Cirque de Calder

A 19-minute short film directed by Carlos Vilardebo, documenting the work of artist/sculptor/inventor Alexander Calder, projected as a film-to-video transfer on a very large interior wall of Seattle Art Museum as part of their Calder exhibit, "A Balancing Act." I wondered whether to consider it a "theater" experience - tinny, overmatched speaker system...giant wall...dark room...endless video loop...yeah, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Calder appears to have been a very busy man. When he wasn't inventing the mobile or forging industrial-sized objects, he would handcraft small wire figures which could be mechanized simply by pulling a few strings. A weightlifter snatches a barbell, an elephant stands on its hindquarters, cowboys buck, wirewalkers glide, trapeze artists fly, chariots race. All of this would be in small shows he would put on for his friends. His wife would play records as a soundtrack while he would stammer his best carnival-barker French.

Immediately after coming home from SAM, I checked to see if this short film was available on YouTube, and it is. The following is a test to see if the embedding code works ... the low-quality, small-screen constraints make it difficult to distinguish all the details (and there seems to be an extra layer of English-language commentary), but if this works it'll be 20-plus of your minutes well-spent...

That seems to have worked OK ... if the one or two of you who see this could let me know whether it seems to work for you, I'd much appreciate it....