Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic “Blonde” meets documentary artist portraits about Nan Goldin and jazz veterans in Venice.
Crisis? What crisis? The festival at the Lido has been running for eight days now, and even in the final stretch there is hardly any sign of the worst crisis in the cinema industry for decades.
At least as long as you don’t run into anyone running a cinema. “At first we thought people would come back, but now we don’t believe that anymore,” says a Düsseldorf film theater director who has been attending the festival for decades.
The fact that the above-average US cinema does not arouse optimism is due to a structural change that is unlikely to reverse: almost all of the Hollywood productions that the festival is showing this year come from the streaming services. Artistically, they were unquestionably created for the big screen – but you only get to see them a few weeks before the screen premiere, if at all. This includes Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s lavish Marilyn Monroe biography created for Netflix. Which festival wouldn’t grab it right away?
Sixty years after her death, there has been no satisfactory approximation of the life of the most iconic star of the post-war period, and the 165 minutes now available do not necessarily claim to fill this gap. But it is a surprisingly experimental feature film, far more interested in Marilyn Monroe’s pop art afterimage than in the continuously growing film-historical or even criminalistic Monroe research.
The fact that this film does not collapse because of its disparate form is thanks to an amazing leading lady – Ana de Armas, the female star of the latest Bond film, is not an obvious cast, but she plays the difficult role relentlessly and with immense range. Her trust in this artistically risky production includes numerous nude scenes – right down to the sight of the corpse, which the director used as a metaphor and also went down in the visual memory of the 20th century.
Alternating between the harsh black and white of a Weegee’s press photos and warm, colorful technicolor tones, the film dramatizes Joyce Carol Oates’ biography novel of the same name, which inspired a television miniseries immediately after its publication in 2001. Rather offbeat accents are set: Driven by the desire to meet her unknown father, the star develops a capacity for suffering that makes her the prey of abusive men – including the sons of two Hollywood stars, Charlie Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr..
On the other hand, there is enormous assertiveness; Self-improvement and self-destruction go hand in hand.
Through this psychological prism, her celebrity husbands, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, become caricatures, the latter in Adrian Brody’s portrayal a glorifying one. It is a strange amalgam of a film, as is so often the case with Netflix films, the overlength acts more as a camouflage of a multi-part format – after all, “content” is produced after minutes. So the cinema audience misses the satisfaction of a closed dramaturgy, but there are other qualities: Artfully staged film scenes that experience subtle breaks. Or a film music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis that bores far below the level of action.
Every biopic from the film world also touches on the domain of documentary film, after all, the newly staged must always be measured against the archival legacy. This makes it all the easier for Venice to place a documentary film at this interface on an equal footing in the major competition. The filmmaker Laura Poitras, known for her work on Wikileaks and Edward Snowdon (“Risk”, “Citizenfour”), this time dedicated herself to the photo artist Nan Goldin.
“The Ballad of Sexual Addiction,” Goldin’s influential slide series about people living outside established gender constructs, offers only the backstory. The main issue is different: Goldin has been active for years as an activist against the pharmaceutical company Purdue and its owner family Sackler, which she blames for the opioid addiction that is devastating, especially in the USA – the company is still making profits with the painkiller oxycodone, which was initially advertised aggressively Billions in sales, Goldin speaks of 300,000 deaths from addiction.
The artist herself became addicted to the drug she was prescribed after an operation in 2014 and subsequently sourced large doses on the black market. Since a successful withdrawal in 2018, she has organized spontaneous performances in world-famous museums such as New York’s Guggenheim, which knows the Sacklers as generous sponsors – but also has Goldin in its collections. The actions regularly force art museums to turn down the Sacklers’ pledges of donations; Most recently, the National Portrait Gallery in London had to turn down a million-dollar donation under public pressure.
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” was the name Poitras gave to her thrilling film, which, thanks to Goldin’s activism, never loses sight of her artistic work.
Hardly noticed by the film crowd at the Lido, on the other hand, a beguiling newer work by Goldin himself can be discovered. At the Art Biennale, her 16-minute video work Sirens can be found in the Italian Pavilion, that grandiosely curated gathering of often-ignored female positions in the 20th century. The found footage film revolves around footage of the first African American “supermodel” Donyale Luna, who died of a heroin overdose in 1979. Goldin takes an Andy Warhol screen test of Luna as the occasion for a delirious collage of surreal-associated material of intoxicatingly unreal beauty.
With the documentary film, the festival in Venice has had a solid pillar in the program for a long time and always emphasizes its artistic aspects. The Danish veteran Jørgen Leth, whose legendary avant-garde short film “The Perfect Man” was once used by Lars von Trier as the subject of his essay film “The Five Obstructions”, is making an impressive comeback with a jazz film.
In “Music for Black Pigeons” the 85-year-old goes in search of the secret of improvisation together with co-director Andreas Koefoed. Greats like Lee Konitz and Bill Frisell are among the protagonists of a feather-light, poetically discursive film about a design principle that spontaneous film work has in common with music. A film festival would do well to think outside the box of its favorite art, especially in times of crisis.
