FILM CLASSICS

KEITH UHLICH

(1986) The Sacrifice Erland Josephson and Sven Wollter in

Au hasard Balthazar (1966, Robert Bresson, France/Sweden) With Jerzy Skolimowski’s loose remake/homage EO now in theaters, the time is right for a rewatch of Robert Bresson’s masterpiece in which a mistreated donkey stands in for the ills of society, and perhaps transcends them. The animal Balthazar comes of age alongside the village girl Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), whose life in a rural French town is one of increasing emotional and physical brutalization. Balthazar is witness to many of these soul-sapping events, though the divide between man and beast is such that any anthropomorphizing (does the donkey feel for his human owners or is that a ludicrous impossibility?) is constantly called into question. What the film seems most interested in is unearthing our feeling for a creature who is decidedly not like us, something the thornily moving final scene takes to a reverential apex. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.)

The Sacrifice (1986, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/France/United Kingdom) The final film from Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky is one of several he made in exile from his home country. Ingmar Bergman regular Erland Josephson plays Alexander, an aesthete whose ideas are very earthbound and eschew the celestial. Then a seeming nuclear war breaks out, upending his life, and driving him toward both God and madness. Though it wasn’t intended to be Tarkovsky’s last effort (he died of cancer soon after completing post-production), The Sacrifice does have the feel of a summing up of the writer-director’s career-long concerns about mankind: its destructive technological advancements, its spiritual and emotional devastation, and its still-evident possibilities (exemplified by a tree planted at the beginning of the film that visually rhymes with one captured in the opening shot of Tarkovsky’s first feature Ivan’s Childhood). The climax, in which Alexander burns his own house to the

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tion since Ra’s death, Ray knows well that the new leader still pulls Ra compositions from drawers and refrigerators while peppering their shows and new recordings with freshly written tunes.

“Marshall has just as much music, from his past and from new writing sessions that he’s working on daily. He has so much music in him; it seems as if he’s finally coming into his own and blossoming through all of his compositions, old and new. We’re just beginning to touch on his compositions on Swirling and Living Sky — he’s got hundreds that we haven’t begun to play yet, and at 98 years old, he’s still coming up with new ones all the time.”

When it comes to new music and new visions — be it the Arkestra’s patented mix of New Orleans’ parish parade funk, spacy free jazz, and cartoon skronk, or some of its more recent gentle soul songs — Allen himself once told NPR that “Imagination is the magic carpet. It will take your soul to distant lands. And outer space.”

The saxophonist was talking, then, about how he met Ra in 1958 and fell immediately into the Afro-Futurist avatar’s Saturn trance through Sun’s conversations about the Bible, ancient Egypt, and the Space Age. “I’m really not a man, you see. I’m an angel,” Sun Ra once said during an interview before his transference into another dimension. “If you’re an angel, you’re a step above man.”

Ra’s talk of bringing the ancient to the future rivetted Marshall Allen and drew the saxophonist into the pianist’s web like a fly to a spider’s lair.

“There was something about him that I

Solution to SEASONAL DOWNTURN

22 ICON | DECEMBER 2022 | ICONDV.COM couldn’t get away from — like a magnet,” Allen told NPR. “He draws you right in, and it changed my whole destiny. Ra told me, ‘We’re

Michael Ray. Photo: Michael Weintrob

gonna play this music for the 21st century’ — which was about 50 or 60 years away. And I was thinking to myself, I gotta wait that long?”

Trumpeter Michael Ray also felt Ra’s magnetic pull.

In 1978, when Ray had just joined the R&B band Kool & the Gang (with whom he continues to play), the Trenton-born brass man didn’t know Ra’s music when he attended one of Sun’s famed, epic Germantown concerts in Vernon Park.

