Released in 2025, Alex Braverman’s documentary Thank You Very Much provides footage and interviews that attempt to shed more light on the life and career of comedian Andy Kaufman. Even if you are already familiar with Kaufman’s work, there’s a lot of rare and fascinating archival material here. The film covers his childhood and family life in an attempt to find out who he was at his core. What’s more interesting is watching a performer who wasn’t afraid to take risks and alienate both his audience and the people around him, and to wonder what kind of work he would make today.
In 1999 Jim Carrey portrayed Andy Kaufman in the biographical film Man on the Moon. He remained in character throughout the filming, both onset and off, even claiming that Kaufman himself was behind his performance. In 2017 Netflix released the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, which includes interviews with the cast and behind the scenes footage. It explores Carrey’s method acting, as well as what seems at times to be him using this behavior to work through his own personal issues.
Both films highlight how difficult it is to really know another person and their motivations. Was Andy Kaufman more than a provocateur looking to get laughs? Was Jim Carrey channeling him in his performance? Ultimately, these films leave you to decide for yourself.
The story in the 2024 documentary Secret Mall Apartment, feels relatively straightforward at first. In 2003, a group of eight artists built an apartment in a small, unused space in the Providence Place shopping mall in Providence, Rhode Island. They continued to use it until they were discovered a few years later. But the film takes you on a journey beyond the creation of the apartment. It’s also about gentrification, urban development, and artist housing; mall culture and consumerism; the artists’ work outside the apartment; and, by the end, even the question of what makes something art.
Artist Michael Townsend was no stranger to art installations. He had previously created one inside a drainage tunnel, allowing only a select few with keys to see it. When local artist venue and living space Fort Thunder was torn down, the idea of living in the nearby new mall began. He remembered noticing an odd extra space while the mall was still being constructed. After searching and finding it with his then-wife Adriana Valdez Young, friends and fellow artists Colin Bliss, Andrew Oesch, Greta Scheing, James Mercer, Emily Ustach, and Jay Zehngebot joined them to build the apartment. Luckily for viewers, the process was also documented with a Pentax Optio (even if the footage is low-res). Furniture was added, along with a video game system, and eventually a wall.
While their new home provided a break from the outside world, it also became a place for the artists to plan their tape-art installations. These included a five-year portrait series in NYC for 9/11; a mural on the site of the Oklahoma City bombing; and creating work with kids on the walls of Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Rhode Island. Townsend continues to make tape-art projects today.
The documentary is fun to watch and at times, even inspirational. It’s currently available to watch on Netflix and other online platforms.
In Welcome to Li’l Wolf, 2022-3 Fellow Amy Ritter‘s solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, she explores the mobile home park where she grew up and her parents continue to live. Throughout her career she has documented several mobile home parks around the U.S. and considers how they reflect on the American Dream. For this exhibition the work is more personal and includes depictions of her father, his life, and his feelings of nostalgia.
From the press release-
In 2015, Ritter created the MH Archive to document the forgotten and marginalized mobile home communities across the United States. Through meticulous documentation consisting of interviews, photography, recordings, and video, Ritter has gained a deeper understanding of the diverse world of manufactured housing. This ongoing process of visiting mobile home parks now brings her back to where her interests originated, Li’l Wolf, her parents’ mobile home community in eastern Pennsylvania. Using her father’s camcorder from the ’90s, she turns her focus inside her childhood home for the first time. She offers the audience a glimpse into her father’s life by investigating the spaces he inhabits.
When the visitor first steps into the gallery, they are confronted by Li’l Wolf 6, part of the artist’s ongoing MHWindow Series. In this life-sized photograph, taken of a window at her parents’ home, Ritter captures the exterior of a world often guarded and hidden from society. Installed opposite the photograph is the video “Happy Birthday Dean.” Here, Ritter gives the viewer an intimate tour of the inside of her father’s home, culminating with footage from a recent birthday party. The celebration evokes feelings of nostalgia in her father and a yearning for his childhood—a time when things were easier for him. As his age has increased, so too have his fears and resistance to change, encapsulated by the fifteen-minute video Fear | Comfort, projected on the central wall.
The insecurities that haunt Ritter’s father flicker across the projector and TV screen. But, unlike the details of his home’s exterior, they remain partly hidden from view. The viewer is asked to project onto Ritter’s father their own baggage about the American Dream. Seen through his daughter’s lens, he becomes a window into the psyche of an entire generation, leaving us with the question: “How do we restore the dignity of those who get left behind?”
Ritter more recently created work in a similar vein for the 2025 installation What Does it Feel Like To Be You at Ortega y Gasset Projects.
In Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1983 film, Nostalghia, a Russian author finds himself lost in memories of home while traveling in Italy researching the life of an 18th century Russian composer who committed suicide after returning to Russia from Italy. The film initially follows the author, Andrei Gorchakov, and his relationship with his attractive interpreter. Drifting between dreams of his family in Russia shot in black-and-white and the present day in color, he later becomes fascinated by a local man, Domenico, who struggles with complicated issues of his own.
Nostalghia features motifs Tarkovsky used in many of his films including reflections, mirrors, water, and birds. There are also several scenes reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman‘s work, including the dream scenes of his wife and the interpreter (seen below). Tarkovsky’s feelings while living in Italy, away from his homeland, are also mirrored by those of Gorchakov.
It is in the character of Domenico (played by actor Erland Josephson who was also in several Bergman films), his past, and his connection to the author, that the film takes a more interesting and tragic turn.
Through Domenico’s moving speech, given from on top of a statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, Tarkovsky comments on a culture he sees headed in the wrong direction.
“What ancestor speaks in me? I can’t live simultaneously in my head and in my body. That’s why I can’t be just one person. I can feel within myself countless things at once.
