Follow the story of the public art project ‘The Gates’ by Christo and Jeanne-Claude which finally graced Central Park in New York City for two weeks in February 2005. Christo and Jeanne-Claude first proposed the project in 1979 and the film follows the ups and downs of the project from conception through to its realization. There was quite a public and bureaucratic contingency against the project from the beginning due to the amount of money that was needed for the project. Many people felt that the amount of money being spent on the Gates project would be better spent in other ways. It was not until Michael R. Bloomberg was elected Mayor of New York City that the Gates project finally had a chance and was approved in January 2003.

‘The Gates’ project covered 23 miles of pathways in Central Park and the film incorporates footage from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s original push to get the project approved in after they conceived of it in 1979 through its final approval in 2003. We also see how the project is finally put together piece-by-piece and then the reaction of New Yorkers and others during the two weeks that the Gates decorated the paths of Central Park. The film is slow and contemplative but for those that are interested in the process that public installation artworks go through from start to finish then it is worth sitting through. Others may find the film’s slow pace and coverage of the negative viewpoints of the project a little heavy. Recommended for colleges and universities with large art programs and those interested in modern art.

-Educational Media Reviews Online

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Legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens) has chronicled the creation of many massive, eye-catching works of public art erected by Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude, including the Valley Curtain in Colorado’s mountains, the Running Fence in northern California, the Surrounded Islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, and the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris (see review of 5 Films About Christo & Jeanne-Claude in VL-7/04). Maysles’ The Gates follows the pair’s most recent endeavor: the placement of over 7,500 gates of flowing orange-colored fabric along 23 miles of paths in New York’s Central Park. The film begins with the artists’ 25-year crusade to win official approval for the project, which was blocked by the city’s bureaucracy until newly-elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a fan) gave the thumbs-up in 2003. The Gates captures the building and month-long installation of the exhibit (including some brusque comments from locals walking through the area), the triumphant opening in February 2005, and the ensuing two-week period during which members of the public were invited to enjoy the work. Many spectators offer up admiring comments as they stroll through Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s creation, while the cameras capture oodles of attractive footage of the fabric billowing in the breeze, as well as especially lovely shots of the curtains seen against new-fallen snow. Although some critics dismiss the artists as charlatans, The Gates makes clear that a lot of folk found Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park enterprise both beautiful and moving. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
-Video Librarian Review September/October 2009

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The Gates
It takes a gate to daze a village

By Roger Ebert
Nov 2, 2007

Many people missed the point of “The Gates,” those 7,500 frames flowing with orange curtains that were installed along the pathways of Central Park in 2005. The point was not to look at them, but to use them, to walk through them and under them. One New York park board member, opposed to the proposal by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, said the addition of “The Gates” to the park “would be like Picasso painting ‘Guernica’ on top of ‘The Last Supper,’ ” demonstrating that he did not grasp the difference between a painting and a frame. He might have saved himself embarrassment by consulting A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, the most important architect alive, who would have had something to say about gates, entrances, exits, doors, portals and views.

Entrances have everything to do with what we feel about what we are entering. All buildings until the birth of modern architecture knew this, and you can see it in church doors, temple gates, city walls, shop entrances and cottage doorsteps. Now the doors of a modern building are likely to be a continuation of the same hostile slab of glass or steel that makes the rest of the building sterile and aloof. There will be no place to rest for a moment, inside or out, and no shelf to rest a burden on, and no decorative details to declare, “This is not just any place you are entering, but this honorable place.” I believe even criminals feel differently about the judges they encounter inside an old courthouse than inside a new one.

My wife and I walked under “The Gates” and beneath the curtains. Thousands of others were doing the same. Many of them no doubt made the same journey daily, scarcely thinking of it.

Certainly our walk was enriched by trees, grass, shrubbery, ponds, views. But now “The Gates,” by framing those sights, gave them a new aspect and importance. Not “grass on a hill,” but this view of a grassy hill. Not a pond, but look at the pond. A frame of any sort values what it encloses. And as we walked, we felt subtly ceremonial. We were not walking, but walking through the gates. People walked a little more slowly, and sometimes had little smiles, and talked less on their cell phones, and perhaps felt more there.

