Reality Hunger (24 page)

Mr. Winterbottom’s recent films have trampled the boundary between artifice and documentary.

How much is true and how much is acting in this extremely intimate, fake-but-real documentary about the Wagners, a voluble, often abrasive New York couple in late middle age who
drive across the country with their adult daughters to visit their son, a Los Angeles filmmaker? That filmmaker, Andrew Wagner, who accompanied them on the trip, is actually the producer, director, and cinematographer of
The Talent Given Us
. Whatever the truth, this fascinating, lively film adds a new twist to the documentary form.

It’s always been tough getting my life and art aligned, and I firmly believe that in order to be a truly good artist, you need to link your art to your life.

Try to make it real—compared to what?

My real life has fallen into the cracks between myself and my film.

Richard Stern is, as one critic has said, “almost famous for being not famous”—friend of Pound, Beckett, Bellow, Mailer, Roth. Stern says, “My whole life I’ve pursued these people: great inventors. What is the best, the most interesting thing going? Since I was a little tyke, I’ve wanted to find out what makes the great tick. Growing up in New York, I trailed Sinclair Lewis up to what didn’t succeed in being an escape route, I met Artur Schnabel on a bus and asked him if he’d like to use our piano, Einstein in Central Park. In England—Cambridge—the physicist Paul Dirac came over with a misdelivered letter, so I used to cross the street and ask dumbie questions about the Big Bang. He was supposed to be laconic,
Delphic, but I found him open and fluent. Being at the University of Chicago has led to friendships with all sorts of remarkable people. Writers are usually the best to know. Their business is openness and fluency. People frequently ask, ‘Isn’t it bad to be in Roth’s and Bellow’s shadow?’ I don’t feel that.” He doesn’t feel that because his deepest subject has always been the making and remaking of actuality. By standing next to monuments and measuring them, he has produced meditations on the relation between imagination and reality that are as meaningful, powerful, profound, beautiful, and funny as any of the monuments he was measuring. A book he has cited as one of his strongest influences is Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier:
the putatively pathetic Dowell contemplating the putatively heroic Ashburnham. “You make something of your limits,” Stern says. “Maybe that’s your signature.” It’s shtick: R. Stern, pro schlemiel; friend of the great, the near great, the ingrate. An interviewer asks him, “How did this brainy, intellectual, deliberately obsolete persona of yours evolve?” Stern’s reply: “Boy, I’m devastated.” Asked why his work isn’t more popular, he says, “There’s an absence of something—an energy, a breadth. A severity, a sourness. Some recusant quality which repels? A low quotient of magic? Who knows?” He quotes John Barth saying to him, “Oh, you know a lot, and you’re productive, but where’s the virtuosity, where’s the art?” The art consists of feigning that there’s mainly miscellany and little order to Stern’s “orderly miscellanies,” which Hugh Kenner has called “almost the invention of a new genre.” In their hybrid messiness, straddling fiction and non-, life and art, Stern’s “orderly miscellanies” perfectly embody and dramatize Stern’s perpetual agon. The miscellanies’ titles invariably define, with precision and subtlety, the thematic investigations the books undertake:
One Person and Another
is about idolatry;
What Is What Was
is about memory;
The Position of the Body
is about mortality. Asked who have been the biggest influences on him, he says, “Stendhal. Proust means so much. James. Dante. Bellow: he’s someone who kept going, who was disciplined. I admire that. I can already feel … I’ve had a flirtation or two with extinction. Life readies you for not living.” Asked what current work he admires, Stern says, “The real stuff going on today is women’s poetry—Sharon Olds writing about sex, or her feelings for her father, or her daughter, having a baby, and all that. That’s big stuff.” Whenever Stern starts talking about literature, he inevitably winds up talking about life; the anxious relation between life and literature is what his work always worries. Several years ago, Stern was going to visit my class, but due to a medical emergency in his family, he had to cancel and reschedule for the following year. First, though, he had suggested, “I could call you or you could call me, put me on the speakerphone, perhaps with microphone amplifier. I would apologize to the audience, speaking about the way life erupts and how dealing with it is one thing literature does, and then I would like—if possible—to read my story ‘Wissler Remembers’ over the phone and …” On and on his email went, deliriously trapped in the interstices between life and art.

It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.

The life we live is not enough of a subject for the serious artist; it must be a life with a leaning, a life with a tendency to shape itself only in certain forms.

In
The Shadow
, also known as
The Detective
, the French photographer and conceptual artist Sophie Calle arranges for her mother to hire a detective, who follows Calle and documents her movements; the detective doesn’t know that Calle is aware of him. In
Venetian Suite
, Calle meets a man at a party and decides to follow him to Venice, where she stalks him throughout the city, taking photographs and chronicling his movements. At the end of the experiment, she confronts the man.
The Hotel:
she takes a job as a chambermaid. Before she cleans each room, she photographs and documents what each visitor has brought and in what state he or she has left the room, drawing conclusions about each person.
Dominique V
is Calle’s investigation into the disappearance of a woman who told Calle she wanted to be just like her. There has been a fire in the woman’s apartment, and she has disappeared. Calle photographs the scene and compares it to the charred portraits and photos the woman took before she had vanished. In
Journey to California
, a man writes Calle a fan letter, saying he’s heartbroken and wants nothing more than to sleep in Calle’s bed. She ships her bed to him in California. The two keep in contact over the next six months. The bed is returned. The work documents the journey the bed took.
The Sleepers:
Calle invites twenty-eight random strangers to take turns sleeping in her bed. She interviews and photographs them, displaying the results in an exhibit.
Double Game:
Paul Auster, who based a fictional character on Calle, assists the artist in her attempt to imitate the life of Auster’s fictional character. Calle documents each step of the crossing and recrossing of the border between fiction and reality.
The Stripper:
Calle takes a job as a stripper. A friend photographs her, the crowd, and the milieu. In
The Blind
, Calle asks several blind people to define what they think
beauty is. She posts each of their responses next to a photo of each subject.
The Address Book
(much my favorite): Calle finds an address book. Before returning it to the owner, she photographs its pages, then calls everyone in the book. She asks each of them to describe the owner of the book, his habits, qualities, idiosyncrasies, creating a portrait of the man via these interviews. The man is upset when he discovers what she has done.
No Sex Last Night
is her video of a trip she takes across the United States with a man. The relationship between the two is nearly over. They marry in Las Vegas, but the marriage lasts only until the end of the journey. In
Take Care of Yourself
, one hundred seven women interpret a breakup email Calle received on the last day of a love affair. In
Last Seen
and
Ghosts
, Calle asks people to describe pictures that had been removed or stolen from a museum, then she places the museumgoers’ responses in the empty spaces.
Public Places, Private Spaces:
she travels to Jerusalem, where she asks both Israelis and Palestinians to share a public place with her that they consider sacred. Her audience isn’t sure if the transformation is supposed to occur within the artwork or themselves. Calle: “These projects are a way for me to have emotions which I can control because I can decide in a way when it’s going to stop, whereas in normal life I can’t control my emotions as easily. I was always curious. I could watch people sleep even when their wives didn’t, because it was art. Now it’s a way of life. I no longer ask myself what I’m doing, but I’m not obsessed with whether it really is art. For me, it’s a game; it’s the critics’ decision to call it art.”