What about the earliest-known drawings? They exist in a cave in France, and are believed to be more than 30,000 years old. The newest film by documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog (of Grizzly Man fame) is a journey into the Chauvet Cave, and a reflection on the profound urge to represent reality—with pigment on a surface.

image courtesy IFC films.

Egged on by Herzog’s rapturous narration, the film’s camera washes over the cave paintings with lavish attention. Beasts of all sizes are depicted. Charcoal brush strokes capture the grace and strength of a horse in motion. Footprints hint at rites of passage and perilous journeys. The film is immersive; the drawings are ghostly, and yet so there. (Read reviews of the film here).

Cave of Forgotten Dreams premiered at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. I saw it at the 2011 South by Southwest film festival and fell in love.

You can see it here at the Indianapolis Museum of Art any of four times between Christmas and New Years. Use it as an excuse to get out of the house and get a fat dose of profundity.

Katherine’s calling this free gathering Public Social University (PSU).  It’s a concept borrowed from friends in Portland, Oregon, from whence she hails.  PSU puts a unique twist on learning by combining it with other (often seemingly unrelated) subjects, encouraging non-experts to speak about their experiences, and adding a playful energy.

Learning from non-experts.  How refreshing is that?   This Friday, the poetry, history, reality, and politics of water will abound. Check the flyer above for the workshops being presented, or download your very own copy and please share it with others.

Bonus: come to PSU, and you will also see a watery art & design show: ten designers’ responses to the shapes and patterns of the White River watershed.

Want to reduce your carbon footprint while attending Public Social University?  Meet Katherine and other avid cyclists to bike over to the Service Center.  They’ll be convening at Freewheelin’ Community Bikes’ new workshop, 3355 N. Central Ave., at 5:30 pm.

See you Friday.  If you’re craving more aqueous-ness, don’t forget the FLOW project and its multitude of events…

Pilloton speaks this Thursday as part of the IMA’s Planet Indy series.  Here, she muses on a few questions in advance of her visit:

Q: What have you learned about the relationship between thoughtful design and the solving of large social problems?

We have learned that thoughtful design can address large social problems, but works best on a small scale. Instead of saying “how can design solve homelessness?” we’ve found that the best design initiatives are actually micro-local, that they address things on a very small scale for a defined group of people in our own backyards, and these solutions can serve as models for others to do the same in their own backyards. One million people with one design solution each will always be better than one person’s solution for one million people.

Q: In 2010, you toured the country in an Airstream trailer engaging with people about design.  What did you learn from that experience?

We learned a lot about how misunderstood design is among the general public, and how disconnected that is from the desire of the next generation to do good. People viewed examples of brilliant humanitarian design as “inventions,” or “the next million dollar idea,” rather than the result of a human-centered process that really does have impact. Students, on the other hand, took to the road show naturally, seeing the power that creativity can have on everyday lives. On a more practical note, we learned that two people and a dog, for 75 days in a confined space with no water or kitchen, is not a fun way to live. But we definitely have some good stories.

Q: As a designer and educator, what are you up to right now in Bertie County, North Carolina?  And why did you choose to take your energy to a rural community?

My partner Matthew Miller and I both have resumes that say we’re designers/builders, and the day-to-day schedules of high school shop teachers. We teach our Studio H curriculum within the public high school, offering students one year (two semesters + summer build) intensive design and construction education, put towards big built community architecture projects. We love working in a rural place like Bertie County because the impact we can have is exponential. There is such a need to do things differently, and to break the instinct to do the same things done in the same ways since the 1800′s. Design is an opportunity to shift the ways in which we view the future of Bertie County, or any place labeled economically challenged or resource-poor.

Pilloton’s talk at the IMA is also part of the fascinating IndyTalks series.  The post-talk Q&A period will be focused on Indianapolis specifically: how can design thinking make this city a better place to work, learn and live?

Fathoming, though, is a big part of sustainability – that’s why we love it at the IMA.  Green thinking demands an experimental spirit, and usually reflects a nod to smart design.  The status quo (pollution, wastefulness, inefficiency) has got to go.

