Film Studies
The year is 1977 tucked into 2018, and Times Square is playing its grittier, garish, four-decades-younger self. Cigarette smoke floats above the gloam of the Hi-Hat bar, dark and loud and disco, the setting of an exhibition opening for Viv (played by Adelind Horan). She darts around the room snapping pictures of her friends dancing and flirts dangerously with the bartender as patrons inspect her photographs, pinned to the red-painted brick walls. Not everyone is a fan. A red-haired woman peers at an image of a red-haired woman who looks a lot like she does, sitting in a bar that looks a lot like this one.
“I coulda done that,” she scoffs to the guy next to her, whose good-natured smirk shows behind his mustache. “Eh, I kinda like it,” he says, taking a drag. This is Vincent, played by James Franco in , David Simon and George Pelecanos’s HBO series about the 1970s and 1980s porn industry in New York. The actress is Nan Goldin, the woman in the photograph is [1980]) was made by Nan Goldin, and all of this, really, is Nan Goldin, regarding yet another reflection of (1983–2008) and its enduring, flexible influence on film and television. Claire Denis dedicated her 2002 film (), a largely wordless film about two strangers who meet at night amid a Paris transit workers’ strike, to Goldin. The saturated color of is soaked into the palettes of the films of Wong Kar-wai and of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in his 2000 crime and comic film , set in Mexico. In an effort to duplicate the hypervivid tones of Goldin’s pictures, Inarritu opted for a processing method that risks ruining the film itself; the film critic Karen Redrobe writes that, at times, his interiors feel so close to , they produce an “uncanny effect, as though Goldin’s photographs had been strangely transformed into tableaux vivants.” The subcultural worlds of Inarritu’s film and Goldin’s project, however, remain vastly distinct.
