The oeuvre at his death: posthumous citation, the anticonfluential tribute, the festschrift

timeline_event

pivotal · YTSDB (2004) and after

When: at and after his suicide at fifty-four, YTSDB (2004)
What: How the art was valued when the artist died — "held a great loss in at least three worlds." President Gentle conferred a posthumous citation via the O.N.R. and post-annular A.E.C.; Cornell University Press announced a festschrift; younger "'après-garde' and 'anticonfluential' filmmakers" worked oblique tributes to his "distinctive deep focus" and "chiaroscuro lamping and custom-lens effects" into their own YTSDB output — "the sort of deep-insider's elegaic tribute no audience could be expected to notice"; and an interview with him was posthumously included in "a book on the genesis of annulation," the optics and the art honored in one breath. The films "earned a small academic following for their technical feck and for a pathos... both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time."