UPON ANOTHER TIME

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is many things: a shoot ‘em up, a buddy film, a nostalgia trip, a revisionist history, and mostly, an essay about the fickle and devastating movement of time. The film, which runs over two and a half hours and never flags, shows how times past (fictional, historical, personal) course inextricably through the present. To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never past, even when remembered incorrectly.

As the movie, set in 1969 and framed around the Manson murders, marches towards its ugly conclusion, we spend time with three Los Angeles movie industry characters: past-his-prime television actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and Dalton’s neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Each time we drop in on one we are served, in bright, lithe, brilliantly constructed flashbacks, a glimpse at the events that brought them to this point. As Tate watches herself fight in a movie, she remembers training for the stunts. As Doug meets a young television star, he relives a major failed audition. As Cliff fixes the antenna on the roof of Doug’s house, he recalls a life-altering conflict with is ex-wife. These memories flare up instantly and seamlessly, slicing cleanly through the present and then dropping the viewer right back into it. They lend depth to the main narrative without pulling it off on shaggy paths.

There has been criticism about the way Tate is portrayed here, as a glowy, speechless feminine archetype: smiling, dancing, driving on the freeway. But Rick and Cliff too are pictured mainly in small moments, many sadly domestic. We see Doug cracking eggs and making frozen margaritas, and we see Cliff opening cans of dog food and making macaroni and cheese. As a counterpoint, we witness all three of these characters in small triumphs. Tate hears a movie theater audience laugh at her on-screen pratfall. Cliff beats up an unsuspecting martial arts star on a Hollywood backlot. And Rick reshapes trite bag-guy dialogue to steal a scene. It’s in these small moments – often mundane – that they make themselves and their lives. Tate, as we see her, is young woman going about her days: running errands, meeting friends, listening to records. It’s an honorable way to depict her, or anyone.

August 20, 2019 by Nalina Moses

BACK IN THE DAY

Gary Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum, has the most perfect format for a photography exhibit. Visitors sit in a dark hall on soft benches gazing at twelve different slide shows on the walls, each picture the size of a windshield projected for the time of a walk sign. The slide shows are staggered, so the eye wanders from one to the other and then back again, tirelessly, hypnotically, even as one loop begins to repeat itself.

The 450 color slides here were selected from over 45,000 left by Winogrand at the time of his death in 1984, and have a scattershot quality. Most are good and some are perfect, but none are without visual and cultural interest. There are classic Winogrand themes: twinning (two teenage girls in matching striped sweaters looking different ways), layering (stooped men passing below stiffly pretty bridal mannequins in a window display), and voyeruism (one gentleman in the crush of a rush hour sidewalk turning a knowing eye to the photographer).

Most of the photographs are from the early 1960′s, before hippies, second wave feminism, civil rights, and the Kennedy assassinations. It’s a gentler time. Winogrand’s photographs are restricted thematically, with only a handful of black and Asian subjects. Gender codes are inflexible; women wear dresses, heels and costume jewelry, and men wear suits and hats. At first the photos have a chic Mad Men gloss, but on closer inspection everyone inside them appears a bit ragged, run-down by the show.

Winogrand’s compositions are typically about five degree off-kilter, with a center of gravity perilously close to the frame. This instability is telling. The photographer’s compulsion to capture every moment, every corner, every character, here feels less manic than sad. It’s as if the world he sees, that he’s sitting inside of, is tipping dangerously. And it is.

August 16, 2019 by Nalina Moses