![]() ![]() Her liveliness is a welcome foil to Butler’s ponderous inscrutability. We see her tiny feet straining to reach the pedals of the massive church organ she plays in “Intervention”, and later witness her effusive glee at the recording of the song’s backing orchestra. Chassagne’s pixie-like buoyancy shines through the random chop-cuts and marks her as the film’s most endearing force. Butler and Régine Chassagne are the most fully characterized, but even they only get the briefest of sketches. The behind-the-scene footage is hardly revelatory, presenting the band hammering out ideas in the studio and relaxing on the road. Miroir Noir is not a product that is likely to give anyone their life back. But one female caller sums up the Arcade Fire’s teetering balance of commercial appeal and soulful empathy perfectly: “Your product gave me my life back.” Oh shit, my foot’s on fire, I gotta go,” mutters one deadpan gent over shots of the band riding bumper cars). These recordings are interspersed throughout the film, and they vary from the adorable to the combative, from candid confessionals to hilarious non-sequiturs (“We’ve been touched by the hope and the truth. Perhaps the most penetrating idea of this type was the (866) NEON-BIBLE hotline, a number which fans could call to leave messages for the band. The film is replete with these concepts, from the cheesy pyramid-scheme ads released online to Richard Reed Parry’s front-row cameo on The Price Is Right. In promoting 2007’s Neon Bible, the group’s chosen instruments for that navigation tended towards ironic appropriations of infomercial hucksterism. Its most obvious antecedent is Radiohead’s Meeting People is Easy, but while that film unwinds gradually to the disaffected malaise in Thom Yorke’s voice, Miroir Noir is a self-aware tone-poem essay on the Arcade Fire’s navigation of the post-millennial liminal spaces between commercial capitalism and independent art. Directed by their long-time collaborator Vincent Morisset, this is never entirely a concert film nor a tour documentary nor even a film-student art flick, though elements of all three are prominent. The contradictions and hypocrisies that the Arcade Fire both embody and work gamely to transcend are visualized repeatedly in Miroir Noir. Even in such close quarters, the act of leveling can only be achieved through the conduit of the music. No species of direct connection is sought. But this footage shows indie’s high priests seeming uneasy among the faithful, who appear to share the feeling. Renowned for their sojourns into the crowd, this particular gimmick is usually configured as a populist transgression of the supposed boundary between performer and audience. The fans bunch awkwardly around them as Win Butler intones into a ghetto-taped megaphone. The colors he used were so strong that his physician urged him to wear dark glasses.The Arcade Fire’s enigmatic Miroir Noir opens with its most authentic moment: the band faces each other in the middle of an audience and gingerly eases into “Wake Up”. When he was an old man confined to bed, he made paper cutouts from brightly colored sheets of paper, which he then arranged into abstract patterns. Throughout his life, Matisse remained enamored by color. 7, selling for $4.2 million with premium against an estimate of between $3.5 million and $4.5 million. It went on the block again at Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art sale on Nov. Pierre sold it to the Reader's Digest Association in 1947, in whose collection it remained until being sold at From there the painting passed through various hands in Paris, New York and Washington before landing with Henri Matisse's son, Pierre, who was an art dealer in New York. Matisse painted this still life, titled "Anemones au Miroir Noir," in the winter of 1918 to 1919, and the paint was barely dry by the time he sold it to the Though the arrangement is carefully balanced, the eye is drawn again and again to the flowers that bloom suddenly before the mirror's blank surface. Slashes of black appear again on the desk, in a suggestion of an inkstand, a blotter and notebooks or pieces of paper. Instead of reflecting an image back, the mirror, painted black, deepens the background of the composition and allows the flowers to float in space. The mirror, vase and desk in this painting are at once recognizable objects and near-abstract exercises in the use of light and color. In his hotel room overlooking the water, the 49-year-old painter who had already risen to the top of the French art world concentrated on organizing the interior space of still lifes.
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