¡Colores!; 1908; Potter Diego Romero, Russian Painter Oleg Vassiliev, Architecture of Flight, Filmmaker John Sayles

>>Narrator: IN THIS EDITION OF COLORES >>COHITI PUEBLO POTTER DIEGO ROMERO MAKES POTTERY THAT'S MIXES TRADITION WITH POP CULTURE. >>Diego Romero: Humor is medicine. Once we loose the ability to laugh at ourselves and the world around us we loose the ability to heal. >>Narrator: OLEG VASSILIEV IS A RUSSIAN PAINTER WHO EXPLORES LIGHT AND SHADE, THE CONCHOUS AND THE SUBCONHOUS WITH HIS ART. >>Oleg Vassiliev: He says that Art is very important, art is great, there is something that is bigger than art. >>Narrator: ARCHITECTURE BRINGS AN AIRPORT TO LIFE WITH MORE THAN JUST TARMACKS AND TERMINALS >>Art and architecture matter it affects your life. >>AND FILMMAKER JOHN SAYLES FINDS INSPIRATOIN IN HISTORY >>John Sayles: Really what I think more about rather than a legacy is mostly about the cultural

conversation of the moment. >>Narrator: IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES! >>THIS PROGRAM IS MADE POSSIBLE IN PART BY NEW MEXICO ARTS. A DIVISION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURALAFFAIRS AND THE NATIONAL ENDOWNENT >>Narrator: COCHITI PUEBLO POTTER DIEGO ROMERO MIXES SOCIAL COMMENTARY, COMICS, GREEK PAINTING, ANDPOPULAR CULTURE WITH TRADITIONAL SPANISH AND ANGLO STYLES. >>Diego Romero: I like clay because it's from the earth. It last forever. A canvas will

eventually turn to dust, but clay ceramics seem to have an indefinite shelf life. So maybe when the universe is imploding, the big bang theory kinda, expand and contracting universe, maybe there will still be a Diego Romero pot on the planet. I am a chronologist on the absurdity of human nature and I believe humor is medicine. Once we lose the ability to laugh at ourselves and the world around us, we lose theability to heal. I wanted to do pottery. I guess originally traditional pottery of the pueblo Indian.

Eventually it became more of a combination of the traditional pottery and my love of comic books. >>Romero: I love narrative art. You know, I see comic books as kind of a contemporary mythology. Youknow you look at the old pottery of the Greeks and you have Hercules going down to Hades, and whacking Cerberus over the head, and he brings him back. And you look at, so you have this whole narrative of this superhero as far back as ancient Greece. >>Romero: I could pour through this stuff for days. It's just a feast for the eye. Here we go, Wonderwoman, one of my all-time favorites.

I kinda see her as the Earth goddess metaphor reinterpreted. Yes, I am an Indian. I am also a white man too. Am I this white kid that grew up in Berkeley reading comic books? Or am I this Johnny Come Lately back to the village born again Indian. I really think I'm neither, and both. Every pot I make stands a chance of being around here for thousands, and thousands, and thousands of years. And that people will look back on it and say, "Gee this is interestingpeople haven't changed that much. Every day I work on pottery, I feel like I've earned my place in the universe that day.

>>Narrator: OLEG VASSILIEV IS ONE OF THE MOST HIGHLY RESPECTED PAINTERS IN RUSSIAN CONTEMPORARY ART. IN HIS NATIVE RUSSIA, HE WORKED AS A CHILDREN'S BOOK ILLUSTRATOR. BUT, AT NEARLY 60 YEARS OLD, THEARTIST IMMIGRATED TO THE UNITED STATES ... >>OLEG VASSILIEV: (Russian) >>MARIA ZAVIALOVA: So, in the White Sea he is close to the Arctic Circle and there is a small islandthere, called the Island of Anser . It was in the mid-1960s, and there on that island, probably dueto the smog and diffused light because it's in the north, he realized that the earth and everythingon it is actually very small and there is this ocean of light that the earth is bathed in. And thenhe remembered

the words of his teacher, Favorsky, who said art is very important. Art is great. There is something that is bigger than art. And he thinks that on that small island in the White Sea, he had some kind of an epiphany, a revelation, and his independent paintings started from that moment. >>Narrator: Oleg Vassiliev is a Russian artist who now lives to the generation of unofficial artists of the 1960s and '70s. He joined the underground scene in the late '50s, so he was at the inception. >>Unofficial artists were unofficial because they were critical of the Soviet situation around them.They wanted to work with the Soviet cultural stereotypes, and also criticize them. Some of the artists began to experiment, and