There are no great masters left. That’s the real evil of our time. The heart’s path is covered in shadow. We must listen to the voices that seem useless in brains full of long sewage pipes of school wall, tarmac and welfare papers. The buzzing of insects must enter. We must fill the eyes and ears of all of us with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we’ll build the pyramids. It doesn’t matter if we don’t. We must fuel that wish and stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet.
If you want the world to go forward, we must hold hands. We must mix the so-called healthy with the so-called sick. You healthy ones! What does your health mean? The eyes of all mankind are looking at the pit into which we are plunging. Freedom is useless if you don’t have the courage to look us in the eye, to eat, drink and sleep with us! It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to the verge of ruin. Man, listen! In you water, fire and then ashes, and the bones in the ashes. The bones and the ashes!
Where am I when I’m not in reality or in my imagination? Here’s my new pact: it must be sunny at night and snowy in August. Great things end. Small things endure. Society must become united again instead of so disjointed. Just look at nature and you’ll see that life is simple. We must go back to where we were, to the point where we took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the water. What kind of world is this if a madman tells you you must be ashamed of yourselves!
O Mother! The air is that light thing that moves around your head and becomes clearer when you laugh.”
Although written in the 1980s the speech feels relevant today, perhaps more than ever. Below is the re-release trailer.
In Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Mirror (1975) we follow the history of a dying poet, told through his dreamlike memories. It’s one of Tarkovsky’s most personal films and is semi-autobiographical. His older mother appears in the film, and he includes poetry by his father, Arseny Tarkovsky. Alternating between black-and-white and color film, as well as Russian archival footage, the film is nonlinear. Different characters are at times played by the same actor, like the younger version of his mother and his wife.
The visual poetry of the film captures something universal that is hard to describe in words, but is very affecting. Mirrors, reflections, flooding, fire, a gust of wind- even just watching the condensation from a cup disappear from a table- there’s so much to take in and contemplate.
Filled with his famous long takes, time moves more slowly in Mirror, and provides a much-needed break from our often too fast-paced world.
The Recap, my Substack newsletter, returns today with a focus on abstract art, punk rock, the American flag, the 90s, and more. It adds a little more dimension to what I post on the website and ties things together thematically.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, his thriller starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, issues of power, control, obsession, and identity loom large over the mysterious plot. Stewart plays Scottie, a former San Francisco detective who retired when a traumatic incident left him with a debilitating fear of heights and vertigo. He is hired as a private investigator to follow an acquaintance’s wife, Madeline, played by Kim Novak, who has recently been acting strangely.
Shot in Technicolor, Hitchcock uses the vivid colors to represent the characters. Below, a hotel sign fills the room with an eerie green light, and Scottie’s head floats in red within a dream sequence that includes colorful animation.
There are also several recurring motifs throughout the film. One of the strongest is the various spirals present throughout the film- the tree rings, Madeline’s hair and the hair of the woman in the painting, and the staircase in the mission. Of course, spirals can be dizzying, and when someone is feeling overwhelmed by their thoughts it is often referred to as “spiraling”- which Scottie is doing as the film progresses. They can also represent the cyclical nature of time.
Madeline and Scottie among the Redwood trees in Muir Woods
Madeline points to two lines marking her life.
Northern California is the backdrop and the scenes in and around San Francisco in the 1950s are stunning.
Vertigo received mixed reviews at the time of its release, but is now considered one of the best films ever made. Through his unique personal vision, Hitchcock created a world to get lost in, with new things to notice on each revisit. The film can also serve as a reminder to struggling artists to stay true to their own ideas- sometimes it takes time for a work to gain appreciation.
Brazilian documentary photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado passed away on May 23rd at the age of 81. His distinctive black and white images brought attention to previously unseen cultures, devastating humanitarian crises, and the struggles of workers, all around the world. Later, he turned his sharp focus to the remote natural world and its inhabitants.
The images in this post are from the 2014 documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The film celebrates the artist’s life and career and focuses on several of his large projects.
Salgado also created Instituto Terra with his wife Lélia in 1998. The organization focuses on planting trees and restoring Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. The project began in on his family’s farmland, pictured below, before and after the restoration.
Below are additional images from Salgado’s environmental work seen in the film.
Charles and Ray Eames‘ Powers of 10, is currently on view as part of Palm Springs Art Museum‘s Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990, among a collection of experimental abstract films.
In the nine minute film you travel in powers of 10 in two directions, starting with a couple having a picnic in a park in Chicago. You then zoom out into space until you are 100 million light years distance from them and then return to travel into the man’s hand in negative powers of 10 until you reach a proton of a carbon atom at 10−16 meters.
Below is the film in its entirety but it is definitely worth seeing on a big screen if you can.
Wim Wenders‘ 2023 film Perfect Days, stars Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo who leads a solitary but seemingly contented life. He spends his time outside of work reading, listening to music on cassette tapes, taking care of his plants, and taking analog photos of trees. This simple life begins to change as smaller and larger moments with others expand his world and alter his routines.
The quiet film focuses on a few of these people- including his coworker and later the surprise arrival of his niece. Watching them together as they spend his previously solitary days mirroring each other unconsciously, is especially lovely. After her departure there is another interaction that leaves the viewer to wonder if Hirayama will continue to live this simple life or embrace potential changes to his “perfect days”.
The pictures of the trees throughout the film capture the Japanese word “komorebi”. The word is defined at the end of the film, after the credits, as “the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind”. These images continue in Hirayama’s black and white dreams, created by Wenders’ wife Donata.
Wim Wenders is currently showing two bodies of work at Howard Greenberg Gallery in NYC- Written in the West, from his roadtrip to the American West in 1983 and Once, a series of works from his travels and encounters with Hollywood. This exhibition will be on view until 3/15/25.
