Sometime between viewing Fantastic Mr. Fox (screening at LACMA tonight) and finishing off Matt Zoller Seitz’s five-part video essay on Wes Anderson, I rediscovered the affective themes that lay among the (meticulous) craftwork of Anderson’s films. Aspiration, disappointment, longing, and estrangement direct his bands of outsiders, a family of some sort caught in mid-transformation or already reassembled in a post-domestic formation like a badly healed broken limb.

It might be easy to catalog Anderson’s signature tropes, tendencies, and textures (and Zoller Seitz does one better by throwing in Anderson’s varied influences). Like a Sunday-strip cartoonist, he renders each scene with a distinctive touch; well-appointed mise-en-scene and a comprehensive sense of production design replace the draftsman’s stroke. And that’s without mentioning his way with words and the modulation of tonality, inflection, and rhythm among the spoken parts.

Of course Fantastic Mr. Fox is firstly a breathless entertainment, perhaps the most fleet-footed work in the director’s filmography. Like Arnaud Desplechin, whose dialogue with Anderson appears the latest issue of Interview, Anderson is prone to jolting inventiveness and sudden spurts of activity (not to mention that both directors share a somewhat caustic view of the familial and an unflagging affinity for the black sheep). But unlike the hectic, nervous energy in a Desplechin film, an Anderson picture is crisply precise and exact. His lithe set pieces have an almost panoramic breadth, while he maintains a hawk-eyed attention to minute details. An animated film, particularly one that uses analog techniques that traffic not only in nostalgia but in its inevitably bittersweet side effects, is more than an inevitable choice for this meticulous filmmaker, it’s an inspired experiment in lyrical screwball.

Bernardo Rondeau

When Andreas Reiter Raabe was in Los Angeles in September to paint the Art of the Pacific galleries with tea, he took the opportunity to extend his ongoing photographic work. Beginning in 2004/2005, he started Natural Monochromes, an open-ended series of photographs that employ silkscreened signs with short texts referring to place and painting in specific locations around the world. Reiter Raabe kindly agreed to share one of the images from his recent trip here on Unframed. He told Nancy Thomas, our deputy director, that when he was in L.A., he felt particularly influenced by the natural landscape and its interaction with commercial and residential building.

Andreas Reiter Raabe, Natural Monochromes, 2009, image courtesy of the artist

Allison Agsten

Last week we introduced an opportunity for everyone to see New Topographics in an entirely new way: via special Sunday afternoon tours given by leading Los Angeles photographers.

This Sunday’s tour leader will be Amir Zaki. Born and trained in Southern California, Amir focuses on the region’s architectural landscape. Carefully recording—yet deftly using digital technology to transform—subjects such as modernist residences, nocturnal suburbia, and urban density, Amir reconfigures many of his subjects into unfamiliar and confounding images. The desire to challenge assumptions about photographic authenticity also informs his recent survey of elevated lifeguard towers on Orange County beaches. Amir experiments with light and color until, shorn of regular indications of locality or use, these everyday structures become monuments of uncertain function and suggestive new meaning.

I recently spoke to Amir about LACMA’s restaging of this important exhibition, which was first seen in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The video here offers a sneak peek into Amir’s take on New Topographics, including how his early aversion to the work grew into profound respect and inspiration.

Edward Robinson, Associate Curator, The Wallis Annenberg Photography Department

Opening this weekend is the first full installation of our permanent collection of art from the Pacific Islands, the majority of which we acquired last year. Though these objects haven’t been on view before, I already feel familiar with them, thanks in part to some beautiful photographs our supervising photographer, Peter Brenner, took upon their acquisition.

Papua New Guinea, New Ireland Province, Memorial Figure (uli, selambungin lorong type), c. 1900, Purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

Easter Island, Rapanui Male Ancestor Figure, c. 1800, purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

Papua New Guinea, Gulf Province, Skull Rack (agiba), c. 1900, purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

Already feeling like I “know” these pieces—and their faces are so expressive, so animated, that they do take on real personalities—I was surprised, when I walked into the new galleries, to find myself bowled over anew. The pictures, compelling as they are, don’t do the objects justice. The detail requires that you get up close. I became captivated by the mouth of one object—a Gable Peak Figure from New Zealand—finding its teeth to be so lifelike, so downright human it was almost eerie. Go figure—when I checked the materials listed for the object, “human teeth” were on the list.

New Zealand, Gable Peak Figure, c. 1800, purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

In fact many of the objects in this collection include the bones of humans and animals, as well as human hair, shark skin, and bird feathers. For me, a twenty-first century Angeleno, it creates a strange disconnect: on the one hand so many of these characters look like they might have walked right out of a Tim Burton film, possessing a kind of sinister charm or a dementia that inspires a chuckle rather than a shiver. But on closer inspection, the human element—both the hands that made the objects and, in some cases, the heads that are part of the objects—makes itself utterly apparent.

