PRESS KIT GUS VAN SANT, THE EXHIBITION 13 April-31 July 2016 An exhibition designed by La Cinémathèque française Co-produced with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin), the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne) and la Cinémathèque suisse (Lausanne) With participation from the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée Thanks to support from the Neuflize OBC Bank, the Fondation Gan pour le cinéma and Vivendi Major benefactors of La Cinémathèque française Friends of La Cinémathèque française In partnership with Curator Matthieu Orléan (La Cinémathèque française) Exhibition designed by berton+kravtsova The GUS VAN SANT/ICONS exhibition catalogue is co-published by La Cinémathèque française and Actes-Sud The Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin) will present the exhibition from 6 October 2016 to 9 January 2017 and the Musée de l’Elysée with la Cinémathèque suisse (Lausanne) from 25 October 2017 to 7 January 2018 GUS VAN SANT, THE EXHIBITION Every day (except Tuesday and 1 May): noon to 7:00 pm, Thursdays until 10 pm. Full price: €11 – Reduced price: €8.50* - Under 18: €5.50 - Libre Pass: free Exhibition + film or exhibition + Musée de La Cinémathèque: €12.50 Open ticket (undated priority ticket): €12 on sale on cinematheque.fr and fnac.com Media partners LA CINÉMATHÈQUE FRANÇAISE PRESS ATTACHÉ ATTACHÉE DE PRESSE LA CINÉMATHÈQUE FRANÇAISE Elodie Dufour - Tel.: 01 71 19 33 65 / 06 86 83 65 00 – [email protected] CONTENTS 1- GUS VAN SANT, THE EXHIBITION (13 April-31 July 2016) Gus Van Sant/Icons by Matthieu Orléan, Curator of the Exhibition Walking through the exhibition The texts Catalogue of the GUS VAN SANT ICONS exhibition Co-published by La Cinémathèque française and Actes sud Tours and itineraries 2- MASTER CLASS, CATALOGUE SIGNING AND LECTURES Thursday 14 April at 7:00 pm: GUS VAN SANT BY GUS VAN SANT Master Class moderated by Matthieu Orléan 8:30 pm: the filmmaker will sign GUS VAN SANT ICONS at the bookshop Lectures Thursday 21 April at 7:00 pm: “Dreamachine Cinema: The Art of Gus Van Sant” by MATTHIEU ORLÉAN Thursday 5 May at 7:00 pm: “River Phoenix: A Fallen Angel” by JEAN-MARC LALANNE Thursday 12 May at 7:00 pm: “Gus Van Sant: The Song of the Tracks” by CYRIL BÉGHIN 3- RETROSPECTIVE (13 April-28 May 2016) 4- ONLINE AT CINEMATHEQUE.FR The Gus Van Sant Galaxy Alicia Miles and John Robinson in Elephant by Gus Van Sant (2003) © HBO 1- GUS VAN SANT, THE EXHIBITION (13 April – 31 July 2016) Gus Van Sant Untitled, 2010. © Gus Van Sant. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery GUS VAN SANT/ICONS The exhibition is a journey through Gus Van Sant’s films, works (photographs, visual art and music unknown in France) and collaboration with other artists (William Burroughs, William Eggleston, Bruce Weber and David Bowie). It explores the world of this cult director, the epitome of bold, radical, anti-conformist cinema. Gus Van Sant’s films are the photosensitive plate of post-modern (post-pop, post-New Hollywood, post-activist) American history. French audiences discovered this figurehead of independent American cinema’s renewal when Drugstore Cowboy¹ came out in 1989. With neither a banner nor a manifesto, he secretly, quietly spearheads and upholds a form of artistic freedom that shines outward from the fringes. Taken one by one, independently of each other, his films are surprising. Their complex narrative structure (in the form of mosaics or collages) and shifts in tone are disconcerting: this is a dissonant cinema where melancholy and humour are never considered opposites. Taken together as a whole, the 16 features are staggering, so extremely different are they from one another, as though Van Sant continuously reinvents his cinema one film after another. One wonders whether the director who stopped time during a massacre in Elephant (based on Columbine) is the same person who sped up the life of gay activist Harvey Milk and filmed youth with such gravity (Elephant, Paranoid Park) and the Beat Generation as enfants terribles. The spiritual heir to that poetic protest movement, Van Sant echoes their aesthetic anti-conformity mixing political, sexual and spiritual demands. In Drugstore Cowboy, for example, William Burroughs, who wrote his own lines for the film, plays a drug-addicted priest. His poetic writings also inspired two of Van Sant’s shorts, including The Discipline of DE in 1977. A few years later, Van Sant repeated the exercise with Ballad of the Skeletons, a film-collage in the art video tradition, where Allen Ginsberg, another Beat bard, reads his eponymous poem, a seemingly endless broadside against the vanities of contemporary society. A MULTI-FACETED FILMMAKER Gus Van Sant’s rich, heterogeneous filmography forces us to rethink the definition of auteur. The multi-faceted American director clouds the issue and tangles the red thread, painting a picture with unprecedented motifs, even trying to disappear