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Art Movies Revued

by J R Compton

Reviews excerpted from Movies Reviewed, ThEdBlog and other stories by J R Compton. Here arranged alphabetically, except new reviews at the top.

new Drawing the Line: A Portrait of Keith Haring***/ is only 30 minutes long but includes many pieces in the historic progression of his work; homage to his art heroes; a minimum of art critic gibberish; plenty of him making and talking about his work; and like his work, a maximum of fun. 2004

new I rented Painted Lady*** thinking it were a movie. It is instead two episodes of Masterpiece Theater. And though theatric, no masterpiece. In it Helen Mirren plays a has-been singer whose friend is murdered, and to catch the killer and get back the painting stolen from the victim and to pay off the murdered man's errant son's gambling debts (the plot continues to spin nearly out of control...), she becomes an international art dealer (just like that, oh and she reads one book). If you can believe any of this plot, you'd probably have more interest than I in seeing the conclusion that's not mentioned in the menu. I called Netflix's 24-hour help line (buried deep in their public menus), and a nice woman helped me find the second half hidden in the Scene Selections. No mention anywhere else. I watched till the end, which was a silly as the rest of this labyrinthine story and noted the stupid visual pun but didn't catch the lifting of Sister Wendy's PBS lecture. Masterpiece, my foot. 1997

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I rented PBS's American Masters production Alexander Calder***/ to see his affect on my late friend Jim Crowe's very similar work. I learned Calder's effect on all of my sculptor friends, whether they know it or not. Art Shirer's work has that childlike simplicity and wiggling, sometimes winding movement. He has taken Calder's directions and expanded them in several dimensions. T.Stone has inherited his monumental moderness. Jim copied many of Calder's ideas and delight. So many others have copied this or that piece possibly without even knowing it. This bit of history of a happy, often child-like man, is its own delight, complete with many films of the master himself doing what he did best, have fun making art. A must-see.

Presented without distractions, director Hiroshi Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudi**** is exquisite. A documentary of works of architectural art by the Catalonian master whose span bridged the beginnings of the 20th Century, this remarkably direct film tells Gaudi's story visually, without insulting us with facts or comparisons, historical or critical contexts. We see, and we understand. No one tells us what to think. Far from the usual documentarian's parade of talking heads, this motion picture shows only the barest essential people talking at all. Instead, it concentrates on what's left of Gaudi's visions, his buildings, models and drawings. Showing us what they look like in their own contexts in motions and use. Fascinating and beautiful.

Art City***/ is a quick-paced run through a PC variety of New York City artists (whom I probably should know) and critics and curators (whom I do know of, especially Dave Hickey) in a documentary about contemporary art from five years ago. Very remiscent of Art in the 21st Century (that was shown on public TV), though not nearly as deep and two years younger. It's fun to listen to the selected artists talk about their art as they make it. Special Features include the parts of the interviews that didn't make it into the film, and we can easily see why. The film's not always in focus, but the film's focus is sharp, and the artists there are fascinating.

Artemesia**/ was reminiscent of Camille Claudet a few years ago. Set in the early Seventeenth Century, about a woman struggling to know life, experience love and practice art, it's an exquisitely beautiful film, with fine acting, solid character development and a moving plot. A truly positive film experience.

Blind Light***/ is a visually poetic, lyrically interwoven plot parallel of 1) a documentary about a doctor who built a villa in Capri to capture the light — who was blinded by a degenerative eye disease caused by light, then wrote a popular autobiographical book; 2) a fictional story of a photographer played by Edie Falco who comes to see the light; 3) a personal travelogue remembering the filmmaker and her mother's trip to the villa; and 4) the reflexive story within a story within the movie of the making of this film — all combining high quality 35mm and Super 8 into a haunting and bright, moody and colorful film that nearly succeeds on all tracks of its ambitious goals.

I used to read his column in the L.A. Free Press in the 70s, then lost track of Charles. Bukowski: Born into This***/ is superb documentary without breaking new ground. I now have a much better idea who was Charles Bukowski, and I'm glad to know it.

Carrington***** is the sensual, moving story of a passionate yet asexual relationship between an artist and a writer. Outstanding acting, story, cinematography. Lots of sex and romance. One of that year's best. My favorite quote in the movie is after some friends remind Carrington that her love object is a bugger. She replies, "You always have to put up with something."

