Word: doves
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...there was ever an artist in the American grain, it was Arthur Dove (1880-1946), with his obstinate home-made lyricism, his complete authenticity and his desire to be modern on local--not Euro-imitative--terms. In the beautiful Dove retrospective now at the Phillips Collection in Washington--which will move on to New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art in January--one sees all this and more. It has been a long time since the last museum survey of Dove's work, and Debra Bricker Balken, who curated this one, has done an exceptional artist full justice...
...point is not to disparage Interview With the Vampire, which was a fine film with plenty of chills. The point is that Wings should be incredibly satisfying to the earlier film's audience, if only that film's audience would go. As things stand, The Wings of the Dove is being sold as a Merchant Ivory picture and shepherded into theaters like Sony Harvard Square where no one would think to look for scarefests, however high-class and subtle...
Worse, those members of the broad popular audience who supported Interview and are aware of The Wings of the Dove may assume they wouldn't be interested because the new film is "too art-house," or "too genteel," or "too Bradless." Not much one can do about that third objection, but the other two represent false divisions imposed by film marketers or, indeed, by audiences themselves...
...films are unfairly ignored by mass audiences, more commercial films are spurned with equal injustice by self-appointed cineastes. If the artificial line drawn between "art" and "commerce" at the movies is erased, and mass audiences can be persuaded toward art films like The Wings of the Dove, then the traffic should rightfully move both ways. The Kendall Square crowd should give a chance to Hollywood's special-effects gizmos, which are more interesting, provocative and even political than film snobs will allow...
Certainly, one need not engage Starship Troopers in an ideological discourse to have a damn good time watching it. Nor, however, does The Wings of the Dove lack some solid, unintellectualized, "pure" entertainment value. The point is that most films offer something for the mind and for the adrenals, and they deserve to be seen by a wider audience than niche-marketing allows. Film has prodigious potential as a unifying medium, and as a mouthpiece to circulate all sorts of ideas across broad swaths of the public. That potential is undermined, and our intellectual and social development stunted...