December 24, 2003
THE FACE
The oft-repeated but still-juicy line from Godard: "The history of cinema is boys photographing girls. The history of history is boys burning girls at the stake." You can confirm the second sentence by watching TV for three minutes. To confirm the first sentence, watch the Cat Power videos available here at the Matador website.
I don't know who Brett Vapnek is, but she's internalized the not-very-hidden fact that Chan Marshall is beautiful like few people are ever beautiful. She does what director Patrick Daughters does in the "Maps" video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs--lets the remarkable looking people provide remarkability. Each Cat Power video is better than the previous one because each song is better than the previous one and Marshall is more beautiful in each successive video. (At this rate, she will soon become a small dwarf star.) "He War," a song that drives me bananas when I can't see her, is almost unbearable as an actual sequence of moving images. The bronzed paeans to Jean Seberg and Anna Karina and Garbo tumble through my head, but they don't stay long. There is little to say except "I was hoping to see somebody who looked like that one day." And I have.
Posted by Sasha at December 24, 2003 05:20 PM | TrackBack