THE GATES, a documentary by Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles, records the struggle starting in 1979 as Christo and Jeanne-Claude tried to get permission to install their gates (for only two weeks, but you’d think they were planning to leave them forever). This despite the fact that the artists were going to pay for it all themselves. One mayor after another, perhaps too timid to support duh artz, said no. Bloomberg said yes instantly. So, I believe, would have our own Mayor Daley, whose wrought-iron fences and islands of flowers and neo-classical columns and Millennium Park declare, “This is a city worthy of such pomp and formality, such beauty and pride.” Those who say Daley has the mentality of a bungalow owner have no idea of the pride a bungalow owner can take in his home. Maybe they live in high-rises where committees buy hideously tortured iron and dump it in the lobby.
The documentary is pretty much what you’d expect: Two decades of ignorant contempt, followed by the city finding it was really surprisingly fond of “The Gates.” How far do you think our beloved Chicago sidewalk cows would have gotten among the philistines of 50 years ago? Why does London cling to manifestly impractical red pillar boxes for its postal system, pillars that look like bright red Victorian fire hydrants? Because they’re fun, that’s why.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude age during the film, their hair turning gray (or red, in her case), but they never stop campaigning. It must have seemed so simple to them: Hey, people, lighten up! Don’t be afraid of fancy and imagination! They actually had to use two high-powered lawyers, Scott Hodes of Chicago and Theodore W. Kheel of New York, to argue the case in favor of their gift to the city. The one thing lacking is a good sit-down chat with Christopher Alexander, explaining why cities require more, not less, attention to human feelings that cannot be reasoned away.

Copyright 2005, RogerEbert.com

 

Daily Variety
The Gates

By Ronnie Scheib
May 3, 2007

Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles’ glorious documentary on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park “Gates” follows the project from its initial, hotly debated proposal in 1979 to its final, triumphant installation in February 2005. Maysles’ sixth collaboration with the Christos climaxes with a beautifully choreographed sequence that basks in the art-piece’s ultimate commingling of trees, New Yorkers and 23 miles of framed orange fabric. Celebrating the city the immigrant artists have called home for 40 years, docu fittingly closes Gotham’s Tribeca fest, and fully merits an arthouse run before HBO’s skedded third-anniversary airing in February.

At an inaugural meeting to discuss strategy in 1979 (filmed by Maysles and his late brother David), the Christos’ lawyer suggests quite firmly that the artists first deal with all the possible negative aspects to the undertaking, covering every conceivable objection anyone might have (and in New York, the “conceivable” covers a lot of ground). Then and only then might the endeavor conclude on a positive note.

The film’s structure precisely mirrors the internal logic of the attorney’s advice. THE GATES, in fact, registers as two distinct films, one from 1979, about a rejected, aborted work of art (with most of the positives cut out), and a second, from 2006, about the process of finally creating that work of art (with the negatives cut out). The first reads as sociopolitical tragicomedy, while the second waxes exultant like an urban operetta.

The Christos entirely self-financed their project by selling off ancillary artwork and preliminary sketches. It’s one thing for outraged citizens to become furious over how officials misspend the public’s money, but apparently, people can also harangue artists for splurging their own millions to interfere with nature and “the work of art that is Central Park” (even if the event only spans two weeks in the dead of winter).

The Community Board hearings set off the usual complaints about social irresponsibility and elitism, often couched in marvelous metaphors and fine hyperbole. Christo at first dynamically explains his vision; with the pride of one who has escaped the handcuffs of communist social realism, he declares he wants to build the gates for no reason at all except own artistic desire to do so. As the hearings proceed, he slumps more and more glumly in the frame as counterarguments range from the merely outlandish to the truly incensed.

Predictions of gloom and doom carry over into the second part of the film. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg gives his enthusiastic support, 9/11 lending a certain solemnity to the notion of consecrating the city in orange nylon. The voices of dissatisfaction start to sound like Mel Brooks’ yentaisms in Pintoff’s “The Critic,” like unending comic counterpoint to an abstract work-in-progress.

Ferrara and Maysles orchestrate the construction, installation and deployment of the gates as a three-part symphony, ending with a two-week improvisational interlude, as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers flock to the park in February. As the mega-artwork is transformed by snow, sunsets and streams of people, the brightly colored 23 miles of pathways transform the wintry landscape into a fantastical garden of dancing cloth.

 

Flick Filosopher
You will hear, Let them eat gates.

By MaryAnn Johanson
May 4, 2007

I can’t imagine a better choice for the closing-night film of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival: THE GATES - a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving documentary about the art project by installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude - will have its world premiere on Saturday night with a gala screening. (There are additional public screenings on Saturday and Sunday nights, and the film, coproduced by HBO, will debut on the cable network in February 2008.) A valentine to New York City and to Central Park, the site of the installation, The Gates is a celebration of the same spirit that initially inspired the festival: to do something magnificent in the greatest city in the world.

