Christo's Valley Curtain

Short and to-the-point documentary covering Christo's first large public work - the bright neon-orange valley curtain in Colorado, which spanned the gulf between two small mountains. It was a temporary and "public" exhibition, more performance art than a real "artifact" style sculpture. When the camera finally shows it in all its glory, an orange triangle on the landscape, you really grasp the audacity and almost brave rudeness of Christo's vision.

Christo should be considered more a pop artist akin to Warhol, repackaging things to make us rethink how we perceive them as objects. (Warhol's Brillo boxes prefigure Christo's early works of wrapped-up boxes, before he went to the landscape scale.) As with most Maysles Bros. films, this one keeps an objective stance and lets the events - the vast majority of which have to do with the actual engineering and erection of the thing - unfold.

Very little talk is devoted to whether it's "art" or worthwhile. The film documents the construction, and we're drawn in by whether or not the cable that is pulling it across will get tangled, or if it'll unfurl evenly across the expanse. It is a very compelling half-hour.

But in the process as you watch, you get the idea of the vision of the project/object, and that it is redefining what we think of as sculpture in the process. A great simple film, that would pave the way for the Maysles other docs on Christo, and since its shorter, it is more humble and more compelling than the others that spend more time talking about what's happening.

It's only 26 minutes, but I found myself wondering more about things not covered here, like Christo and Jeanne-Claude's artistic vision, or even why this curtain spanning a mountain pass in Colorado was viewed as an improvement on mother nature (though with a golf course nearby, maybe that ship had already sailed). Side note, it's rather irritating that Jeanne-Claude's name is omitted from the title, another example of women being uncredited. Anyway, instead this mostly seemed to be home movie like footage of the construction workers struggling to get it erected, and even their difficulties were not explained in a meaningful way. We see Christo screaming at them when the thing snags, and then receiving great adulation when that's resolved, but personally the piece wasn't all that moving to me.

As the artists were seen earlier testing a model of the curtain under the stress of wind coming from a big fan, I wondered how accurate that model might be. Later, upon reading that the real curtain was destroyed after only 28 hours by the wind, something conveniently ignored by the film, I guess that question was answered. As it took 28 months to complete this project from beginning to end, a fact I also didn't learn here, that was an hour for each month of effort. Maybe if you see this you'll think of it like a butterfly, one doomed to a short lifespan but beautiful nonetheless, because after all art is highly subjective. For me, it was less appealing, and definitely not helped by the style of the documentary.

I have claimed in several of my reviews that all I, or anyone can do when confronted with a movie is to speak of its competence and our own reactions to it, which has almost nothing to do with the movie's excellence. If my opinion is widely held, then the movie, being an artform that cultivates a large audience, is held to be good; if not, not. That doesn't apply to fine art.

Given my middle-class, old-fashioned tastes, it seems unlikely that I enjoy Christo's work. His thesis is that if you wrap something in fabric, it will alter your perception of it. Having grown up in an era when a lot of people got furniture which they wrapped in plastic or Scotchguarded it lest it get dirty, my reaction to Christo's early works like "Wrapped Chairs" is that it all seemed rather pointless, like Duchamp presenting a toilet as an original work of art. Shouldn't the credit go to American Standard? Likewise, "Wrapped Chairs" seems to owe more to my aunt Selma's desire not to have to have the parlor sofa cleaned six times a year than to an original artistic impulse.

Continuing this clearly bourgeois and even Philistine analysis, what is Christo's Valley Curtain but the same impulse writ ever larger? True, the men who do the labor getting it up are impressed. One notes that Christo is an educated man. Another that he would never have thought of it himself. Pardon me, if I am not impressed by something which stood for 28 hours.

It's a competently made film.

Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude were a most unusual team of artists. Instead of using traditional materials, they created many huge outdoor art spaces....not art in a traditional sense at all. A few examples of their work are an installation of gigantic umbrellas in California and Japan which cost US$26 million, wrapping Biscayne Bay as well as the Pont Neuf in Paris, as well as erecting the world's biggest curtain across a canyon in this film. In each case, the 'art' was meant to be temporary, huge and involved changing the environment. Some loved his work, some thought it was less amazing. It clearly was unique and in many ways like performance art rather than traditional art.

This film is about the giant orange curtain and all the logistical details involved with making sure the project came off as expected. In many ways, it's interesting. Oddly, however, it's also rather lifeless due to a lack of incidental music and a need to edit the film to tighten it up a bit. But what do I know...the film WAS nominated for the Best Documentary Short Oscar.

The hope from the Maysles boys and Ellen Hovde that two negatives...a boring artist installing a boring project...would equal a positive...a good documentary...is, as could have been predicted, quickly dashed. Oh well, at least it's short.