experimentation was out of the question at that time. Oleg Vassiliev belongs to that group of artists, who are not overtly critical of the regime but the way they painted and the way they experimented with art was already a political statement. >>Oleg's early work is quite different. He went through several periods. He did some engravings in the style of Favorsky, his teacher. Then in the 1960s he began to create this energetic flow of fewercolors, warm to cool, around objects that he would try to place in the middle of the painting. And then he began to combine very detailed elements with his spectral theories of pictorial space. >>VASSILIEV: (Russian)

>>ZAVIALOVA: Technically speaking, every painting, Oleg can create a model, an abstract model. So this is the painting he's working on, and this was one of the ideas that - >>VASSILIEV: (Russian) >>ZAVIALOVA: But he's saying it - >>VASSILIEV: (Russian) >> ZAVIALOVA: There is something unnatural about the way he structured this space, so he switched - >>VASSILIEV: (Russian) >> ZAVIALOVA: Oleg's work is very interesting in the way he works with several theories of the construction of pictorial space. According to one of them - there are three kinds of pictorial space thatyou work with: the high space, deep space and combined space. And he also works with different waysof representing this space through the combination of cool and warm colors that

creates a sort of movement and energy around the painting. >>Space & Nature is a painting where you can see his combined space - deep space and high space coexisting in the center of the painting. And you can feel that the overall pictorial space is twisted there - there is this whirl, tornado of energy going through the center. Also one of his more generalideas about art is that whatever you paint, there's visual impressions that are really very fleeting. They are passing quick and the light that they are bathed in is permanent, it is constant. >>Like the earth that is, you know, rotating around the sun in this powerful flow of sunlight and sun energy. So this is an important idea for him. That's why his paintings combine this

very precise detailed visual impressions of real life and the spectral flow of light. >>One of the paintings that really impressed me the moment I saw it is his Memory of Kira. That's the painting that he started soon after his wife passed away, and you can feel her presence still lingering there. Kira is placed in this white circle of light that is trying to push her out but she is still working away into that light from us. And there is this ocean in the background, so it's a wonderful painting. >>Since coming to America, Oleg's work did not change a lot. Even though it will take a future art historian to look at the body of his work created here, he says that he has not

changed his style, his technique. Oleg says a Russian artist is always a Russian artist and he, that's how he feels abouthimself. >>VASSILIEV: (Russian) >> ZAVIALOVA: He says that in some of his paintings, he achieves this moment of light flying away orflying through the painting, like this passing, fleeting moment within the light that is permanent. >>Narrator: TAKE A MINUTE TO LOOK AROUND ANY AIRPORT AND YOU MAY SEE THAT A TEAM OF ARCHITECTS AND ARTISTS HAVE WORKED TO PROVE THAT THERE'S BEAUTY IN THE JOURNEY AS WELL AS THE DESTINATION. AN EXHIBITION AT THE DENVER ART MUSEUM SHOWS US HOW. >>Airports can be a gateway

and they can be a gateway in a majestic and dramatic way. The airport is really a brand It's the first thing you see and the last thing you see when you go to a place. >>Art and architecture matter and it affects your life. It affects your life in many ways. So what we have in the design of airports is up applied art and applied science. >>I think Fentress is really showing how airports can be really sort of unique, uplifting and exciting spaces. Using technology of create these very unique spaces that are very different from the airports that I knew when I was growing up in the 70s and the 80s that almost became these long, low corridors filled with florescent light and almost were people processors. >>The goal of the exhibition

and pulling together the specific works that you see in the gallery wasto reveal the creative process of the design of airports and so you'll see things like sketches, the use of digital and animation to move through spaces. Bringing these spaces into the third dimension with a lot of the models. >>I think that it's really difficult to typically exhibit architecture in an art museum in that you can't show the buildings themselves. So we often grapple with the different ways of representing these spaces. It's a really interesting way of getting our visitors into these spaces without actually going to anairport itself. Travel has become a gruesome experience. >>The number of people traveling and the hustle and bustle and the size of the planes and the loading and unloading. So, we as architects do everything we possibly can to make

the passengers' experience a pleasant experience. And we do that by bringing daylight into the building. We try to reduce the walking distances, have amenities that are really interesting. When we are designing an airport we think of touch tones of design which are things like bring the context into the design of the building and celebrate the entrance to the building. We try to capture the culture and the place. >>We use natural materials from that area and we capture something from the history of that place inthe design of the building. >>A part of trying to capture the essence of a place is researching the area and understanding what's special about this place. >>The North Carolina project we did in Raleigh-Durham we used laminated wood beams inside the building because that area is about crafts and hardwoods. >>In San Jose, California we used the inspiration of a computer cable being unfurled and unrolled because that's the Silicon Valley.

