I’ve never seen Jeanne Dielman, though it is finally available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. I’ve been waiting instead to see a good 35mm print, since what I’ve read so far indicates that this is one film which demands the finely rendered visual texture and sense of space that only a theatrical presentation can provide.

If you haven’t seen any of Chantal Akerman’s films, her Seventies work is fascinating as an extreme example of the long-take aesthetic. Individual shots often run for several minutes without a cut, unfolding in real time while very little seems to happen story-wise. It’s a calculated challenge to the viewer, but the cumulative effect can be surprisingly moving, especially in News From Home (1977) and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978).
Criterion is putting out an Eclipse set of Akerman’s other Seventies films in January 2010.

In general, there seem to be quite a few interesting films coming out of Turkey in recent years. Probably the best known figure internationally is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who has won numerous festival awards for his art-house films Distant (2002), Climates (2006) and Three Monkeys (2008). He’s a major practitioner of the long shot/long take aesthetic associated with directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Chantal Akerman. His treatment of emotional isolation (or “alienation,” if you will) is often compared to Michelangelo Antonioni, though in Distant, the one film of his that I’ve seen, there’s also a great deal of humor in the film’s observation of everyday life. (To be fair, Antonioni also had a sense of humor.) Another new Turkish director, Özer Kiziltan, explores the conflict between religious faith and modernity in Takva (2006), which received U.S. distribution on DVD last year. A third figure worth looking at is the Turkish-born Italian director Ferzan Özpetek, known for films such Steam: the Turkish Bath and Facing Windows; I like his sympathetic, open-minded treatment of the complications of human sexuality.