Blue Sky Sunshine White Sand by the Mile

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The toughest thing in the world is to turn what's staring you in the face into art. I don't mean to undervalue those that dance out towards the far reaches of their imagination, that's its own sort of tough, but there's something about staring back at the dull space right in front of your face, the flat tactility of it, that can be real intimidating to boundless inspiration. Sometimes it's just a bowl of fruit, ya know? And so I'm always impressed by documentarians who can turn their cameras onto their corner deli and find something beautiful there - people who are able to see the future looking back on their time and place and moment and whittle it down and say this, this is this thing's value right here.

The Last Resort, a sparkling new documentary out this weekend here in New York, takes a look at two guys who tried to be that person for their moment and the two very different roads and conclusions they came to. Their names are Andy Sweet and Gary Munroe, and they were two friends and photographers who turned their lenses on the vibrant Jewish communities of Miami in the 1960s and 70s. 

The most fascinating parts of the doc, besides its introduction to this colorful and singular world that's pretty much gone now, all rainbow rayon sleeves and yellow wigs, ukuleles on the boardwalk, are when it plunks these two men's different visions down beside one another and investigates the ways one artist can see the same space with totally different eyes; how a face in a crowd being filtered into a head and back out onto a flat surface is never the same, all of them snowflakes, one of a kind. 

But more than that - it's about how time susses out which one is worth more than the other; where value comes from, and why. The years chisel away at our understandings of the lost eras we've just been inhabiting and certain images, certain person's personal takes, remain, forming the hard crust around these crystallized pasts. How does that happen? How does an image become more than a single image, but an entire time, an entire culture, a communal experience? The Last Resort tussles with these considerable questions of art and eternity all while making time for matzo balls and beehives - a pretty good deal if you ask me.

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The Last Resort is now playing at The Quad
and at the the Marlene Meyerson JCC.

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