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.