J. Hoberman reviews a new installation by James Nares at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Street:
Most of Nares’s subjects are oblivious or indifferent to their documentation, although a few are hyper-alert. People point to things we cannot see or make hieroglyphic gestures that unfold too slowly to be decoded. Tourists take their own images and occasionally one catches a glimpse of the filmmaker’s silver SUV reflected in a storefront window. Kids clown, adults stare. The moments when someone locks eyes with the camera are always electric. Nothing may be more dramatic than the focused concentration of New Yorkers hailing a cab, but small sensations become thrilling events. Rain falls. A woman’s hair is caught in the breeze. A merchant demonstrating a child’s toy produces a trail of soap bubbles. A low-flying pigeon comes in for a landing.
The moment-expanding, arrested-time effect has appeared in any number of Hollywood films, including Taxi Driver and virtually every feature made by action-movie director Michael Bay. Here, however, congealed temporality is the main point: Street is a motion picture predicated on two types of motion.
The first is the inexorable forward movement of the filmmaker’s car, proceeding at a constant speed although periodically—and almost invisibly—reversing direction. The second is provided by the wildly contrapuntal activities of the people on camera. Nares is best known for paintings made with a single brush stroke. Street, which is composed of thirty or more smoothly conjoined separate shots, is a comparable gesture.
Transforming the city into a kind of mass choreography, Street may suggest an updated version of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 Koyaanisqatsi, the only non-narrative avant-garde film to ever play Radio City Music Hall; actually, it is quite the opposite. Where Koyaanisqatsi is essentially a jeremiad, using pixilation as well as slow motion, along with Olympian camera angles and an overwrought Philip Glass score, to portray urban life as an unnatural catastrophe, Street, shot at eye-level and deliberately paced, is more investigation than judgment. There is much that can be gleaned from it regarding New York’s social structure but, far from condemning the metropolis, Street revels in its diverse types, feasting on what the sociologist Georg Simmel described 110 years ago as the psychological conditions of modern urban existence: “the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.”
The Dish 