Brooklyn Book Festival OnePage
Week of 15-Jun-2012
This is about my encounter with a newly discovered footage that depicts Renoir painting on a canvas. It was discovered not very long ago in the basement of a Harvard building and screened at the Met in NYC. Watching this looping 16-frame film of a wheelchair-bound, arthritic Renoir brought so much to mind for me about art and writing and transformations.
“In Endless Moving Light”:
I am watching Pierre-Auguste Renoir paint. He is seated in a wheelchair, a blanket thrown over his lap, a broad swath of sunshine warming his back. He is bent and fragile, his face a series of lines dropping into a white beard that hides a once-sharp jaw. In front of him is an easel with a white canvas. Behind him is a balcony that opens to a world disappearing in the sun. He is oblivious to the camera nearby, utterly unaware of the shadow from the reel that is spinning in jumpy, jagged circles on the wall. His hands are painfully twisted and as he raises one off his lap, I see what must be for him a daily battle to keep them from turning entirely into his wrists. He is heartbreakingly twisted, his body evidence of the ruthlessness of time. Even art, I think, is at the mercy of our frail human selves.
I am staring at him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, stopped short in the middle of the room by this celluloid image of a man in combat with himself. The film is brief, barely an entire moment, lasting only as long as it takes for Renoir to lift his arm and let an assistant slip a paintbrush into his damaged, waiting fingers. His hand holds the paintbrush. The paintbrush dips into color. Its tip hovers then pushes forward onto canvas and angles down. The first stroke is made. He puts brush to canvas again then it ends. His image is swept aside by the dust particles and slender threads clinging onto the film. Black frames slide onto the screen. Then suddenly, the moment whirrs to life again. The segment loops and forces Pierre-Auguste Renoir to come back, old and frail once more, bent by a body resisting it all. His decay is once again exposed to an unforgiving lens. Then the end and the pause. Lights. He is a nomad eternally uprooted, hurtled forward and shoved back.
I watch it many times before I begin to understand what it is I am seeing. There is something captured in this film that is larger than Renoir’s frail, aging body. Here is a man in transformation. Stand still. Look. Bear witness to the shift from thought to creation. Imagine that briefly, the axis on which all myths pivot sheds its invisibility. There is a truth unfolding in this moment, a revelation of the instinct to create, to rise up no matter the obstacle and press instrument onto paper. He sits up then leans back, he talks to someone off camera. He is vibrantly alive. Each time the reel starts, each time Renoir is forced back into the wheelchair, he manages to burst past pain and paint, to render a new moment, flickering in endless moving light.
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“In Endless Moving Light”:
I am watching Pierre-Auguste Renoir paint. He is seated in a wheelchair, a blanket thrown over his lap, a broad swath of sunshine warming his back. He is bent and fragile, his face a series of lines dropping into a white beard that hides a once-sharp jaw. In front of him is an easel with a white canvas. Behind him is a balcony that opens to a world disappearing in the sun. He is oblivious to the camera nearby, utterly unaware of the shadow from the reel that is spinning in jumpy, jagged circles on the wall. His hands are painfully twisted and as he raises one off his lap, I see what must be for him a daily battle to keep them from turning entirely into his wrists. He is heartbreakingly twisted, his body evidence of the ruthlessness of time. Even art, I think, is at the mercy of our frail human selves.
I am staring at him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, stopped short in the middle of the room by this celluloid image of a man in combat with himself. The film is brief, barely an entire moment, lasting only as long as it takes for Renoir to lift his arm and let an assistant slip a paintbrush into his damaged, waiting fingers. His hand holds the paintbrush. The paintbrush dips into color. Its tip hovers then pushes forward onto canvas and angles down. The first stroke is made. He puts brush to canvas again then it ends. His image is swept aside by the dust particles and slender threads clinging onto the film. Black frames slide onto the screen. Then suddenly, the moment whirrs to life again. The segment loops and forces Pierre-Auguste Renoir to come back, old and frail once more, bent by a body resisting it all. His decay is once again exposed to an unforgiving lens. Then the end and the pause. Lights. He is a nomad eternally uprooted, hurtled forward and shoved back.
I watch it many times before I begin to understand what it is I am seeing. There is something captured in this film that is larger than Renoir’s frail, aging body. Here is a man in transformation. Stand still. Look. Bear witness to the shift from thought to creation. Imagine that briefly, the axis on which all myths pivot sheds its invisibility. There is a truth unfolding in this moment, a revelation of the instinct to create, to rise up no matter the obstacle and press instrument onto paper. He sits up then leans back, he talks to someone off camera. He is vibrantly alive. Each time the reel starts, each time Renoir is forced back into the wheelchair, he manages to burst past pain and paint, to render a new moment, flickering in endless moving light.
