Luc Tuymans Oversees Eyes Without A Face At MCA

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 18, 2010 9:20PM

Perhaps we are just suckers for obscure rationales for programming film series, or perhaps we simply have Tuymans Fever, but Eyes Without a Face, a film series curated by Luc Tuymans, showing at the MCA from November 27 to December 12, looks quite intriguing. The rockstar artist has chosen some fascinating titles and provided us with the perfect reason to visit to revisit the sensational retrospective the museum is hosting through January 9.

It is no trick at all to pick up on cinematic currents floating through much of Tuymans work in the current, comprehensive exhibition (which we already told you to go see). Although nearly everything is on canvas, the explicit use of film stills and photography as source material and a reliance on an undisguised cropping of the image is around every corner. Add to that the time during the early 80s when Tuymans stopped painting and worked as an experimental filmmaker, and it becomes obvious why enlisting him to pick some films to complement the exhibition is not only a useful idea but a really good one: he has selected some dandies.

The films chosen, like Tuymans' work, can be seen first as a distillation the best of recent European traditions. Roman Polanski's taut and suspenseful debut, Knife in the Water; Coup de Torchon, a typically polished and intelligent offering from Bertrand Tavernier, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder's masterpiece of modulated melodrama, are each impeccable, canonical selections. The oblique but uncompromising commentary on dark events in Tuymans work is also reflected, as with the harrowing Come and See, a Russian film directed by Elem Klimov depicting the harrowing atrocities of Nazi reprisals in Belarus, and the cult horror film Eyes Without a Face, where a plastic surgeon attempts to reconstruct his daughter's face using skin that hasn't exactly been donated. And of course, there is the digestion and recapitulation of minimalism in a way that creates maximal impact, as in choosing the silent Fall of the House of Usher, and his final choice, There Will Be Blood, about which Tuymans says:

This is the only American movie I chose. It is minimal and thorough in the way it portrays something as an understatement that has not yet been understood within the field of contemporary art. Besides the story of greed and power, the display of Daniel Day Lewis's anger management came so close to my own that two weeks after having seen the film, my wife had to point out to me "it is only a movie."

All Screenings are at the MCA Theater, 220 East Chicago Avenue. Tickets are $8 ($6 for MCA members and students)