In that vein, this spring you can hear three free radicals speak at The Toby, as part of the IMA’s Planet Indy series: guerilla gardener Richard Reynolds is here tonight, design educator Emily Pilloton on March 24, and the uncategorizable Temple Grandin on April 28. (Grandin is a visual thinker, a cow whisperer, slaughterhouse designer, and heroine to anyone who lives with autism.  Plus, actress Claire Danes just won a slew of awards for portraying her. Thanks to her crossover appeal, tickets for Temple’s talk are already sold out, however overflow seating with a live feed are still available.)

While London-based Reynolds runs a global movement planting gardens in urban areas without permission, Pilloton has guested on The Colbert Report and is re-designing civic life in a poor rural town in North Carolina and the ways its kids are educated.  Introducing sustainability on the scene is often a case of designing a new system, whether it’s a wind farm, a carbon stock exchange, or a national network to power plug-in cars.

Behind the scenes at IMA, we need a redesigned system as well.  The IMA’s recycling program for staff and visitors, admittedly, leaves something to be desired.  There’s a meeting this week to review the text on our recycling bins for greater clarity and redesigning our dock to expand space for collected recyclables.  As a member of the IMA’s green team, I’ll definitely be collaborating with our crack Design staff to find solutions.

My fantasy is that we compost food scraps from Nourish Café and use it to feed the new plantings in 100 Acres.  Another fantasy is eliminating plastic from the Café (check out a prior meditation on plastic here).

But the IMA has gotten quite a few green things right, from energy efficient gallery lighting to a rain garden that absorbs storm water runoff.  Help us improve by leaving your suggestions for how you think we ought to keep greening.  Or supply your ideas for green innovators you’d love to hear speak…

Angelic sounds from the mystical country that produced Bjork, in the month of January, in The Toby, made by a musician headed for Istanbul and London once his US tour is done?  A poetic no-brainer.  So it stands to reason: you must join us at the IMA for Ólafur Arnalds this Saturday evening.

Here’s a sample from Arnalds’ new record, …And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness:

I find these sounds delicate as a paper-thin sheet of ice on a lake.  Resplendent as white fondant on a winter wedding cake.  Patterned like lace, or bird tracks in the snow.  At the concert, there will be long-haired ladies playing cellos.  And moody sweetness with the lights low.  A little peace; a fairy-tale feel.

Read what one concert-goer had to say about the show in Detroit on Wednesday night.

Oh, I’m supposed to also tell you that you can enter a sweepstakes to win a trip to Iceland, courtesy of Iceland Naturally.

So, tomorrow, our crack IMA public programs team will fire up the lights and sound in The Toby, tune up the Bösendorfer, provide plenty of smoothies and beer (as requested in the rider), tear the tickets, and then let Arnalds’ sonic sheen wash over us all.

Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, writes about the seminal film noir Criss Cross, screening this Friday night at the TOBY as a part of the Winter Nights series:

When people ask me to cite the definitive film noir, I usually say Double Indemnity. That’s the one most people have likely heard of. But these days, I’m more inclined to call Criss Cross the perfect film noir. I’ve seen it several more times in recent years and it improves with each viewing. Its mood of thwarted passion and desperate melancholy only deepens with the passing years.

Criss Cross was essentially the culmination of the film noir era (roughly 1944-1952), made at the movement’s peak in 1949. It reunited the brain trust from The Killers (1946), one of the films that ignited Hollywood’s fascination with dark, cynical crime stories. The one collaborator missing, unfortunately, was producer Mark Hellinger who died of a heart attack at age 44, just as the project came together. A one-time Broadway newspaper columnist, the brash and ballsy Hellinger had recently scored his biggest success with the groundbreaking police procedural Naked City (1948). He seemed destined for a long career as film noir’s dominant storyteller.

Hellinger was inspired by Don Tracy’s 1934 novel about a daring racetrack robbery, complicated by sexual passions. It was essentially The Killers redux, only better: this time there was no dispassionate protagonist (Edmond O’Brien) to distance the audience from the tale’s maelstrom of lust and longing. Daniel Fuchs fashioned a screenplay that greatly improved upon Tracy’s novel. Michel (Michael) Kraike stepped into the producer’s role and smartly let director Robert Siodmak have free rein. (Although theirs was a successful collaboration, Siodmak and Hellinger often butted heads while making The Killers.)

Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) is an armored car guard who still has it bad for his ex-wife, Anna (Yvonne De Carlo). He’s drawn back to Slims, a nightclub where their passion burned brightest. He discovers that she’s hooking up with Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), a slick and shady operator. Anna, in fine femme fatale fettle, ignites a fire fight between the two men. When Dundee catches him with Anna, Steve blurts out a cover story: he’s willing to act as the inside man so Dundee can knock over one of his company’s armored cars. Both men stage a cagey mating dance, while setting each other up. Steve plans on swindling Slim, grabbing his cut, and running off with Anna. Slim plans to kill Steve in the heat of the heist.

Such are the rudiments of the plot. Staple crime story stuff. Yet the film unfolds in the most seductive fashion, flashbacks within flashbacks, moved dreamily along by Lancaster’s voiceover narration, one of the best in noir. Siodmak shows his cinematic genius by transforming this routine pulp into an achingly exquisite example of l’amour fou. For beyond all else, Criss Cross is about love—albeit a one-sided, obsessive love that moves steadily, sensually, toward an uncompromisingly bleak finale.

One of the lasting pleasures of Criss Cross is its stylishness. Robert Siodmak had a tremendous flair for compositions and camera movements, ominous yet elegant. Images simultaneously inviting and foreboding are essential to the noir vision, and Siodmak mustered them like no one else. From the start—the camera swooping down like a hungry night bird to catch Lancaster and De Carlo in a secret embrace in the nightclub’s parking lot—the director infuses the drama with an sexy urgency that gets under your skin like a narcotic.

The acting couldn’t have been more stylish, either. In the best noir, actors play with flourish. They understand that memorable moments are way up there—dangerously close to over-the-top. Lancaster had been a trapeze artist before acting, for Pete’s sake. In noir, where he usually played a predator turned prey, he always suggested an imminent eruption beneath his implacable machismo. Costar Dan Duryea possessed an innate sense of how to colorfully sketch a character—a caricature, really—while nailing the priorities: advance the story, entertain the audience. Duryea was so good at playing villainous cads (he specialized in smacking around recalcitrant dames) that in the late 1940s he received more fan mail than any other actor in Hollywood.

A viewing of Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Criss Cross provides a telling contrast between then and now. Retitled The Underneath (1995), it’s well told and engrossing. But to accommodate the supposedly more sophisticated tastes of contemporary audiences, the film is relentlessly “realistic.” It outlines motivation for every character to lend the proceedings as much credibility as possible. The actors sell the material with the studied naturalism now required of dramatic film acting. As a result, the film is an involving, but forgettable, 120 minutes.

During its 88 concentrated minutes, Criss Cross shoots out little slivers of art that will never leave your head. The lazy torpor of a nightclub in the late afternoon; the lanky Duryea, dangling around his digs like a jackal in a zoot suit; Lancaster’s lovelorn face as he watches his lost love rumba around the dance floor (with a young Tony Curtis); bandits in gas masks firing blindly through a smoke haze; the terror of a lurking shadow in a hospital hallway. Vivid, dynamic imagery—and vivid, dynamic acting—stick in the mind long after the extraneous details of “naturalism” have evaporated.

Modern film noir plays like real life. Classic film noir plays like a fevered dream. Criss Cross is one of the very best dreams you’ll have at the movies.

The subject of this film, Mark Hogancamp, almost had his head taken off by a pack of bullies in a bar.  But Hogancamp lived to create a painstaking, war-torn, one-sixth scale universe called Mar-wen-col (a word combining his own name, and the names Wendy and Colleen, two significant women in his life).  Marwencol is overrun with punk-i-fied Barbies and Nazi G.I. Joes, enacting a cycle of torture and love.  Hogancamp’s bird’s eye photos of Marwencol are worthy of a New York gallery show.

Watching the film is like unstacking a set of Russian dolls, revealing ever weirder scenarios combined with spectacular pathos. The Boston Globe critic Ty Burr calls Marwencol “a strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art — about the compulsive need to create something when the world leaves you with nothing.”  (Read his full review.)

Any art museum is a haven for objects of embodied power: a Buddha statue, a Bidjogo mask, a painting of the Virgin Mary.  The dolls he created to live in Marwencol are just as effecting for Hogancamp – and for viewers of the film.

