Bunny Ultramod, Hollywood Art Critic

There were six people in the audience for Frederick Wiseman’s newest documentary, titled “Crazy Horse,” when I attended at the Downtown Independent last night. It’s hard not to take this  fact as something of an indictment, although it was just one show of several this weekend, and perhaps the paucity of audience members was just an accident of timing. Perhaps the 9:30 p.m. showing was overfull. It should have been.After all, this is Frederick Wiseman, the legendary documentarian whose career began with 1967’s epochal “Titicult Follies,” a genre-defining look into the mistreatment of inmates at Massachusetts’ Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He’s a particular sort of documentarian, in that his films are not narrated, and are made up of cooly observed scenes drawn from hundreds of hours of observation. And so one would expect Hollywood’s filmmaking community to be out in large numbers, but I was not there when this happened, if it did.

And then there is the subject of the film, a nightclub in Paris called “Crazy Horse” which offers a revue that is something of a strip show, in that female pulchritude is both the subject of the performance and on exquisitely art-directed display. Isn’t there a sizable community of adult film performers, exotic dancers, and burlesque artists in Los Angeles? They might have benefited from the film, but they were not present at the screening I attended. But Crazy Horse has, and has always had, significant artistic ambitions, and, in the past few years, has hired a succession of high-profile choreographers to revamp their show. This film details the efforts of Philippe Decouflé to produce a new show under significant artistic limitations. Decouflé is an antsy figure who sometimes seems like a spoilt boy, but he is a choreographer of no small accomplishment — in fact, he choreographed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics, garnering his work a television audience of about two billion people, making him one of history’s most widely seen choreographers. So you might think the Independent would have been flooded with dancers wanting to see new samples of Decouflé’s choreography. They were not there for the showing I attended.

There’s a longer list I could compile. Where were the dedicated eroticists who make such a fuss of their fascination with the female form? This film has quite a lot of it to look at. It’s all very mod film as well — the show’s creators cite filmmaker Michael Powell as their inspiration, probably referring to the director’s cinematic exploration of dance and music in “The Red Shoes” and “The Tales of Hoffmann.” But the production makes extensive use of almost-cheesy 60s-style lounge music, silhouettes on colored screens, and op art patterns projected directly onto the dancer’s bodies, making much of the filmed Crazy Horse show look like the opening credits to a James Bond film, or a 1960’s nudie cutie musical. There is a sequence in which two comely women in space helmets meet inside a mirrored spaceship and plunge into each others embraces, and, yes, it’s lowbrow, but, then, LA loves lowbrow. We created an entire fine arts scene with that name.

But the film is not a document of a performance, but, instead, a document of the creation of a performance. This continues a series of documentaries Wiseman has created with this theme, including 2009’s “La danse - Le ballet de l’Opéra de Paris.” And so the film spends a lot of time in the rehearsal process, and spends time with the company’s feisty, frustrated costume designer, and peeks backstage to the kitchen to watch the process of filling dozens of clear plastic ice buckets with ice and champagne bottles for the show. It peeks in on the performers gathered around a television, watching a decaying videotape of ballet bloopers and laughing at each missed step and stumble. It listens in on the self-serious but winningly passionate interviews the artistic staff offers about the artistic merits of the new show.

The film also spends a little time with the audience. They are cheerful, posing for photographs, and they are a smaller group than you might expect, as the red velvet-lined club is unexpectedly intimate. They’re also a group with at least a little money to spend, as tickets start at about $130 for the show. Of course, this comes with complimentary champagne. I saw it for under $10 in Wiseman’s film, including an extensive peek behind the scenes, but I had no champagne, and also, for some reason, almost no fellow audience members.