When we were designing the Denver International Airport terminal I had this kind of idea that I wanted it to relate to the mountains somehow. So when we got involved in fabric for the roof of the building it just came very naturally that we were able to design it with peaks and valleys and it reallyrelated to the mountains. Although, some people look at it and say that it looks more like teepees. >>With the Denver airport we started a whole new genre of things that are going on in airport designaround the world where now everyone wants their airport to relate to the place and be emblematic ofthat place. >>Architecture matters. It shapes your environment in ways that you never thought, it shapes how youmove through a space, the way you sit in a space. The way daylight comes into the space. And all ofthese things we take into consideration when we're designing a building and we do it in a way to try to make it

a pleasurable experience for people. >>Narrator: NEXT FILMMAKER AND AWARD-WINNING FICTION WRITER JOHN SAYLES ... THROUGH HIS CAREER, SAYLES HAS CONTINUED TO PURSUE BOTH ABOUT HIS MOST RECENT FILM, HIS LATEST NOVEL AND HIS FASCINATING CAREER ... >>Narrator: Now, John your most recent film Amigo deals with the Philippine-American war. Why did you decide to make a movie about a war that most people haven't even heard of? >>Sayles: When I was doing research for my novel Los Gusanos, I went back to the Spanish-American War. And in that research I kept running into this phrase,

the Philippine insurrection, the Philippine-American War. And I never heard of it. I started asking some of my Philippine and Philippine-American friends, what do you know about this. And they said, well you know it wasn't taught in our schools either. And that got me suspicious. ...How do you and why do you make a war disappear where maybe a million people got killed. >>NARRATOR: But why don't we know about it? I mean we won the war and the wars that we win we usually brag about. >>Sayles: Yeah, I think it was a combination of a little bit of shame. At the time that it was happening the justification for it was almost all racial. Rudyard Kipling's poem "Pick Up the White Man's Burden", the subtitle of the poem is The US and the Philippines. It's this open letter to the United States saying you are white Christians, they are little dark people,

it is not just your opportunity, it is your white Christian duty. In the Philippines it was we didn't want them to know their own history. We did not want them to remember that they had a Philippine Republic with very educated people as elected officers, with a constitution that was partly based on our constitution; that they weren't a bunch of people in a hut somewhere making things up over a cook fire. >>NARRATOR: Now, your new book, A Moment in the Sun, also partly deals with the Philippine-AmericanWar. What is the relationship between the book and the film? >>Sayles: Well they kind of evolve from each other. I wrote a screenplay twelve years ago or so called Sometime in the Sun that dealt very specifically with the 25th Infantry, which was an all-black infantry, white officers, black soldiers who fought both in the Cuban campaign in Santiago and then were later in the Philippines. And the fact that while some of them were away their right to vote was being taken away

in the southern states. The last kind of nail in the coffin of reconstructionwas in North Carolina in Wilmington, where in 1898 there was this racial coup. And I realized okayhere's the connection. And the connection is race. >>NARRATOR: The novel Moment in the Sun includes so many topics, The Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, that racist coup in Wilmington, the Gold Rush in the Yukon, the birth of the movies, the power of the yellow press. This novel, which comes to about 1,000 pages... >>Sayles: 960. >>NARRATOR: It is truly an epic. How long did it take you to research and to write it. >>Sayles: Because I started it as a screenplay and then I kind of realized that we will never get the money to make this thing. I put it aside for a while. I always felt like I was cramming too much into a two hour movie. What if I made it into a novel. And I had written novels before. I could expand it a little. And then as happened with Los Gusanos my previous novel, there was a strike of The Writer's Guild