My IMA colleague Lindsay Hand went to the South by Southwest film festival last March, and this was the standout film that we had to bring to the IMA.  The screening’s co-presented by our friends at the Indianapolis International Film Festival.  After the film, we’re going to skype in filmmaker Jeff Malmberg for a virtual post-film chat in The Toby.

Marwencol is also showing this week in Toronto, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.  We’ve brought it to Indianapolis for your viewing pleasure—if it pleases you to have your mind blown.

I’m here at the Indianapolis International Airport waiting for the 11 members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra to arrive.  They perform at The Toby this Saturday night, 7 pm.

Since seeing their picture in a cooking magazine five years ago, I’ve been obsessed with bringing them to perform at IMA.  I love that they take an everyday object like an eggplant and mine it for its expressive sonic properties.  I love that they wear all black and let the colorful veggies create a visual pop.  I love that they treat vegetables as sculptural objects.  I love that their music is experimental.

Here’s a listen to their latest CD, Onionoise. I especially like Brazil.

NUVO music critic Scott Shoger did a great piece on them this week. CBS Sunday News Sunday Morning is coming to record their visit. The Austrian Consulates from Chicago and New York are coming too.

Getting them here wasn’t easy.  Let’s just say, if you’ve never dealt with the US Citizen and Immigration Service, be glad!  The good news is that their concert is a signature event in the 2010 Spirit & Place Festival, whose theme is “Food for Thought.”

Today, some donated veggies are being delivered.  If they aren’t the right size and shape, we’ll have to go shopping tomorrow, probably at Saraga. Note: If you want to learn how to make you own veggie instruments (hint: drills are involved), sign up for tomorrow’s 1 to 5 pm workshop.

Friday night, I may take the orchestra members to First Friday.  I will definitely let them take a look at the IMA’s Warhol show.  After the show, we’ll go to either Brugge Brasserie or Barcelona Tapas, I think.

Since they are worldwide one-of-a-kind, you won’t regret coming to their concert Saturday night at The Toby.  As part of the event, we are also displaying vegetables as art in The Toby lobby, and having a cookbook swap, too.  I know I’ll see you there…

Since the art of film was born, directors and screenwriters have snatched drama from the lives of real people and transmuted them into works of cinematic art. From Erin Brockovich and Larry Flynt to Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, there are a gazillion real lives that beg for big screen treatment. Jake LaMotta, anyone?

In his new book, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, Bingham interrogates the oft-dismissed biopic genre for its power to mythologize, demonize, sanctify, and complicate.

Think of the innovative 2007 Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. Or Oliver Stone’s takes on Nixon and JFK. Not to mention Gretchen Moll in The Notorious Bettie Page–a film that might have been naughty but was actually quite nice. Plus Denzel Washington‘s channeling of Malcom X back in ’92.

See you October 28 at The Toby for this free 7 pm talk (details here). Meanwhile, leave us a list of biopics you find most notable – whether schlocky, exploitative or aggrandizing…

A guy in a suit and tie hits on a log with a big stick, producing a deep thumping vibe. Another one rattles a young maple tree, making a swishing sound, while a woman in a black dress and sky-high heels shimmies on a slatted wood platform. A full moon rises behind the trees as dusk descends.

Such was the scene at last week’s fall equinox performance in the IMA’s 100 Acres. Pharm Accident, the performance group of Big Car, christened the Ruth Lilly Visitor Pavilion with its first full performance since the Park opened last June. Here’s a portrait of the Pharm Accident performers:

The organic structure of the Pavilion and its hideaway sensibility begged for a performance that was equally organic. Seventy-five people agreed and came out on this humid September night to experience this offbeat concert.

Eight sets of dancers and sound makers (all wearing blue jumpsuits, each signified by a different type of leaf) were controlled by Jim Walker, Big Car founder and maestro of the overhead projector. Walker placed leaf shapes on the projector, triggering one or more of the eight sets to dance and make avant garde music.  Take a listen and see more images from the event.

This concert in the woods helped us reconnect with everything primal; and it was a surreal way to usher in the autumn season. Thank you, Pharm Accident!

Now we’re planning for the spring equinox. Ideas welcome…