The Jeanne Dielman essay, Farber's final piece of film criticism, starts off with a thrilling survey of
Seventies art cinema, from Celine and Julie Go Boating to Beware of a Holy Whore.
It's right in tune with the
cinema of paranoia and conspiracy that bloomed in the
seventies while also jumping on the martial
arts craze with Caan taking on ninja warriors as well as his former partner (Robert Duvall).
Occupying a space between sculpture,
cinema and drawing, his work's historical importance has been internationally recognized in such exhibitions as Into the Light: the Projected Image in American
Art 1964 - 77 at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York (2001 - 2); The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and
Seventies at the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria (2003 - 4); The Expanded Eye at the Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2006); Beyond
Cinema: the
Art of Projection at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2006 - 7); The
Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2008); The Geometry of Motion 1920s / 1970s at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York (2008); and On Line at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York (2010 - 11).
The earnest «reflexivity» of the narration, which constantly draws attention to its modes of discourse; the smug female voice - over artist, who bizarrely mispronounces the numerous French words; the use of another medium — in this case dance — to create a kind of abstract demonstration of the film's content — these things all hark weirdly back to the «materialist» theory that influenced
art school teaching in the Nineties, and further back to the frequently soul - destroying «deconstructed narrative»
cinema of the late
Seventies and early Eighties.