Events Calendar

Cinematheque is an informal film series curated by the UI International Writing Program (IWP) Fall Residents, who introduce and lead conversations around films they have chosen to show to the UI community.
These films are all by/with/for/about IWP 2018 Fall Residents and all have English subtitles. Free & open to all!

This Sunday, followed by a short Q&A with IWP 2018 Fall Resident Jacqueline Goldberg (Venezuela): 

Reveròn 
Directed by Diego Risquez
Venezuela, 2011 (110 min)

(1)
“In the film work of Diego Rísquez there are two main phases that illustrate his approach to cinema. His early work is dominated by experimentation, the use of alternative formats [such] as Super 8, and narratives that do not conform to the traditional story telling techniques. Then there is his mature work, that includes (as of today) three features dedicated to personalities of the history of Venezuela: Manuela Sáenz, Francisco de Miranda and -- in this case -- painter Armando Reverón, an artist who offers the filmmaker the possibility of combining all his concerns. Being an artist himself, Rísquez had been attracted before to Reverón, as the subject of one of his first short films. Now, he concentrates on the last years of Reverón's life, from the day he met his wife, Juanita, to his untimely death in the 1950s. There were many moments in Reverón's later life that begged for visual illustrations, and Rísquez took advantage of them with a plethora of images that show the painter's passion for Juanita, for his surroundings and for his art, and that evoke his time and circle of friends. […]”
Armando Reverón used to sign his paintings with the accent of his name done the other way around. That is why the film is called "Reveròn". 
-- “flobaby” [2014]

(2)
Long a cult figure in the Venezuelan art world, Reveròn was also the subject of a much-admired 1952 documentary by the Venezuelan filmmaker Margot Benacerraf. 
An account of her work can be found here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20687983?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Her film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqgQhtMO6pA

(3)
Modernist in Loincloth and Feathers
-- Holland Cotter, NYTimes 2/9/2007

Unless you have spotted his single smoke-puff of a painting in the Museum of Modern Art, Armando Reverón probably means nothing to you. Why should he? Reverón, who died in 1954, spent most of his life in a shack by the sea in his native Venezuela. Many of his contemporaries dismissed him as nuts. His white-on-white pictures are practically unphotographable.

But chances are that if you visit the Reverón retrospective opening at MoMA on Sunday, you’ll find yourself thinking about him a lot. His art and his story are like few others, and MoMA puts both across in an inspired installation: a single long corridor with compartmentlike rooms of paintings on each side, and at the very end, against a sea-green wall, a life-size doll with giant bat wings floating above her.

Dolls? Bats? White-on-white? Permit me to introduce Reverón.

Born in Caracas in 1889, the only child of a wealthy couple who had no interest in being parents, he was farmed out to another family. Withdrawn and prone to illness, the young Reverón found an early interest in art. As a teenager he studied painting in Caracas, then traveled to Spain and Paris to study some more, devouring Velázquez and Goya, Cézanne and Degas as he went.

Back in Venezuela he joined a group of anti-academic artists known as the Círculo de Bellas Artes, and under the sway of an émigré Russian Symbolist, Nicolas Fernandov, he did a series of paintings in shades of blue. The most striking of them, “The Cave” (1920), is based on Goya’s pictures of seductive women known as majas. But Reverón’s majas, hazily defined and set in some twilight space, are more plump water nymphs than vamps. […] 

Reverón’s response was to flee, moving from place to place, until 1921, when he and Ms. Rios moved to a fishing village called Macuto on the Caribbean coast. There they built two huts with woven palm-frond walls. Before long the huts grew into a small walled compound with a studio, a pool and a Gaudí-esque chapel. Reverón called the place El Castillete, the Tiny Castle, and made its walls higher year by year.

[…] He had many visitors. Macuto was only partly wilderness; it was also an upper-class resort, and Reverón gained a reputation — one he seems to have fostered — as a tourist attraction. If you went to Macuto, you had to drop by El Castillete and watch the crazy artist at work, dashing at his canvas with jabs and swipes, using “brushes” made of cloth, sticks and bones. Afterward you might buy a picture as a souvenir. That was the idea.

The landscapes he painted there between 1926 and 1934 are remarkable. Done mostly in white oils, they depict the immediate beachside surroundings, but as if in a blinding glare, or a light-shot mist. They’re like Whistler nocturnes at tropical high noon.[…] Often referred to as “white paintings,” they actually have touches of blue, gray and aquamarine, and areas of scraped-away pigment that reveal the beige canvas or burlap ground. The compositions, though simple, are astonishingly varied. A pair of tall, thin palm trees forms an ethereal architecture. A foamlike spattering seethes with hidden life, like Rodolphe Bresdin’s foliage. A picture titled “Light Behind My Arbor” — an image of light seen through the porous walls of Reverón’s house — is like a Malevich filtered through Agnes Martin.

If these landscapes are Reverón at his most innovative, others from the 1940s are no less experimental. Their subject, surprisingly, is the industrial port of La Guaira, near Macuto, which was thriving thanks to an oil boom that brought Venezuela economically into the modern world.

Did La Guaira attract Reverón’s attention as a symbol of modernity, which he embraced in his art but retreated from in his life? Or because he figured that the paintings might sell? His images of the place are hardly triumphalist. The docks and sheds seem scratched and pricked into being. The colors are liverish, sad and grimy. Mountains rising behind the town threaten to slide down into its streets.[…] By the time Reverón died in 1954, he was famous as a Latin American modernist pioneer. He was also romanticized as a second Gauguin or van Gogh; maybe he was inviting such comparisons in his self-portraits. He was touted as both insider and outsider, academically trained but self-developed, the creator of a persona that in the end he was unable to live without. El Castillete survived as a relic of that persona until it was destroyed in a mudslide in 1999. […]
More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/arts/design/09reve.html


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Coming up Sunday 10/7:
A Brighter Summer Day [????????? ]
dir. Edward Yang. Taiwan, 1991 (3 hrs 57 min)
followed by a short Q&A with Huang Chong-Kai

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Stay tuned to the IWP's Facebook page for announcements of the Residents' film choices for subsequent Sundays!