“I was confronted with Ra’s sound and image all at once,” said Ray. “You looked at the members of Ra’s Arkestra on the bandstand then, and every one of them had stacks upon stacks of sheet music piled high under their chairs. Not like the regular thing where you have all of the music on a stand in front of you. This was stacked high like phone books because Ra had so much stuff broken down by his own genres: standards, stomps, Fletcher Henderson material, Jimmy Lunceford stuff. There were more stacks dedicated to his arrangements — very singular — as every song he wrote had very particular structures. All I could think was, ‘Wow, how do these cats keep all that music straight?’ But they did because the music was amazing.” Add to the Arkestra’s sonic display, two fancifully adorned drum kits, fire eaters, dancers, and chanters running around, singing “space is the place,” and Ray was hooked.

“Sun Ra told me when I met him, ‘I know everything you need to know about music,’ which was apparent. When I moved into the Sun Ra Institute, it was a 24/7 proposition. Ra

Sun Ra. Photo: Baron Wolman.

would knock on my bedroom door at 3 am, asking me to play a line or a song that he had just composed minutes prior. And Marshall is the same way, the same creative genius. Marshall would wake me up the same way. ‘Play what you don’t know.’ That was a favorite of Marshall’s that he got from living in the Ra house long before I got there.”

Quick to praise the making of new albums such as Swirling and Living Sky, Ray said, “There’s always been a push for new music, especially since Marshall has been playing around with the kora and the EVI. The sound of his kora alone is gorgeous. Marshall is my roommate when we go on the road, and his songs on the kora are lullabies as they put me to sleep every night.”

For Ray and Sun Ra, the tradition continues. “That was our instruction from him — bring it all into the future.”

The same is true of Ray and Marshall Allen. “It’s the same continuum that goes from the ancient to the future and back again. And that interplanetary arc is its crescendo.” n

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One salesperson, Harold, has taken care of my wife for years. She first noticed him when he was demonstrating a fancy step to a customer. She asked if he was a dancer, and they ended up doing the cha-cha on the aisle near the Birkenstocks. My wife has bought many pairs of walking shoes and gorgeous heels from Harold. She’s not just an excellent dancer. She’s a shoe person.

A strong sense of place in a painting will tell a story by itself. It doesn’t have to be true, just accurate, or maybe vice versa. You sense that things happen in this place because it feels like you’ve been there, and that’s the bones of an engaging narrative, written or painted. I call it a heartbeat. A lot of places are lifeless and forgettable. Everybody who comes here has a memory from Tip-Top.

I love painting in places that evoke that sensation. I get to stand and feel for a few hours. Revisit things forgotten or just not seen anymore. Watch them unfold and make them mine. I don’t have to buy anything or look like I have a reason to be there. I craft my description as I go, investigating the events swirling around me, picking from things that catch my attention. Not describing a hundred little subjects, but one: what it’s like to be in Tip-Top Shoes, 72nd and Broadway. There is nothing in the image that looks much like a shoe. I’m painting the place, not the shoes. I don’t need them—just the heartbeat.

daylight pours in through the front doors and windows from the city outside after having bounced off the buildings and streets, shifting in intensity, blocked and reflected as people and trucks pass by. The light casts off the walls, floor, columns, and cases, picking up colors and decaying a little each time, and each time adding to our understanding of the space we’re in.

It’s not always practical to set up in some businesses, especially in Manhattan. Real estate is often at a premium. There are some specialty shops, like where they make keys and repair shoes, which are squished impossibly between their larger-but-not-all-that-big colleagues. The tiniest of them have waiting areas that are smaller than my easel. Tip Top was tight, but I’m good with tight.

It’s also not always easy to gain access to some places (You want to do what?), but some owners like the idea of there being an artistic record of the business. Third-generation owner Lester Wasserman did, and he gave me the green light with no hesitation. Then it was up to me to select an iconic view of the interior that had a place to set up and didn’t put me in anybody’s way, including the customers.

I opted to set up back past the counter by the socks. I quickly became part of the landscape. Customers walked by, testing how the shoes felt on their feet. Most stepped around me as if they negotiated artists and French Easels in stores every day. People stopped to look at the painting and talk to me while I worked. I like that. I was just another part of a good-feeling place. The owner got his father from the back room to see the painting. The father held his phone in shaky hands to take a photo. The manager was pleased that I put him in the image. Harold laughed that I got his bald spot. n