Time-stopping movies and TV shows are almost as wonderful as time-traveling ones. Cashback***/ began as a sweet little time-stopper, won an award, added a life and some loves to the hero's life and became a fullish-length movie of the same name. Gentle, sexy (lots of full frontal female nudity; only hints of male parts) and sweet little movie about a young man who thought he could, and in movies that's the same as being able to, stop time. Oh, and our hero is an artist.

Another artist and a slightly different take on the documentary form. Robert Crumb, his family and his several lovers in the scintillating Crumb**** are astounding, shocking, amazing, and very much themselves. One of the absolutely best and strangest artist films of all time.

Dali*** was a good enough documentary of the famous artist's life and ambitions. Just what I wanted. I loved his paintings when I was a boy, but I'd lost track. Stumbled upon him again in my first Art History class at the U of Dallas (aced it), in libraries and bookstores and other people's libraries since. But I needed to know who this guy was. This movie told me what I needed to know and reminded me of The Savior's (Salvador)' true greatness, despite an immense ego that only diminished when he finally did.

I can't help it. I put off watching The Devil and Daniel Johnston***/ for nearly three weeks. When I finally sat down with it on a sleepless night, I got into it. Still, and growing all the way through it, I became convinced it was fraud. A fiction. Not documentary, mockumentary. A strange, literally unbelievable, story of the life of a certifiable crazy person. On Beyond Crumb without the knuckle of a grasp on reality. Over the edges in too many dimensions. An amazing perverse fiction about the reality of madness and bad taste. Too weird.

Oh, my gosh. I'm so glad that's over with. I've spent the last three days watching and refusing to watch and then watching this awful movie some more. Watching almost anything to keep going back to watch Edward Munch: Special Edition. Disks One and Two**/. All the way up my Netflix Queue, I thought it was just one disk. But then I was expecting the usual biopic. Two was too much. Three hours of constantly circling back to his family. Coughing children bleeding from their mouths. Swaddled in white stained by the blood. Dying of tuberculosis. His father a doctor. Everybody dying or committing suicide. Not a lasting relationship among them. Gloom, doom and no wonder he was troubled. Then there's his romantic life, if you can call it life. Instersticed among all that depression. His art. We see hands painting, etching, gouging woodblocks. Get a feel for his art, see it, like all the other elements of his life, recurring and again. I liked the special features on disk one. They tell about the museum. Through the movie perhaps every critique of his art through his life. Nobody liked it, yet he kept being invited to have solo shows, be in shows around Europe. Then back to reciting how much everyone loathed his work. Now I have to go back and explore his art again. I've always liked it, always thought those who wrote about it attributed too much depression to him and his art. Still think that.

Picasso, Magritte, Calder and all those other big-time famous fine artists of the last century are intriguing to learn about and watch their influence on so many artists since, but one of the most influential artists of all time has to be Chuck Jones. In Extremes and in Betweens, a Life in Animation***/ we don't learn all that much about his personal life and family, but we get to see many of the cartoons that have subtly or overtly influenced us all. He didn't invent Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, but he had a hand in their development. However, he did invent Peppy LePeau, Wylie Coyote and the greatest underdog who ever lived (in celluloid, at least) and always won, The Roadrunner. Here, we get to watch the development of all those and many more remarkably human, mostly animal characters.

The best thing about Frazetta*** is his art, by the hundreds, filling the frames of this documentary, and it's nice to see him and listen to him talk about his life, his family and his art — and even watch him make art. His art surpassed the supposed limitations of illustration in the 1950s and reinvented it since, but this movie never makes the jump. Although the content is fascinating, the movie itself is gimmicky and hokey.

I somehow managed to miss writing about Frida****, which we saw right about here in the chronology. Wonderful visualization of a familiar historical story about one of North America's greatest art couple and one of this continent's most expressive visual artists. The movie was better than we expected, with a solid grasp on history in general and Frida Khalo's work in particular. I can still — several months later — see her and her famous painting of herself and husband Diego Rivera's portrait coming to life via special effects. Lots of delicious art philosophy, great characters and characterizations. A delight.

I didn't think I did till the end, but I liked this movie even though it has nothing to do with Diane Arbus or making photographs or visual thinking and overly much about the famous photographers' often strange subjects. This film is not about a lot of things it properly should have been. I appreciate historical accuracy, and the biographical aspects of this movie are blatantly imaginary. But it is strikingly visual, often beautiful and intentionally weird (even though actual freaks inhabit it), and intriguingly and inappropriately spooky as if the filmmakers forget they were not making a horror flick. The title is stupidly funny, but not much else about Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus***/ is.