Scott Tennent

Britt Salvesen came to the museum earlier this month from the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, where she was director and chief curator (as well as organizing curator of New Topographics, on view now at LACMA). In her new role at LACMA, she’ll head up our Wallis Annenberg Photography Department as well as our Prints and Drawings Department. What better way to welcome her than to grill her?

When I was on a walkthrough of New Topographics with Michael Govan last week, he commented on a trend—the exhibition as art—that I thought was very interesting. Can you tell me a little about that phenomenon?

We’ve seen some really seminal shows come to life again recently. New Topographics is one of those, as is The Pictures Generation, which was on view at the Met earlier this year. One reason to revisit these shows, New Topographics in particular, is because the original exhibition, which ultimately has become a chapter in the history of photography, didn’t have a huge audience. The tour started off in Rochester and the accompanying catalogue was quite small. No one was expecting it to become a definitive show that embodied a particular style. So it was time to ask, what can we learn by looking at these images again?

Would you actually use the phrase “New Topographics style”? And if so, what does it mean?

It has emerged as a useful category in today’s vocabulary, though the original work wasn’t intended to forge a style. New Topographics tends to be shorthand for photography that depicts the built environment, human impact on land. It also implies something harder to define as clearly—an objective viewpoint and also a serial approach, an assumption that a single image cannot necessarily capture all aspects of a subject.

What are your initial thoughts on L.A. from a professional perspective so far?

I oversee two departments—the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department as well as the Department of Prints and Drawings—and L.A. is unique in its productive disregard for traditional disciplinary backgrounds. There are powerful precedents of that kind of thinking here. John Baldessari is an artist, for example, who has been working in a variety of media for his entire career. I think, at museums, we can always learn from artists and their ability to create through juxtaposition, contrast, and invention.

And what about personally? Do you have any L.A. favorites yet?

I’m getting to know my way around as I drive to gallery openings in Culver City, to universities, and to other museums. I love the energy here—it used to be people left L.A. for New York and now it’s the opposite for career and quality of life reasons. So far, I’m really enjoying the farmers markets and the restaurants, which are great. I have to say, the fresh produce here is just amazing.

Allison Agsten

In February 2008, LACMA bought the building across the street from Urban Light, at 6006 Wilshire. It had been gutted by a developer who was readying it for a condo project. When that fell through, the museum purchased the building, to improve the museum’s neighborhood and to seize a strategic opportunity to acquire prime real estate at a reasonable price. But, as you can tell from the “before” picture above, it wasn’t exactly in the best of condition. (Read: It had no windows, no water, no power.) So, a few months ago, in what amounts to the world’s most anticlimactic demolition, workers began chipping away at the five story structure. Even if you’re in the neighborhood often, you might not have noticed as the process occurred over a long period of time behind scaffolding. But, lo and behold, the scaffolding is down now, and so is the building.

In the next couple of months, we’ll transform the space into a surface parking lot for the museum and for staging space for the MTA construction of the Subway along Wilshire Blvd. Long term plans for the museum’s use of 6006 have not been established; office, gallery, housing, hotel and other museum related mixed use retail options are being considered.

Allison Agsten

Now that cooler weather and darker evenings are here, haunted houses, hay rides, and ghost tours abound in Southern California. The city of Fullerton, located thirty miles south of Los Angeles (and a convenient half-hour train ride from Union Station) offers “haunted” walking tours within its downtown area. One fascinating spot rumored to have paranormal activity is Plummer Auditorium, part of the Fullerton High School campus, where witnesses claim to have seen ghosts watching the stage from the balcony. But it was something outside the auditorium that really caught my eye: a large wall mural entitled Pastoral California by Charles Kassler.

Murals such as these were very common. To combat the high unemployment rate and faltering American spirit of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created a series of social/economic programs called the New Deal; artists like Kessler were hired under the Public Works of Art Program, designed to inform the public by showing art in public buildings and by displaying works of an American scene. The US government also hired artists for other New Deal programs; Dorothea Lange documented the effects of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration, and Lester Beall designed energy posters (which were on display in the American Art galleries this past year) to promote the use of electricity in the agricultural states.

Kassler’s Pastoral California (1934) reveals the history of southern California at the time. Painted over just five years later—it was considered inappropriate by school officials—the mural was eventually discovered and fully restored in 1997. Pastoral California depicts a scene of ranchers and animals, with evidence of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. On the right-hand side, Kassler depicts a fight between wild animals—a bear biting viciously into a bull.

While the origin of the bear and bull market terminology is debated, some believe it has to do with the attacking styles of each animal, and at the time the mural was painted, the triumphant bear may have revealed the artist’s pessimistic assessment of the economy at the time.

The Fullerton Haunted Walking Tour continues until November 6, but if you’re interested in other works of art created under the New Deal closer to Los Angeles, you can check them out here. And if you already have a local favorite, please comment!

Devi Noor

In anticipation of Halloween (and tomorrow night’s annual Costume Ball), we have once again asked some of our museum staff to come up with their picks for creepy, spooky, or otherwise disturbing artworks in the collection.

