Netflix has been calling, unconsciously, for some time now as the DVD rental company represents itself as having nearly very film title that you’d ever want to see. There are so many films I’d like to have the opportunity to see and re-see, including many from the American Avant Garde, who I used to dote over. In a search of works by Maya Deren on Netflix, they do have one title that would satisfy my urges. But if you look up someone like Kenneth Anger, probably my most favorite film auteur of the genre, you get zilch.
A search for him on Amazon shows why — Anger’s work, though prime candidates for the supposed lushness of DVD, are still on VHS. Which brings up the question: Are film aesthetes a dying breed? Or do they prefer tape the way some audiophiles still prefer vinyl over CD?

It’s gotten little coverage, but a few days ago the Israeli ambassador to Sweden literally pulled the plug on a piece of artwork called “Snow White and The Madness of Truth.” The piece was shown in Stockholm and featured an oddly rendered image of a female suicide-bomber floating on a white boat in a sea of blood.
The work almost sounds kind of powerful but the context of the work, as provided by the artist, mockingly glorifies innocent death. It was wrong of the ambassador to deface the artwork, despite its pretenses. But it’s also a sad commentary of contemporary art that this is all we get anymore. Needless to say, I’m pretty down on art this year.
(In writing this, I realize critics may point out that my last post makes comparisons between films and the Holocaust. But in “The Women,” or in “The Wizard of Oz,” the texts of the films were not subject-specific and each devised its own language to speak about the world’s complexities, including issues of race and violence. In the “Snow White” piece, artist Dror Feller does the opposite.)

The 1939 comedy, The Women, whose tagline is “It’s all about men!” was on last night on PBS. I watched almost all of it with a feeling of morosity throughout. Before knowing the date of the film, I recognized that the black and white film, with its stylish color footage of a fashion show, was much like The Wizard of Oz, in that it also showed a fictional world utterly at peace while the world was preparing for self-immolation.
The film was achingly well-acted by Joan Crawford and Norman Shearer, who played women in the world of supreme wealth and huge class and race transitions. But what I felt while watching the film was not the American social politics behind it but the weight of Europe, a few thousand miles away, preparing for the deaths of millions. The fine clothes, the light switches, the telephones, the sense of privilege throughout, were not unlike what much of Europe had experienced before they were wrenched under war’s grip and when some were thrown in gas chambers. Some of the folks who watched that movie in 1939 died only a few years later despite its charms, or perhaps, because of them.
Tomorrow, on MLK day, The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA) at Keele University, England, will be releasing hundreds of aerial photos on the Web that were taken during World War II, including those of Auschwitz, in which smoke can be seen flying up from the chimneys.