August 12-18, 2004

movies

Outside In

THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Christo admires his work in Christo's Valley Curtain.

"Five Films About Christo and Jean-Claude" reveals the environmental artists' inner world.

Five Films about Christo and Jean-Claude

by Sam Adams

Though a fascination with art inevitably spawns a desire to peek behind the scenes, watching artists work is generally as interesting as watching paint dry. Fictionalized versions of artists' lives yield torrid obsessions and white-hot inspirations, but the actual process of creation, full of false starts and minor adjustments, stubbornly resists the demands of narrative. In Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Mystery of Picasso, perhaps the most breathtaking filmed document of an artist at work, sketches spring to life in a matter of minutes; you can actually see ink lines soak into the paper as Picasso continues to draw. But when he switches to oils, the trouble begins. After a painting of a goat's head has shape-shifted through dozens of iterations in rapid fast-forward, Clouzot appears on the soundtrack to express concern that the audience won't understand the time involved. Why, Picasso asks, how long has it been? "Five hours," Clouzot replies. Thank heaven for judicious editing. It's hard to believe even the most devoted disciple could have sat through such a span without feeling the urge to nip out for a coffee on the sly.

Coincidentally, five hours is about how long it takes to watch "Five Films About Christo and Jean-Claude," Albert and David Maysles' documentary saga, which begins with Christo's Valley Curtain (1974) and runs through Running Fence (1978), Islands (1986), Christo in Paris (1990) and Umbrellas (1995). Of course, it helps that the five films cover five different projects, but for all the scale and complexity of Christo and Jean-Claude's enterprises — which have most famously involved wrapping such public structures as the Pont-Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin — even their extreme novelty would wear off over time. What makes "Five Films" so consistently fascinating is the sense that the Christos' fantastic creations are only part of the story.

The key moment comes early in Running Fence, as Christo is attempting to persuade a zoning board to grant him permission to run 24 miles of white nylon "fence" through California ranch country. Unlike Valley Curtain, which is mainly concerned with the difficult deployment of a 400-foot-long nylon curtain across a Colorado valley, Running Fence devotes much of its time to the planning process: the meetings with government officials and individual ranchers, the wildly disparate reactions the project provokes in the communities it is to affect. This might seem like mere logistical detail, incidental to the Christos' capital-a Art, but as Christo tells the zoning board, it is, in fact, integral. "The work is not the fabric, the steel poles and the fence," he says. "The art project is right now, here."

On the commentary track for the "Five Films" DVD, released by PlexiFilm in April, Albert Maysles — who will introduce Saturday's showing of Islands and Christo in Paris --says the Christos produce "art that's connected with life," and the real-world aspect of their art is clearly key to the Maysles' ongoing fascination. (David Maysles died in 1987, but Albert is still filming the Christos as they work toward the February 2005 opening of The Gates in New York's Central Park. Their collaborators over the years include Deborah Dickson, Susan Froemke, Henry Corra, Grahame Weinbren and the brilliant editor Charlotte Zwerin.) A running theme through all five films is the profound effect the Christos' work has on working-class people, and conversely, the anger it provokes in bourgeois pseudo-sophisticates. A Miami councilman denounces the plan to surround 11 of Biscayne Bay's islands with hot-pink skirts for its "chauvinistic use of the natural environment," whatever that might mean, while in Marin County, a woman asserts that the running fence project "amounts to advertising for their books and movies and theatrical gestures." (The Christos have always funded their own projects through the sale of conceptual sketches, and do not accept donations.) The female golfer who stands by the Valley Curtain and describes Christo as "an artist, one of those people who paint pictures" no doubt means to pay him a compliment by calling him "really well-educated," but it can't match the triumphant whoops of the mustached construction workers as they watch the curtain fall into place, or the one who says simply, "This is a vision." Outside of museums, often outside of cities, the Christos' art goes where no art has gone before.

From a distance, Christo and Jean-Claude's work seems like a triumph of pure ego. Extravagantly pointless — even Christo says the works contain "a profound dimension of irrationality" — they're easy to dismiss as white elephants, grand gestures devoid of meaning. But "Five Films" makes the implicit argument that in their sheer artificiality, the Christos' works throw their natural environments into sharper relief. Their translucent fabrics catch the sunlight and register every gust of wind; the sinewy curve of the Running Fence emphasizes the contours of the hills it snakes through, while the 3,100 umbrellas distributed in Japan and California chart the topographical affinities between the two coasts. Even their Pont-Neuf takes a step back toward nature: Wrapped up like a brown paper parcel, it seems less like a man-made structure than a natural rock formation. Christo, who discovers as much in his own works as any spectator, notes approvingly, "It's becoming like a sketch."

Though they're years in the execution and sometimes decades in the planning — The Gates was first conceived in the 1970s — the Christos' projects are strictly limited-time offers; like a flower, a metaphor Christo and Jean-Claude often invoke, they bloom but briefly, usually a matter of weeks. They exist, perhaps, just long enough to transform a landscape, but not long enough to become part of it.

In a sense, then, "Five Films" is the ideal record of the Christos' work, since a film is both permanent and fleeting, always moving forward, flickering light and dark. Though the Christos' extravagant art would seem antithetical to the Maysles' self-effacing "direct cinema" style, a deep similarity emerges. Christo's statement that the social context surrounding the work is the work is practically a prescription for documentary film, and though the Maysles' work is much more natural-seeming, it, like the Running Fence itself, is an artificial structure applied to a natural landscape — the landscape of human experience. Driving toward the same goal from different ends, the Christos and the Maysles create a common ground, a volcanic island thrown up in an empty sea. And for as long as "Five Films" lasts, you explore that strange country with them. As a Japanese shopkeeper says of the umbrellas project, "I feel like I'm standing inside a painting . like I'm part of a dream. It's like dream and reality coming together."

Five Films about Christo and Jean-Claude Fri., Aug. 13-Sun., Aug. 15 International House

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