Film: Eye Candy, Arkansas Times

"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" coming to LR: Correction

Leslie Newell Peacock — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:36:24 -0500

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry OFFICIAL TRAILER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Alison Klayman's documentary on Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei will show ~~Aug. 24~~ Aug. 31 at Market Street Cinema. (Press release gave wrong date!)

Weiwei is an installation artist whose work with another artist commemorating the deaths of thousands of students in the massive Chinese earthquake of 2008 and other public protests against Chinese authoritarianism got him jailed and beaten; his studio was destroyed last year and China will not allow him to leave the country.

One of Weiwei's best known nonpolitical pieces is "Sunflower Seeds," an installation of 8 million sunflower seeds that was purchased by the Tate Gallery in London.

No showing time for the documentary has been announced yet.

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Saturday at Laman: 'League of Their Own'

Leslie Newell Peacock — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:47:42 -0600

Laman Library's exhibit "Linedrives and Lipstick: The Untold Story of Women’s Baseball" isn't about art, but I'm not letting that stop me from posting here the library's event tomorrow in conjunction with that exhibit: First, a showing of "A League of Their Own" at 1 p.m., and when that's through, a panel discussion with three women who played in the American Girls Professional Baseball League: Sue Kidd of Choctaw, who makes an appearance in the movie and was a pitcher and first baseman in the late '40s and early '50s; Mary Lou “Studnicka” Caden, a pitcher and second baseman from Chicago who now resides in Arkansas; and Delores “Dolly” Brumfield White of Arkadelphia.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 758-1720 or visit www.lamanlibrary.org.

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"Disfarmer": Great movie

Leslie Newell Peacock — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:55:00 -0500

I just got back from seeing Martin Lavut's "Disfarmer: A Portrait of America" and I'm wondering why I didn't make an effort to see this film when it was presented as a work in progress at the Ozark Film Fest or as a completed film last year Hot Springs. It's a great movie, superbly timed and edited, with terrific interviews of down-to-earth Arkansans and New York collectors and gallery owners. It is, of course, an incredible story — a man who claims he was delivered to a family by tornado becomes a misanthrope, changes his last name to Disfarmer (as in anti-farmer, townspeople speculate), shoots 25 cent photographs of the people of Heber Springs and surrounds during the Depression and World War II and becomes, posthumously, declared one of the greatest American photographers of all times. His plates are rescued from destruction by Peter Miller and enlarged and appreciated and a book comes out; then it occurs to collectors to go to Heber Springs and find as many original prints as they can. The originals sell in New York for many thousands. What a story.

The film does the story justice. The contrapuntal critiques are wonderful: in New York, these old-fashioned Arkies in their overalls and funny hats and fish on a line are the picture of a people suffering through the Depression; in Heber Springs, it is noted, nobody knew there was a "Depression on" (to quote "O Brother Where Art Thou"), a sentiment I heard my mother repeat frequently, because Arkansas was so poor anyway. The discussion of the evolution of Disfarmer's work, with the artificial props disappearing and people's real belongings — including a string of fish — appearing. The debate over black-taped white background — is it intentional? Was he exposed to Mondrian? Or was it because he needed the light in that part of the studio and was too lazy to move the background?

The filmmaker not only had some colorful Heber Springs people — and the Russian-born beauty who went there in search of their stories — to include but the images of the photographs themselves, which alone could carry a film, with no narration at all. The detour into the puppet show — its creator was drawn to Disfarmer by one image of two men embracing — about Disfarmer is fabulous. I can't wait to find it and see it again. Unfortunately, today's was the LRFF's last showing of the film.

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