Not that I’m biased or anything.

Now, Christo insists at a pre-project press conference that appears the film that this whole deal has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. He categorically denies that he is motivated by any desire to help the city heal in the wake of that terrible day, and he cheerfully admits the project is “irrational, irresponsible, selfish” - and the fact that, as the film demonstrates, Christo and wife/artmaking partner Jeanne-Claude have been lobbying the city for permission to do this since 1979(!) is testament enough to that fact. The absence of political correctness is refreshing - geez, not everything that happens in NYC has to do with 9/11! - and is a wonderful indication of how filmmakers Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles work as pure documentarians here, literally simply documenting the project in all its phases without feeling the need to editorialize or in any other way step on the toes of the artists or the art.

The artists come across as thoroughly charming, in a creative, off-kilter kind of way: Christo, for instance, characterizes the “bureaucratic horror” they slogged through with the city as “like poetry.” There’s a delicious meta twistiness to the film that suggests that the making of the art was as much a work of art as The Gates themselves, and that there was a certain splendor in the audacity it took to even try to mount such an ambitious undertaking as merely proposing to blanket Central Park in 7,500 flame-orange flagged “gates” for two weeks.

But for all the uphill battle Christo and Jeanne-Claude faced, much of it from naysayers who decried the project as elitist and a frivolous waste of money, the final half hour of the film is a commanding refutation of all such complaints. Without musical accompaniment or distracting narration, Ferrera and Maysles give us, simply, The Gates as they were in February 2005 - the filmmakers stand aside and let the project speak for itself, which is does most eloquently. Quiet scenes of the park and the throngs of awed people strolling under the giant orange gates express the grand scale of the project that even being there in person couldn’t quite do. The crowds and their reaction become part of the art itself, and wide, high views of the streams of brilliantly colored flags flapping in the wind from gates snaking along the park’s paths, caressing the curve of the park’s hills, lend a perspective that wouldn’t have been available down on the ground.

But I was there, one bitterly cold day that winter, and though The Gates did not make me bittersweetly sad and all messy from sobbing with joy, THE GATES did. I had marvelled at the time how the gates sketched out the landscape of the park in a way that I had never appreciated before, but seeing images of the project two years later, I now realized that the ephemeralness of the gates was perhaps the most important aspect of its artistic nature. The Gates were beautiful in part because they were unusual - they transformed something so everyday as a walk in the park into a profoundly touching experience unlike anything I had ever felt before. THE GATES made me simultaneously wish that they had never been taken down and understand that if they had not been removed, we would have stopped seeing them after a while.

I’m not quite sure what that means yet - it probably has something to do with getting a sense of my own mortality and inevitable death, and I’d rather not think too much about that at the moment. But I do know that it makes THE GATES as essential a part of the art of The Gates as the gates were themselves.

 

Back Seat Manifesto

By Tom Hall
SilverDocs June 18, 2007

That evening, I took in my final screening of the fest; Antonio Ferrera, Albert Maysles and Matthew Prinzing’s look at Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park installation The Gates. Frankly, I adored the movie, despite the feeling that it was a little slight and not really loving The Gates when they were up. But individual taste is irrelevant and that is the point; An absolute warts-and-all love letter to New York City, THE GATES shows the people of New York City as an unclassifiable community of diverse people that not only take their city seriously, but are willing to open their hearts to collective experience. For all of its flowing fabric, what The Gates really brought to New York City was a chance to come together in Central Park, a place that everyone loves, and be New Yorkers together. The movie itself follows Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1979 attempt to get the City to permit the project (it failed under the weight of ridiculous arguments against ‘defacing the perfection of the park’) through to the last days of the installation itself, and the second half of the movie, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude step aside and The Gates project is in full swing, reminded me of a late-1970’s/early 1980’s Woody Allen film, when you simply fall in love with New York City in all of its rich splendor (and the wonderful jazzy soundtrack for the film, although very un-Maysles like, certainly contributes to the Woody Allen feel). Ultimately, though, what The Gates represented was a triumph of large-hearted humanism and art over not only the conservative objections of literal-minded critics, but the post-9/11 malaise that still materializes now and again here in New York. And frankly, who doesn’t like to see art save the day?