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MY TOP 10 ART FILMSBY RYAN MCGINLEY  EYE TO EYE Dir. Isabel Hegner 1989 In 1989, Isabel Hegner asked Robert Mapplethorpe if she could make a documentary about him. He was really sick and at the end of his rope at that point, so he suggested she interview Jack Walls, his longtime lover and model, instead. Jack is in many of Mapplethorpe’s photos—he’s the guy in that one picture with the hard-on and the gun. Jack is really funny and insightful, and that’s what makes this film so interesting. He strolls around downtown Manhattan and then flips through Mapplethorpe’s book Certain People, dishing on everyone and telling funny anecdotes, like how Mapplethorpe never had an unlisted phone number and random people would call him up to get their picture taken all the time. Jack said that if they sounded even slightly black, Mapplethorpe would invite them over! The most important quote for me is when Jack is talking about how he deals with being photographed nude and he says, “I divorce myself from the image and after that it’s just a picture of a dick and a gun.” And it’s true, as a photographer I’ve noticed that after a while a photo begins to take on a life of its own and it stops being a picture of your friend or lover or whoever. It becomes simply an image. UNTITLED (FALL ’95) Dir. Alex Bag 1995 This is the one film that is shown in every experimental video-art class. It’s almost like an educational video. Every kid I know who has gone to art school has seen it. Bag portrays a stereotypical undergraduate student at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The eight confessional diary segments (one for each semester) trace an art student’s struggle to make sense of her experience at art school in “the big city.” She is annoying and pretentious, but so naïve that you mostly just feel bad for her. You see her disillusionment coming from a mile away and it just makes you cringe. Between these confessions are other pieces in which Bag does a lot of mocking. She mocks a pretentious artist giving a lecture, a phone-sex-commercial girl, two London shopgirls discussing their punk band, a Ronald McDonald doll attempting to pick up a Hello Kitty doll, and Björk explaining how a television works, among others. If you went to art school this film will make you laugh so hard. It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit geared toward art snobs. Bag really zeros in on her targets and is merciless in her ridicule. KENNY & CO. Dir. Don Coscarelli 1976 This isn’t an art film but it may as well be. I saw it on HBO when I was about five or six and it stuck in my mind for so long. It doesn’t really have much of a plot, it’s just four days in the life of some suburban 12-year-olds, all leading up to Halloween night, the most anticipated night of a boy’s life. It’s all about cherry bombs, pranks, homemade Halloween costumes, bullies, haunted houses, first crushes, pellet guns, M-80s in trash cans, running down railroad tracks, leaving flaming bags of dog shit on doorsteps—all the important kid stuff. It really captures the spirit of being young, and it reminds me how character-building everyday childhood experiences are. Also, some of the scenes were shot with a diffuser lens, causing the picture to appear hazy (like someone smeared Vaseline on the lens), so it’s extra 70s-looking. LOVE BITES Dir. Claudia Hielman 1995 I got this from a super-obsessed Morrissey collector. It’s so rare that it doesn’t even show up when you google it. I think she just made it and never did anything with it. It’s a documentary about Morrissey fans following him around England during the Boxers tour. It’s about all the things that happen on tour, from a fan’s perspective. I can totally relate to what they talk about, having followed Morrissey all over the world taking pictures of him. For instance, when they talk about being up front at the shows and having Morrissey make eye contact with you—I love when that happens. “It’s nice to be noticed by someone you really admire,” says one fan. They talk about the tradition of jumping onstage during the shows and how everyone in the audience is so happy to see someone make it up there. “We’ll always be there, we’ll always bloody be there, it’s too late now,” says another fan, and that’s exactly how I feel. It’s an addiction, going to those shows. HAIR SHOES LOVE AND HONESTY Dir. Mike Mills 1998 One day in 1998 I walked into Alleged Gallery on Spring Street and this film was playing on a bunch of TVs with headphones attached. I put the headphones on and listened to all these different kinds of people speaking genuinely and in depth on the subjects of hair, shoes, love, and honesty—and it was so good it made me want to cry. The people talk about truth in love, heartaches, highs and lows, being true to your lover, romantic messes, walking barefoot, hair transplants, classy shoes, loving selflessly, shaved heads, bald men, dishonesty, loneliness, feeling great in heels, compromise, and afros. It’s like watching a confessional, or a train of thought, and everyone seems so confident about what they’re saying. The film is shot in Mills’s trademark low-key style. The only thing that changes is the backdrop color when people talk about each of the different topics. It’s very subtle and beautiful. See all articles by this contributor
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