Taking Venice keeps trying to figure out why it needs to tell us its story. A residual emptiness follows each of the developments in director Amei Wallach’s documentary, in which a potentially fascinating subject is undone by a general sort of aimlessness. Is its human subject, Robert Rauschenberg, truly at the center of that story, which recounts the Venice Biennale held in 1964, or is the story more of an overarching one about the event itself, which was occurring during a significant year in world history? It’s simultaneously telling both of these stories, by virtue of including details about the significant complications of getting Rauschenberg’s work into the exhibition and wandering occasionally into bits of the man’s biography, and neither of them, because it once again can’t find a thesis until it is also supposedly concluding its ideas.
Even once it reaches that thesis, though, the hollowness at the center of it all shines through, possibly even to the greatest degree at that point. It seems to be that the 32nd Venice Biennale was a really big deal in the same year as the passing of the Civil Rights Act in the United States, the sting of the assassination of the president of that country only months before, the unrest caused by the Vietnam War and the ongoing conversations that were leading to a sexual and gender revolution in America that would reach its highest heights in just a few years. What Wallach doesn’t give us is a reason to believe that it was anywhere near this level of importance or significance.
Surely, it was fairly significant at the time for the United States to give itself a win as a major force in the art world. That’s why Rauschenberg, an early pioneer in the discipline of pop art with his fusions of painting and sculpting with postmodern (for the time) concepts that incorporated photography and papermaking into his pieces, as well as an embrace of pairing them with physical performance, often in the form of dancers, as a complement. Could an informative documentary be made from Rauschenberg’s work on its own? There is almost no doubt about this, and indeed, a spot of research reveals that a retrospective of his work does exist, having been made right in the middle of a period spent in nearly a dozen countries, capturing their cultural essence in his pieces.
Perhaps an interesting film could have been made about the Venice Biennale, too, but this one meanders through a lot of redundant talking-head interviews that seem to iterate, then reiterate, how determined the United States, under John F. Kennedy, were to making a dent in the competition after France’s near-total domination during the previous 15 years. That fight was a contentious one, as the U.S. decided not to play entirely fair in their bid to make that dent. Rauschenberg was something of a pawn to Alan Solomon, chosen by some people with fairly blatant connections to our government to organize the American entry, and he was even more of a pawn, played to bring in old friends of his, including composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, as accompaniment for his pieces.
A lot of this leads up to a major anticlimax, but then, Wallach barely commits to a tone, beyond the superficially informative, with which to relay this story or any other that might come up during a fairly spare 90 minutes. All the complications of getting Rauschenberg’s work into to the exhibition are false drama as soon as one discovers who received the grand prize at this exhibition, and therein lies the problem with Taking Venice. It resonates only as a fairly interesting anecdote, hinting at something deeper but never exploring it.
Photo by Zeitgeist Films / Kino Lorber
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