I'm a typophile. I've been a typesetter, a publication designer and a publisher nearly all my life. I have used it and abused it. The movie Helvetica***/ is funny and fascinating. I know a lot of the talking bodies in it, because they are and have been my type and design heroes. If I'd known David Carson was going to be in this, I would have rented it just for him. As it is, there's scads of great type and design ers here, and I found it fascinanting.

The made-for-TV and boy does it show The Highwaymen - Florida's Outsider Artists*** lacks visual or video or lighting — or for that matter audio or much of anything else — sophistication but it does tell the story of this historical group of Black artists led by "a benevolent White artist" (naturally, or could they have shown it on TV?) whose work is now, supposedly, selling like tulips. The title's sponsor is the gallery selling the work, and the video sells and sells and sells (but is anybody buying?). It is racist through and through, running subtitles on Black guys whose words are plenty clear, and it is repetitive, befitting that it was made for TV viewers who don't know from ART, and some of the "historical" visuals are just stupid. But it's also interesting and shows a lot of these outsider artists' work.

How to Draw A Bunny**** is the story of Ray Johnson, a strange art genius known for his simplistic cartoons, complex collages, drawings and, primarily for his extensive mail art. Anna and I have sat through too many movies about artists lately, so I did not have high expectations. But I was wrong. This sprightly documentary shows us who Ray really was — a difficult man, at best — in most of his glory and many of his foibles. It's put together strangely, to the beat, as it were, of a different drummer, and it's several different kinds of wonderful.

I Shot Andy Warhol ***/ is the gruesome tale of the woman (introducing Liv Taylor) who shot AW and why. Hurts to watch her spiraling downward — somewhere between Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer and Sid & Nancy. 1996

I am indulging in a history of art of the 20th Century, one famous artist at a time. Lately, I've watched Picasso, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst and Frazetta flash from DVDs. It is not like watching Dallas artists appear, grow, learn, expand, expound, disappear (etc.). But my concentrated attentions have taught me new facts and fascinating concepts I did not learn from reproductions in books. The filmmaker of Magritte: An Attempt at the Impossible****'s contemporized film sequences of the painter's symbols at first seemed odd, over edges. But they are informative, memorable, some — like the candles burning — quite marvelous. We see the filmmakers making art of the artist's art and his making of it.

Like a low-contrast black & white grandfather of Koyaanisqatsi, Man with the Movie Camera*** (1929) is long, tending toward the tedious with a repetitive sleep-inducing soundtrack, and it is not nearly as interesting to see than to talk about its importance. It's only an hour and eight minutes long, but I had to watch it in segments. It is more visually fascinating when it shows the man with the movie camera than what he filmed, and the editing is experimentally and annoyingly non-sequitur. It's an interesting enough look at the early years of movies while the syntax of film was still being invented. Documentary in content and context, it's a truly lurid portrait of "Modern Soviet Living," accomplishing its purpose to create a new language of film by being far enough ahead of the curve technically, but it lost its soul and most of its meaning in all the early/basic visual gimmicks, and now it's more dated than historic.

Mary Cassatt was a fine American painter, and we're told that repeatedly in this uninspired movie that suffers from an insipid script, spurious and oft-repeated images and a lot of stirring b.s that sounds good but doesn't really mean anything. Mary Cassatt - A Brush with Independence*** is adequate as a documentary and an introduction to her work and life story. We learn about the person but not much about her work. One of the stupider lines in this fairly stupid movie is near the end. "She slipped into a diabetic coma, but like she had so many times before, she perservered." As if that meant something.

MirrorMask**** is a marvelous fantasy, aimed at children but more in there for adults. It blends drawings and computer-generated animation with actors in a manner and style I'd not seen before or since. Fun, funny, marvelously inventive. Unique.

My Best Friend Klaus Kinski*** is another play of light and dark. Sane and murderous crazy. It's about conflict and accord, best friends and, luckily, a whole lot about making movies.

Piece By Piece***/ is about a whole different set of outsider artists, the men and women who mark and tag their colorful if often gaudy ways across our urban centers. Graffiti artists. Some would say a contradiction in terms. The music is wonderful and as exciting as the stories, the legends, the lores and the artistic styles. A lexicon of new terminology for the new form of expression and destructions. A lot of information piled in fast, just like the real stuff, piece by piece.