when he copied Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary Psycho shot by shot. As with any auteur, of course there are recurring themes and faces (Matt Damon as a troubled genius in Good Will Hunting in 1997, a lost hiker in Gerry in 2002 and an oil company employee struggling to find his ethical bearings in Promised Land in 2012), but above all an ability to start all over again from scratch, at each step, to re-invent a new dream of cinema. At one point in his career, the dream involved finding shelter in the studios (Universal, Miramax and Columbia) in order to tell stories within a superstructure where the hierarchy and rules protect the obedient craftsman that he is. At others, on the contrary, the dream is the quest for unconditional freedom: experimental films (climaxing with Mala Noche) self-produced with a beginner’s fervour and, later, the “Death Tetralogy” (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park, in chronological order), a series of radical formal experiments that gracefully, acutely redefine the American space (the desert, high school, forest and skate park have never looked as menacing since Raoul Walsh, David Lynch, Terrence Malick and Larry Clark, respectively). Although Van Sant is nurtured by influences from elsewhere, especially Europe (from Béla Tarr to Bernardo Bertolucci and Chantal Akerman), he always remains attuned to the state (real or subconscious) of his country: the violent America of outsiders and down-and-outs, of scrapbooks and the all-pervasive media, of scorched earth and an endangered environment. He is also the filmmaker of the America that invented folk and psychedelic music, an irreverent way of being in the world and on the road: the metaphysical matrix road from which one comes (My Own Private Idaho) or, on the contrary, the labyrinthine road that goes nowhere (Gerry); the road that sets Will Hunting free in the last shot of the film (accepting responsibility, for the first time, for his choice to leave) or the one Marion Crane (Anne Heche) takes at night at the same speed as her alter-ego Janet Leigh in Hitchcock’s Psycho, of which Van Sant’s remake is the sick, twisted, uncontrollable double. The shots are the same, or almost; so is the fear, the driving rain and the detective with his big dark glasses. Van Sant enjoys venturing out onto new ground or, on the contrary, to the centre of ordinarily untouchable empires. The point is to play with the latitude he likes, as a pure filmmaker, as though doing always matters more than seeing: cinematographic writing on reception. Van Sant enjoys challenging cinema, without a capital “C” and without turning it into a sacred cow, positioning his discourse in light of his personal practice with a passion for describing the tools allowing him to create it: camera lenses, types of film, the grain’s pictorial quality (which brings him back to his first passion, painting; the exhibition will feature around 20 large-scale works that have never been on display before in France, most created specially in the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles in 2011), the spatialisation of sound and mixing. His work process blossoms within the framework of a team bound together by trust, resulting in paradoxically complex and effective directing. In particular, he is in osmosis with cinematographers Christopher Doyle and, especially, Harris Savides, who made the magical light in six of his films. Van Sant openly embraces his obsession with abstraction, even when his work is based on actual events (Milk), crime (To Die For) or his own life (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy). Even in his most political films, the point has never been to denounce injustice but to touch us, as though they were above all a tangible, tactile, sensorial essence (Milk, edited with the imperious energy of a political flyer in the form of a film where archival footage echoes the hero’s joys and cries). The political dimension, which evolves in his body of work depending on continuously updated operating methods, is never incompatible with the emotion that inhabits his characters when doing the most mundane or incongruous things: caressing each other in the shower before committing a massacre (Elephant), figure-skating over a corpse (To Die For), falling off a huge boulder without a scratch (Gerry), dressing as a rifle-toting woman (Last Days), outlining a body in chalk on asphalt (Restless). Van Sant’s photography, which occupies a key place in the exhibition, underpins those actions. He spontaneously started taking hundreds of Polaroid shots in the 1980s. Everything in them depends on the deceptively simple- looking balance between shadow and light. Van Sant captures nothing. On the contrary, he frees the people he meets when preparing his films (whether actors, dancers, writers or singers), a metonymic sample of the American people, and puts them on an equal footing with each other.