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CRAVAN
VS CRAVAN
5/10
Spain 2002
: Isaki Lacuesta : 100mins
Cravan vs
Cravan should really be called Cravan vs Nicotra, as this is
a bio-documentary in which not one but two men jostle for director Lacuesta’s
attention. In theory, this purports to be a profile of Arthur Cravan:
a Swiss-born nephew of Oscar Wilde who achieved renown as both a dadaist
poet a talented boxer, travelling the globe before abruptly disappearing
in the Gulf of Mexico in 1918. In practice, however, the film is soon
hijacked by modern-day pugilist Frank Nicotra – a former European light-heavyweight
champion turned poet, novelist and moviemaker, whose interest in Cravan
spurs him to piece together fragments of his idol’s life by revisiting
Cravan’s old haunts in Paris, Barcelona and beyond.
Lacuesta follows
Nicotra’s progress as he interviews a broad gallery of subjects, including
Cravan’s prickly biographer Maria Luisa Borras, Cravan’s relative Merlin
Holland (Wilde’s grandson), and even a nonagenarian Spaniard who claims
to have been present in 1917 when Cravan fought his ill-advised exhibition
bout against the then-reigning world heavyweight champ Jack Johnson. Lacuesta
intersperses all this with a series of black-and-white ‘recreations’ of
key incidents in Cravan’s life, with Nicotra appearing in the Cravan role
– despite the light-heavyweight Nicotra being a completely different size
and shape to the outsize Cravan, who these days would probably be considered
a super-heavy.
Nicotra hogs
even more screen time thanks to a bafflingly generous selection of video-footage
featuring video footage of his own ring exploits – we see him knocking
out James Cook in one round to claim the Euro title, with the killer punch
replayed in slow-motion just in case we’ve missed the point. There’s no
doubting Nicotra’s intense identification with Cravan – at one point Lacuesta
even shows him having his photo taken to recreate a famous image of the
‘boxer-poet’ smugly resplendent in fur-trimmed coat and ornate veil. Lacuesta
seems content to allow Nicotra to indulge such bizarre whims, presenting
them without editorial comment.
It’s also unfortunate
that, despite a lengthy 100-minute running time, Lacuesta and/or Nicotra
couldn’t time to examine how some of Cravan’s comments (“If you can be
a brute, remain like one”), his Nietzschean swagger and his connections
with the Futurists – who would soon after provide spurious intellectual
respectability to the nascent Fascist movement – take on a somewhat alarming
aspect with the benefit of hindsight. But Cravan is very much a product
of his times – indeed, he was on friendly or unfriendly terms with virtually
every ‘player’ among Paris’s then-booming intellectual and artistic community,
sitting as a model for many leading painters from various movements.
Such was Cravan’s
fame, and so mysterious his ‘demise’, it is surprising that he’s so seldom
mentioned nowadays. Despite this, at each stop on his journey Nicotra
does keep handily stumbling across groups of people who are remarkably
well-informed about Cravan’s activities. Running into that nonagenarian
fight fan, meanwhile, does seem an astonishing stroke of luck… and isn’t
the oldster suspiciously youthful for somebody who must be pushing 95?
What, meanwhile, are we to make of comments such as “the only way to understand
Cravan is as a work of fiction”, “none of his fights are documented” and
“I rather doubt Cravan existed”?
At times, the
shadowy Cravan does seem like a composite being, perhaps conjured up by
Smiths songwriter Morrissey – a fanatical Wilde devotee whose ‘interest’
in boxing (or rather boxers) is also well known. There are several precedents
for such an faked ‘biography’ – William Boyd and David Bowie briefly conned
the art world into thinking they’d discovered a ‘lost’ master called Nat
Tate a few years back – and, if Cravan were to be a figment of Lacuesta
and Nicotra’s imaginations, then Cravan Vs Cravan would take on
tantalising extra levels as a rumination on fame, creativity and the role
of hero-worship.
But further
investigations indicate that Arthur Cravan was, in fact, 100 per cent
real. Which leaves Cravan vs Cravan a somewhat unsatisfactory contribution
to his legend – there’s no real attempt, for instance, to come up with
any kind of explanation for Cravan’s disappearance, with much more time
and effort spent on the tangential issue of whether or not Cravan was
the painter who signed his canvases ‘Edouard Archinard.’ Cravan even published
a magazine, Maintenant, in which all of the ‘contributors’ were
in fact pseudonyms for Cravan himself, who once boasted “I am all men,
all animals”.
This monomania
is, one suspects, no small part of the attraction for Nicotra, whose ‘quest
for Cravan’ rapidly takes on the air of an elaborate ego trip (“this is
my story” he brags, early on). The arty recreations are very ill-advised
– they pad the movie out to its rather bloated length, and Lacuesta seems
as uncomfortable directing semi-fictional vignettes as Nicotra does acting
in them. The director achieves much more striking images with his smooth
present-day documentary footage, his camera gliding through the Pere Lachaise
cemetery, a Lausanne cocktail party, and, most photogenic of all, the
ruined stadium in which the Johnson-Cravan bout took place. The surviving
spectator looks on, Cravan blurring into Nicotra in a monochrome memory,
as vivid, fragile and unreliable as celluloid itself.
23rd
February, 2003
(seen on video, 22nd February)
official website
: www.cravanvscravan.com
Frank Nicotra’s
website : frank.nicotra.9online.fr/
by Neil
Young
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