Pleasantville**** is a once-in-a-lifetime film that could only be a film, no other medium could support this primarily visual look at conformity and non. Good acting, outstanding dialog, truly superb and original film. You've never seen anything like it and won't again for awhile. Like I've said only rarely before, after you see this gem, you know you've been movied!

Pollock**** was great, not nearly as sad as I'd read, although it is not a feel-good flick. Strong cinematography, excellent acting, I still remember many scenes and just loved watching Ed Harris be Jackson Pollock, especially his painting scenes. Usually pseudo-biographical films about artists don't show the act of creation at all, very rarely this fluidly. 2001

POPaganda: The Art & Crimes of Ron English***/ is a little more involved than most art documentaries, and we appreciate the little things like its own soundrack, but mostly that's what it is. A movie that documents Ron English in both his legal and illegal art forms. Legal in galleries and chapter transitions and illegal glued over billboards. Actually one of the more intelligent art movies, since it gets at the artist's true motives directly from the artist who has lots of those, many of which skewers McDonalds and other symbols of Corporate America. 2004

Rivers and Tides**** is an amazing little film about sculptor Andy Goldsworthy who makes intuitive art — he says so in probably the only bit of gratuitous exposition in this gently beautiful film. He's talking to his wife, who probably already knows, and we figure it out as he goes about creating his art — in Scotland and in America. This is a deeply intelligent, even moving first-person singular film about an artist. It's about process. We watch the idea spark, his actual step by step work. We even get to see him fail as well as succeed. Some of the more beautiful scenes are of his work in situ, in rivers and tides and the wind. Stunning in its simplicity. Luscious three-dimensionality and his understandings of what he is doing and why — almost never what I might have expected. Exquisite film about making art.

The Russian Ark**/ seemed like a great idea — one, whole movie long, camera on, drag it through a large building that holds the cultural heritage of a nation, with lots of costumes and acting and history and dancing and color, etc. all the way through, then turn the camera off at the end. The spectacle of it was pleasant enough. The story — if one can call that a story — baffled me. I liked looking at the building and traveling back and forth in time (sorta), but overall, I'd rather they had edited together a bunch of different takes like most other movies do.
 

This following extended review is taken from ThEdBlog on DallasArtsRevue. Only the bolded movies are new here.

Heather Gorham - The Magic Trick, 1999
acrylic on canvas - 50 x 55 inches

I've been watching art movies. Not art house movies, but movies about artists. My favorite is still Hiroshi Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudi*****. It's exquisitely visual, as I wrote on my movie pages and have added to the DARts Art Movies page. Oddly, the subject of this latest artist movie, Dallas artist Rusty Scruby, mentions Gaudi.

They have visions in common. Both create natural undulating surfaces in service to their art. Both are complicated people who obsessively make complex art. Even elements of the artists' work are similarly interconnected. Rusty is still very much alive, and Antonio has been dead since 1926. Gaudi is world famous. Rusty's working on it.

My understanding and appreciation for both artists deepened as I watched their movies, although Gaudi has been one of my heroes since college. I have seen Scruby's work but had passed on it as gimmicky. Now I see both sides.

Not surprisingly, Hiroshi Teshigahara is more deft a director than Quin Mathews, but Quin's work here is solid, although the lengths of the titles may be instructive. Rusty Scruby - Beyond the Plane, A Portrait of The Artist in Motion**** verses Antonio Gaudi.

Teshigahara's film moves us through the Catalonian master's buildings — and his mind. Quin's shows Scruby in motion as a human, a creator, craftsman, theoretician, exhibiting artist, salesman and musician. I didn't learn about Antonio's personal life, but Scruby's is populated with three-dimensional characters who help.

I award more asterisks to innovative movies on the leading edges of their form. Teshigahara qualifies. Mathews is good at what he does, and I'd give him points for following his form to function, not fashion. But I want more of Scruby talking and less of the people around him — some of whom have not got comfortable with the camera like Scruby has — although it was pleasant to see some old friends we share, and they wouldn't be so 3D if they didn't share who they are, too.

Norman Kary - pages from Armstrong [book]
approximately 10 x 8 inches
J R Compton Collection

The moments when Scruby talks about his obsessions and how they feed his art are intellectually enthralling. Set my mind to rambling about my own craft's concerns (and more). Many artists don't know what their work is about. Most think they know but get lost in theories and forget facts. When artists speak knowingly from their selves as they make art, it's inspiring.

