Rudy Burckhardt
Catalogue Entry for In Bed



Rudy Burckhardt is the poet of cinema. For 50 years he's been creating personal films that blend mortal dailiness with bop satiric myth. The films are pure lyricism, more about the texture of light and air than any plot that might be unfolding. Rudy's framed views are choice with not one frame ever being transitional. A quiet, understated power gently persuades. No other film-maker is so perfectly in tempo with the rhythms of the ordinary day. He filters the cacophony of charged city streets down to the clear jazz of Gabriel's trumpet. His sunset-over-pond-with-reeds-swaying-in-the-breeze-at-twilight postcard beauty might get juxtaposed with Scarlatti's logical keyboards runs. He lovingly attends the beauty there in overlooked crannies and the more obvious though thrilling sights passed by on strolls around. Permeating it all is a slapstick spirit. The films have the freshness of spontaneous invention practically dormant since silent comedy era whackiness, Sometimes fruit stars.
   His latest film, In Bed, is a bringing back into life the various snippets and events described and imagined verse by verse in Kenneth Koch's poem, "In Bed," from his collection Days and Nights. Arranged in staccato verses rapid as machine gun fire, the poem is read voice-over on the soundtrack while the montaged visual choreography unfurls. The poem riffs on the plausible possibilities and remembered musings that took place in beds the poet has known. While some of these are reenacted, there's room for luxurious pauses while the visuals catch up with the poet's triggered thoughts running banshee away into formerly unexplored regions of hilarious fantasy and sweet memory: a morning coffee vision becomes penetrable as, lugging a typewriter into bed, a poet, surrounded by muses (in silk nightgowns) and amusements (mandolin, flowers, white dog) in reverie composes a ditty before unreluctantly submitting to more mere mortal pleasures; a portrait sitter's fantasy of seeing the artist working sans shirt is spliced in; a scantily clad damsel sleepwalks her way through a dawning forest into the viewer's daydreams.
   Burckhardt's lyrical montage opens and reflects the world the way a poem does, editing out reportage and creating with the cream, the heightened impressions, the affects of a dream time. He consistently gets to the essential fragments of an experience or a view. His perspective is that of a loving pedestrian god of the sidewalks and breeze blown dandelion, a celebrator of details we might have missed. The films are about desire, bewitched noticing and, most of all, love.


Photos of Rudy Burckhardt by Barry Kornbluh

  

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© 2001 Greg Masters