Rocky Mountain high points

ArtForum, April, 1995 by Jeffrey Slonim

Rechristened Sundance, backed by Redford's name, and blessed with an idyllic location - Park City, Utah, a mountain-ringed former mining town, PR-perfect right down to its Egyptian Revival movie house - the festival quickly became known as a showcase for adventurous independent movie-making. With the success of films like sex, lies, and videotape, River's Edge, and Hoop Dreams (all Sundance discoveries), independent film has broken out of the midnight-movie circuit into profitable popularity. And if the Sundance Film Festival has transformed its Rocky Mountain Shangri-La into a new center of industry hustle, that only demonstrates the credit it can claim for the increase in both the quantity and the quality of American independent film.

We asked a handful of critics, filmmakers, a fashion designer (Isaac Mizrahi), and a museum curator (Lisa Phillips) who attended the festival this January what films impressed them most. Documentaries scored high, with two portraits of artists scoring virtually all round: Douglas Keeve's Unzipped tracks Mizrahi through the creation and presentation of his Fall 1994 collection, and is buoyed by the designer's witty high spirits; Terry Zwigoff's Crumb is a more disquieting look at the life and family of the cartoonist Robert Crumb. Besides these films about artists, two movies by artists - painter David Salle and photographer Larry Clark - piqued our interest. Phillips, a long-time supporter of Salle's work, praises his cinema debut, but Artforum's own columnist and Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman dubs it "a bomb." (See also David Rimanelli's review on page 13.) The consensus on the Clark? The buzz after Sundance's sneak preview suggests that Kids is a cult classic in the making - a film to give the "art" in "art house" a good name.

J. HOBERMAN (film critic, The Village Voice): I liked the two vampire films, Michael Almereyda's Nadja and Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, which were in some respects complementary: attitude-rich films shot in lower Manhattan in black-and-white, each evincing a certain amount of AIDS paranoia, which is now par for the course with this genre. They're both centered on women vampires: in The Addiction Lili Taylor plays a grad student working on her Ph.D. at NYU, whereas Nadja is sort of an arty version of Dracula's Daughter. The films are so different they'd make a wonderful double feature.

I also liked Douglas Keeve's Unzipped, the Isaac Mizrahi portrait. I thought Robert Altman's Ready to Wear was truly oppressive, whereas this was more delightfully gaga, and far more illuminating about the world it represents. There were some other good documentaries, like the one by Don Was about the reclusive Beach Boy, Brian Wilson - a very entertaining and garrulous guy. Then there was Michel Negroponte's Jupiter's Wife, about a homeless schizophrenic woman living in Central Park. I'd say that the best documentaries were personality driven. Finally, I'd recommend Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion, about the vicissitudes of making an independent film.

You don't want to hear about the terrible films - lugubrious Generation X and pre-Generation X soul-searching, really torturous. You feel bad, because people put so much into making these movies, but on the other hand it takes a certain type of calloused ego to put this stuff out there.

By the way, the David Salle film was a bomb.

MICHEL NEGROPONTE (director, Jupiter's Wife): Terry Zwigoff's Crumb was astonishing, a portrait of a '60s legend, the cartoonist Robert Crumb, and his dysfunctional family. It describes the fine line between madness and survival; it's tough, gentle, disturbing, and ultimately exhilarating.

Unzipped is a great epic fluff-piece, It's fun. Douglas Keeve managed to take us backstage for an intimate look at a world that I found surprising. It's shocking how hard supermodels work! Unzipped is one of the finest examples of ethnographic filmmaking I've ever seen.

ISAAC MIZRAHI (fashion designer): Sundance reminded me of fashion week, actually: a desperate little period in which you only have a few days to get everything done. People are running around wildly making deals, hawking, selling and buying.

I was only there for a day, completely booked with Unzipped - related events, so I didn't have a chance to see films. The one film I saw was a short by Jonathan Schell that was shown with Unzipped, called Picasso Would Have Made a Glorious Waiter. It's about Sean Driscoll and the Glorious Food people. I liked it and it seemed to be well received.

The thing I like about Unzipped is that it shows a fashion person as a person, and not just this horrible, wretched, tasteless, feelingless, hysterical screaming harpy with ice water in the veins. It's weird seeing yourself documented for an audience of complete strangers, but I figure at this point in my career I have no humility left. It's not about humility anymore. That's a very early-20th-/late-19th-century experience. It's 1995, and if Roseanne is the Laura Petrie of the TV world, do I really care if people see me in the bathtub?