When it comes to art, I'm a sucker for ambition.
When I heard there was a film shot entirely in various rooms of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, it didn't have much impact on me. But when I found out the film, Russian Ark, was done in one 96-minute camera shot, I was all in.
Likewise in 2000, when Mike Figgis announced a film about movie executives, I couldn't have cared less. But when I learned it was going to have four stories being told simultaneously in quarters on the screen and that each story had been shot at the same time and then mixed together, I got interested.
Krzysztof Kie?lowski made a movie based on the colors of the French flag? Meh. Wait, he made three movies each based on one color of the flag, and then he made 10 more movies each about a single commandment, well now he's my kind of guy.
Philip Glass wrote an opera about Einstein. No thanks. It's five hours long without interruption? Let me get my credit card.
Which is why I spent the first part of this summer, as I have several past summers, reading the most recently released section of Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-part novel, My Struggle.
You must really love it, people have said to me. Not really. In fact this 600-page chunk is pretty tedious and I kind of don't like the protagonist.
Why spend so much time engaging with art that doesn't excite? Maybe for the same cliche people climb mountains: It's there, and the ambition itself is part of the beauty.
Will the effort be worth it? Just as Wagner fans have to wait until the last notes of Götterdämmerung, to know whether they've spent their 12 opera hours wisely, we will have to wait to find out.
I’m Dan Libman, and that’s my perspective.
