Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
I tuned in excitedly every week to watch Nathan Fielder’s kind-of reality TV show The Rehearsal, which recently wrapped its first series on HBO Max. The show defies easy encapsulation, and I won’t try here; rather, I can point you to an astute, spoiler-free appraisal by the critic Adam Nayman writing in the Toronto Star, which does a great job in briefly situating a would-be viewer before they plunge through the trapdoor into Fielder’s startlingly deep pool of magic and manipulation.
Personally, I found The Rehearsal to be a protean, technically amazing (in particular two of the most jaw-dropping in-scene transitions I’ve ever seen—in one case, “cut” is inaccurate), occasionally hilarious, often discomfiting and, in the closing stages of the series’ sixth and final episode, downright nightmarish experience. I’d be lying, however, if I said I couldn’t understand why it inspired such hostility in some quarters. It’s gleefully off-putting in myriad ways, and as rich in malevolent solipsism as it is in profound insight on the human condition.
As the show progresses, Fielder presents an increasingly elaborate and ostentatious ontological ouroboros, in which the show is, without fail, aware of its questionable morals, and amazingly/potentially infuriatingly adept at critiquing itself before others have had the chance. For me, the miracle of the show is that, in spite of this, it never felt airless or emotionally foreclosed. It’s rare that something this unpredictable, disturbing and original comes along on a stage and scale of this size, and I'm thrilled it exists.
The Rehearsal has been aptly and widely placed in conversation with a number of fascinating works with which it shares provocative, meta-mischievous DNA—Fielder’s own prior body of work, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up (1990)—but it also made me think of one of the great underrated docs of recent years, Leigh Ledare’s The Task (2017), which I first came to via the peerless curation of the team at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri. Here’s a partial synopsis for The Task, taken from Ledare’s website, where the film is freely available to stream:
Ledare’s 2017 film The Task comprises an intervention into a renowned method of experimental social psychology initially developed in the 1950s at London’s Tavistock Institute. Ledare began by staging an immersive three-day Group Relations conference—an intricate feedback apparatus designed to surface and reflect upon unconscious group phenomena—around which he conceived a complex filming structure. In addition to directing the film’s crew, Ledare assembled a diverse group of twenty-eight participants that represented a cross-section of Chicago and secured the collaboration of ten psychologists trained in the method. During a sequence of small and large group encounters, the group enacts a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself—an abstract “task” that allows participants to examine the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics.
This synopsis offers a fair flavor of what you think you might be in for, but I can safely say I’ve rarely enjoyed/endured a more prickly viewing experience than The Task, which anticipated today’s “culture war” hellhole by a good few years, and is this week’s first quick rec.
Like The Rehearsal, The Task occupies an intensely grey space of authorship, fact, fiction, truth and control, and raises all sorts of questions about the role, presence and effect of a camera in a space. Don’t say you haven’t been warned, but equally, don’t be scared off. And stick with it, too. I hope you’ll find it as rewarding as I did. I liked it enough to put not one but two sets of audiences through it when I was working as a film programmer at BAM, including in a series entitled “On Resentment”.
This week’s second quick rec is completely unrelated to the first: The Gap Band’s “Yearning For Your Love” (1980), a song I’ll never tire of listening to. Rock steady, smooth as silk, and deeply felt—check out the building despair in the extended coda (“You can’t keep runnin’ in and outta my life!”)—this R&B ballad, sung by “Uncle” Charlie Wilson, was famously and ingeniously sampled by Nas on “Life’s a Bitch”, the third track on his 1994 LP “Illmatic.” Enjoy:
Third and final quick rec this week is this photograph by Bruce Davidson from his astonishing 1980 series “Subway”, a daring, immersive and deeply atmospheric study of the early 80s NYC subway system in all its rum and raggedy anti-glory. I could have picked any number of images from the set, but this one’s always stuck with me on account of its cinematic power and stark framing—it could be a still from a John Carpenter film. What has this man seen? And who’s that lurking in the shadows? We’ll never know…
See you next week!
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