of America and I had seven or eight months where I was unemployed and really couldn't be working on anybody else's stuff. So I just had time to sit down. So I did most of the actual writing of it in about a year. >>NARRATOR: Now A Moment in the Sun is your first novel in 20 years. >>Sayles: Something like that. >>NARRATOR: But you started out as a fiction writer. What was the transition from being a novelist and short story writer to writing films, and directing films. >>Sayles: Yeah... Yeah. It is interesting because certainly as a kid I saw ... I read books, but Isaw more TV and movies than I read books. But when I started it was obvious I don't have any money, I didn't go to film school, I don't know anybody in the movie business. So I started with the thing I could do, which was to write stories. Always in my head, wouldn't it be cool to be able to make a movie. And my literary agent, his agency had a deal with a Hollywood agency. So I came out to LA and the first job offer I got was a re-write on this Jaws rip off thing. And the movie did verywell. And then I wrote

a couple of other movies. And all of a sudden I had $40,000 in one place atone time-which I never had before. And I wrote The Return of the Secaucus Seven very much with whatcan I do well for $40,000. And I wrote it for a bunch of people who were about to turn 30. Because all the good actors I knew were around 30 and they weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet. So itwas very much a here's what I got to make the movie. What can I make well for that much money. >>NARRATOR: But Baby It's You came out in 1983. That was a studio movie right? >>Sayles: Yeah, we shot it for what was even then a low budget movie for a studio, which was $3 million, almost all in New Jersey. So the making of it was

wonderful. The editing was fun up until the point where the studio said, this doesn't look like Porky's, this doesn't look like a teen comedy.Well it was never meant to be a teen comedy. >>NARRATOR: What happened then? >>Sayles: We started fighting over the cut. At some point I was kicked out of the editing room. They did their cut. It didn't test any better. In fact, at one point worse than my cut. So they let myfinish the movie. I was happy with what the movie looked like. But they didn't kill themselves distributing the movie. >>NARRATOR: But you never did another studio film? >>Sayles: No, I did Eight Men Out was done with Orion. It was one of the last movies Orion did. ...And they pretty much said, okay if this is two hours and under you can make this movie. And the movie is an hour and 59 minutes and 37 seconds or something like that. And everybody talks really fast. >>NARRATOR: So, most of your films are self-financed ... >>Sayles: Or independent money when that was around. So for about a five-year

period we were able to finance things by selling it to a home video company first. They would put up $2-$3 million to make the movie and then together then we would look for a theatrical distributor. But that was back when there were maybe 25 to 30 independent movies made every year. Sundance Film Festival will probably get this year over 2,000 feature films submitted. >>NARRATOR: So would you say that a Secaucus Seven couldn't happen now? >>Sayles: It probably wouldn't even get into Sundance. >>NARRATOR: You know in your film Men With Guns, the protagonist, Dr. Fuentes, is so concerned about his legacy that he's willing to risk his life to make sure he leaves one behind. Are you in any way as concerned about your own legacy? >>Sayles: No, I don't think so. There's already filmmakers that I think are world class filmmakers who are almost forgotten. And they've only

been dead for 20 years. I think it's pretty rare and pretty much random that anything lasts more than a couple of generations. So really what I think moreabout rather than a legacy is mostly about the cultural conversation of the moment: what do I see in life that is interesting to talk about that I don't see on the big screen? One of the reasons I wrote A Moment in the Sun and got into the Philippine-American War is I've never seen anything about it, I didn't even know it existed. This should be part of the conversation. And we should remember, you know, our history because the official version is not a very good version. >>NARRATOR: Well John it's been a pleasure. >>Sayles: Yes. Thank you. Thanks. >>Narrator: NEXT TIME ON COLORES >>DJ SPOOKY FILLS IN THE BLANK SPACE OF HIS IMAGINATION WITH THE HELP OF A NEW MEXICO

BASED QUARTET >>Spooky: It's a cynthasis between hip hop, the idea of sampeling, colage and cynthasis bringing together all these different traditions. >>Narrator: POET ED BOK LEE DELIVERS A MESSAGE TO A MOVIE STAR >>Lee: Bruce thank you for advancing on to that final island mist in the sky and for taking as manyof us as you could with you. >>Narrator: PROMINENT CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPE PAINTER GREGORY KONDOS STILL EXPLORES... >>Kondos: Get up in the morning and say I'm a student and that's it and I will die a student and that's it. >>Narrator: DANCING WITH THE BILL T. JONES ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY, JENNIFER NUGENT IS MOVITATED BYPASSION >>Nugent: I feel like the personal musical dialogue is poetry. >>Narrator: UNTIL NEXT TIME