Papua New Guinea, East Sepik Province, Yuat River, Biwat People, Flute Ornament, c. 1925, purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

Selected by Nancy Thomas, Deputy Director; on view in Art of the Pacific, opening November 7

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James Ensor, "Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals," 1896, purchased with funds provided by the Judith Rothschild Foundation, Joan Palevsky, Dr. Richard A. Simms, Julius L. and Anita Zelman, Daws and Carla Waffer, and Urban S. Hirsch III

Selected by Taras Matla, curatorial assistant, Prints and Drawings; 0n view in our online James Ensor exhibition

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Mexico, Western Oaxaca or Puebla, Mixteca-Puebla Style, "Mosaic Skull," 1400-1521, gift of Constance McCormick Fearing

Selected by Tom Drury; on view in the Art of the Americas Building

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Federico Castellón, "Her Eyes Trembled," 1939, gift of the 2006/2007 Drawings Group

Selected by Leslie Jones, curator, Prints and Drawings

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Ludwig Meidner, "Apocalyptic Landscape," 1913, gift of Clifford Odets

Selected by Carol Eliel, curator, Modern and Contemporary Art; on view in the modern art galleries, Ahmanson Building

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Abishek Singh, "Kaalnemi transforms into Asura," Ramayan 3392 AD, 2006, Liquid Comics, Bangalore, India, © 2008 Liquid Comics. All rights reserved.

Selected by Julie Romain, assistant curator, South and Southeast Asian Art; on view in Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics

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Japan, "Samurai Armor of the Gusoku type" (detail), 18th century, gift of Leslie Prince Salzman

Selected by Allison Agsten; on view in the Pavilion for Japanese Art

In honor of our re-staging of New Topographics, we’re doing something special: starting this Sunday and occurring every Sunday through mid-December (except Thanksgiving Weekend), we’ve invited a leading Los Angeles-based photographer to give a tour of the show and share his or her insight into the ways New Topographics opened up possibilities for new photographic engagement with the landscape.

Each Sunday will feature a different photographer. In anticipation of each tour, we’ll whet your appetite here on Unframed with an exclusive interview. First up: Mark Ruwedel. Mark has photographed the topography of the American West for nearly three decades, focusing on nature’s reclamation of the land over time. He has depicted relics of industrial expansion, like abandoned railways, as well as evidence of geological upheaval, such as the impact of prehistoric glaciers. His recent series Westward the Course of Empire surveys the deterioration of the once mighty railroad network forged across the nineteenth-century American landscape.

I recently spoke to Mark about LACMA’s restaging of this important exhibition, which was first seen in 1975 at the George Eastman House of Rochester, New York. The video here offers a sneak peek into Mark’s take on New Topographics, and how it continues to bear influence on photographic practice today, including his own.

More details on this Sunday’s tour can be found here, and you can get a glimpse of some of the future tours here.

Edward Robinson, Associate Curator, The Wallis Annenberg Photography Department

Much has changed for this year’s edition of AFI FEST, which begins Friday. There’s an ace new director of programming—Robert Koehler—some new venues (Mann’s Chinese Cinemas and Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex), and tickets for all films free of charge to the general public. All that said, the festival’s core commitment to offering some of the major entries and discoveries in contemporary world cinema remains unchanged. Here are five films I am most anticipating:

Un Lac

With its primeval setting (a snowy, remote expanse of Alpine forest), sparse narrative (a stranger enters the life of a fatherless family), and pervasive darkness, punctuated by iridescent blurs and hushed voices, Philippe Grandrieux’s latest is a cavernous shadowplay of immersive, Romantic nocturnes.

Vincere

The rise of Benito Mussolini and the (forced) decline of his first wife is boldly rendered in Marco Bellocchio’s baroque and starkly operatic epic, another surgical incision in the fabric of Italian society by this 69-year-old master. Click here for an interview with Bellocchio by Scott Foundas in Cinema Scope magazine.

Ne Change Rien

Portugal’s Pedro Costa follows French actress Jeanne Balibar in all iterations of her budding chanteuse alter-ego—rehearsing, recording, performing—with the same fixed, enduring gaze, and chiaroscuro shadings that charged Fontainhas with cosmic import. The film will be preceded by Le streghe, femmes entre elles, the latest short work from the indefatigable Jean-Marie Straub and likely the first Los Angeles screening of a new film from this forceful materialist in over three decades.

Police, Adjective

A plainclothes cop tails a young man through the terminally vacant streets of Vaslui and winds up lost in the tussle of language. Another momentous entry from the continually reliable Romanian stable of young directors, Corneliu Porumboiu’s second feature is a procedural of sorts with a semiotic bite. Here’s a trailer.

Sweetgrass

Two bona-fide academics (Lucien Castaing-Taylor directs Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab while Ilisa Barbash is associate curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum) helm this rigorously observant, astutely pictorial document of Westward sheep herding that not only tends to ovine mannerism but also the outer lives of the men who direct them. Here’s the official site.

Bernardo Rondeau