Sunday, December 28, 2014


Movie Review

Egg (1988)

April 5, 1989

A Double Bill That Stars Simplicity Itself

Published: April 5, 1989

A fantasy about a childlike middle-aged Dutch baker and a documentary about a well-known sculptor rearranging stones in the Sahara definitely sounds like a forced double bill. But ''Egg,'' Danniel Danniel's fiction about a 35-year-old naif, and Philip Haas's ''Stones and Flies: Richard Long in the Sahara,'' are both sophisticated films about simplicity itself. These two unconventional works, opening today at Film Forum 1, run scarcely more than an hour and a half combined. They are energetic, engaging, paradoxical little forays into one huge question: how do simple values and forms survive in our complex modern world?

''Stones and Flies'' begins with a man walking - the fundamental activity Mr. Long has been turning into art for 20 years. The British artist travels the world, leaving behind stones he has shaped into circles and lines, sometimes photographing the traces of his walks.

Following him through the desert, Mr. Haas's film tries to convey a sense of creation. Mr. Long scrapes his boot along the earth, allowing a brown line to emerge on the sand's black surface. He clears a space to create an empty circle outlined by small stones, and designs a wide line of rocks that seems to lead to a small hill in the background. Mr. Long's elemental forms have a lyrical beauty, and Mr. Haas's film is as elegantly composed as the work it captures.

But at intervals Mr. Long, the only figure in this deserted landscape, turns to the camera and explains something of his art, how ''a dusty line makes a sculpture.'' Where is the camera crew hiding in this isolated setting? Why do we see Mr. Long build a fire on which he places a tiny pot, when he is so clearly not alone? In these interludes he is acting out a solitary walk, not creating one.

In Mr. Haas's previous film, ''A Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China,'' the painter David Hockney commented on an intricate 17th-century Chinese scroll. Mr. Hockney's narrative recognized how the camera selected and altered our vision of the art. ''Stones and Flies'' needs more of that honesty. For while the sculpture it shows is clearly Richard Long's, Mr. Haas's film is closely related to Mr. Long's own exhibited photographs of his temporarily altered landscapes.

When the artist pours water on the desert sand to form the shapes of the Amazon, Nile and Indus Rivers, Mr. Haas preserves the image of the artist's most evanescent work. Despite Mr. Haas's occasional coyness, ''Stones and Flies'' is a rich example of art forms interacting.

Johan, the hero of ''Egg,'' also piles up stones to amuse himself. And at the breakfast table, he creates perfect little circles out of eggshells. But where Mr. Long takes a sophisticated route to these elemental shapes, Johan is a gentle simple-minded man, a village baker with a child's sense of the world.

Mr. Danniel offers a droll but fond look at Johan and his tiny village, where a dog giving birth is a major event. Stylistically, the film echoes the calm rhythms of Johan's slightly unreal, idyllic vision. Title cards frame words inside elliptical, egg-shaped lines, but they are obvious phrases like ''What now?'' Though ''Egg'' is not silent, it has a silent film's quiet grace, and the title cards offer a slight but welcome mocking edge. The film's artificially bright colors - Johan wears turquoise and iridescent green shirts - suggest how far this fairy-tale village is from ordinary life.

But Johan's friends break the spell when they respond to a personal ad from a lonely woman named Eva. They write to her in Johan's name, and soon she arrives with many suitcases, announcing she has come to marry the baker. She must either leave, bitterly disillusioned, or become part of his simple storybook life.

Though Mr. Danniel has said, ''I hope that I can send people home feeling nice'' - a statement as simplistic as a happy face button - his film is more disconcerting and ambiguous than that. Eva is a reminder of how fragile Johan's innocence is, how soon the baker would become Humpty Dumpty in the real world. Mr. Danniel tries to make Johan a hero by stubbornly insisting that he is one. That approach turns ''Egg'' into a cracked fairy tale, but as a film it shares all of Johan's freshness.

Fantasy and Fact

EGG, written and directed by Danniel Danniel; in Dutch with English subtitles; director of photography, Erik van Empel; editor, Menno Boerema; music by Michel Mulders; production designer, Michal Shabtay; producer, Rene Scholten. Time: 58 minutes.

WITH: Johan Leysen, Marijke Veugelers, Jake Kruyer, Coby Timp, Peter Smits, Piet Kamerman, Anneleun Schram, Magdaleen Jansen, Adri de Bruyn.

STONES AND FLIES: RICHARD LONG IN THE SAHARA, directed by Philip Haas; camera by Bernard Zitzermann; music by Marc Wilkinson. At Film Forum 1, 57 Watts Street. Time: 38 minutes. These films have no rating.

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