Difficult to get long-dead artists to give the real skinny or go off on personal tangents. Talking heads, even if they're moving around the screen, don't cut it. In Picasso: Magic, Sex, Death****, a very personable and knowledgeable old friend narrates telling details, but the movie provides rare few short movies of Pablo in action. We see and hear but do not necessarily understand. The master's voice is curiously missing.

Many artist movies screw up talking art-crit nonsense. The narrator of Artists of the 20th Century: Man Ray**/ runs off at the mouth through a long series of sloppily copies Ray's work, then stops dead at a gleaming phallus. It's wonderful education to see the work of artists, famous or not. Worth the price of admission. Even when a movie fails, getting to see dozens, even hundreds of their work is fascinating, though sometimes we have to turn off the sound.

In the Picasso movie, reflections of people moving in his work on the walls of active places show us it's real and alive, not some stupid slide Ken Burnsed in and out of. Seeing the textures — Scruby's art is vivified by them — like seeing a sly silhouette etched in a Picasso painting, is stirring.

A more recent favorite is Magritte, An Attempt at the Impossible**** (reviewed below), that incorporates much of the Original Surrealist's work, intelligent biography, understated art-criticism and surreal vignettes that reveal and promote understandings of specific work. Similar to the quick, colorful painting-inspired back-story scenes in Frida, only better, more intellectual and stranger.

new Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre**/

Sketches of Frank Gehry**** is a simple movie by Sydney Pollack (who actually shot a lot of the video) about an amazing architect. I had only a vague notion of who this Gehry guy was. I'd seen some shimmering museums in photos and thought I needed to know more. This was the perfect vehicle. Watching Gehry work told me more than a thousand talking heads. This is a beautiful film with many little nuances. It's about art, and it is art.

Stone Reader**** is a wonderful, moving movie about a book and its authors but also about people who read books and the people who write them. If you heard this movie on the radio you could make up your own visuals for it, just like we do when we read books. But the visuals this director came up with are eloquent, lyrical, beautiful and elegant.

Surviving Picasso***/ -- Someday there'll be a movie starring an historical figure not played by Hannibal Lecter. Till then he'll have to do. Here, he's a certifiable AH, truly the Spaniard he always was, not much of the genius PP was, more a glimpse into Pablo's social life than his creativity, though he daubs paint in one scene and hunts junk in others. A new look at an old viewer.

Sylvia**** about Sylvia Plath, whom I'd probably identify with too much, is scintillating. Gweneth risks being plain often and is marvelous credible as a deeply depressed poet whose insecurities feed her life, work and suicide. Dark and affecting film. Beautiful imagery even when she's all down. Lush, memorable, even set in England. Now I have to read her.

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre**/ is a 35-minute program about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's life and art. It's interesting, has photographs of the artist and paintings and drawings and posters by him in a sort of twisting, turning life's story. The art is discussed by somebody who keeps assuring us that the artists, poets and dancers in Lautrec's life were working on Modernism, not on their own work. Which is to say, the narration is full of high-falutin' art crit, which as usual, has little to do with the facts of an artist's life and time. Worse, the same images of his work keep recyling till I had most of them memorized. There's also a lot of early photographs of Montmartre and Toulouse and his friends that are fascinating, and movies of the times and some of the places that are just parked there for historic, not significance, more like flavor. I know a little more about Lautrec now, and I'm thankful for that, but there's much else that needs telling that is not dependent upon bullshit art crit.

Visions of Light***/ is a wonderful compilation of movie history's great technical visual leaps forward with lots of intelligent movie fan experts and a fascinating, chronological collection of clips from each. Now I've got a great, long list of even more movies worth seeing.

It's about an important art guy in New York in the middle of the last century Who Gets to Call It Art?****, and it may be the best movie about an art era I've ever seen. Henry Geldzahler curated exhibitions and knew artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stalla, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaller and others who are now household names. At least in the households I know. It's done standard documentary style with few new edges and an irreverent style. Wonderful soundtrack that got me boogying when the art world changed and settled me down when it was settling. It's only 80 minutes long not counting all the extras, but it tells more about that era in art, via the voices of the artists and the visuals of them than anything else.

William Eggleston, Photographer**/ and Henri Cartier-Bresson* can easily be placed in the Ho-hum Department. The former does show us this strange guy's droll personality well enough, but it goes on and on to little effect, except to show us his amazingly droll (but stellar, sometimes simplicity is an artistic, if not a human, joy) photographs, which are better enjoyed in a book at the library or bookstore. Same for Cartier-Bresson, which is a better and better known photographer, but the movie is a complete bore.

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