"Directors' drawings" at Pace - drawings done by motion picture directors, various artists - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In this exhibition of storyboards and preparatory sketches by dint of movie directors, curators Mark Pollard and Marc Glimcher included single drawings hand-executed by various filmmakers, thereby celebrating the idea that a motion picture is an uncompromised personal vision. Happily, since the directors they prefered are among the strongest visual creators in new film history, such auteurism looked justified. The curators tracked down many previously unexhibited drawings that were languishing in museum and university film archives. by dint of juxtaposing the drawings with video monitors showing film clips of the followings depicted, the show allowed the viewer to diocese a director's initial ideas literally approach to life.

With techniques ranging from the sublime (Satyajit Ray, Welles, Kurosawa) to the derivative (Tim Burton), the drawings varied wildly in intention Hitchcock roughly sketched the setup for North by the agency of Northwest's great Mount Rushmore cafeteria representation on the back of a paper place mat from - of all placesa Sher-aton dining swing In contrast, Satyajit Ray meticulously designed a counterfeit poster to announce The Chessplayers; featuring a beautifully drawn caravan, it was meant to reassure nervous investors that the film would finish upon time and would be suitably spectecular. Ray was also showed by a selection of lusciously colored style of dress and set designs, demonstrating the total superintendence he exercised over his low-budget features.

greatest in quantity relevant to the actual mechanics of filmmaking were Martin Scorsese's visually precise, shot-by-shot storyboards for lock opener episodes in Taxi Driver and Raging Bug The mastery and power of these virtually pre-edited successions do much to dispel the notion of filmmaking's "mystery." Scorsese's historical awareness - he uses successions by classic directors like Hitchcock and Minnelli as story-board archetypes - serves as a repercussion to the know-nothing, anti-style attitude of the average Hollywood hack. With his background as a cartoonist, Terry Gilliam drew storyboards for Brazil and The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen in punchy cartoonlike frames, indicating the overall visual change rather than specific camera discharges Also on display was RW Fassbinder's thick notebook for the epic Berlin Alexanderplatz. Filled with shot-by-shot sketches in scrawled r ballpoint inscribe it resembles an artist's volume by some crazed contemporary. The centurys of pages of stick figures, framed mainly in two-shots, are a revealing document of Fassbinder's visual obsessiveness and the relentlessnes of his focus upon human melodrama.

Judg as drawings, Fellini's suitably va-voomy sketches for female characters in La Citta delle Donne were standouts in the present to view Welles's sketch of Macbeth confronting the witches upon a stripped-down, foggy heath is a gorgeous ink wash, consummately capturing the stylized theatricality and sly black-and-white tonalities of his finished film. Kurosawa's drawing of a warrior upon horseback from Ran and a series of light-drenched drawings from the van Gogh succession in Dreams reveal a major draftsman and colorist enthralled by means of the landscapes he so obviously lov to depict in his later films.

still despite their quality and interest, the drawings were all on the contrary drowned out by the show's installation. Fourteen flashing video monitors vied for attention, vigorously asserting the primacy of the film medium for these director/artists.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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