The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 24-30
Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes (2004)
Directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn
This two-part documentary combines the filmmakers’ 1988 hourlong film portrait of the sardonic American painter Leon Golub (1922-2004)—whose vivid large-scale paintings frequently set out to make visitors aware of abuses of power in the world surrounding them—with a twenty-minute-long second study filmed two decades afterwards, when his work had grown quieter and more universal in meaning as he knowingly grew closer to death. “Over a ten-year period, Jerry and I had done several films about labor struggles and issues,” says Gordon Quinn, one of the original cofounders and key figures (along with Blumenthal and others) of the Chicago-based company Kartemquin Films, whose myriad documentaries produced over the course of 50 years and counting include this film among its jewels. “Many of those struggles ended in defeat and even though we’d put them in a larger context, we were hoping that our next film could be about something a little less gritty and, to be honest, a little less depressing.
“We had an interest in how art gets made and the effect it has out in the world with the people who experience it,” continues Quinn, who will attend the Museum of the Moving Image screening along with the film’s producer, Judy Hoffman. “When we saw a Golub show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, we knew we had found our next subject. With a potential funder, we flew to New York to meet him, and within the first ten minutes, we knew that the film was going to happen. Golub’s struggle to create and his interaction with the world around him, his desire to make work that was dealing with the gestures, power relationships, and challenges human beings face immediately drew us to him and made us want to understand his process and the effect that his work had on those who viewed it. Despite the heavy subject matter, when we began filming, we found ourselves in a delightful process of intellectual, artistic, and personal examination. We all came away from the experience thinking about our own creative process differently.
“The reason for making the second version of the film was twofold. First, one of the most interesting and challenging parts of making the first film was the struggle between Golub and us about the ending of the film. We had always wanted that story to be transparent, and to show—in terms of our film, as we had with his painting—how the art got made. We were also interested, Jerry in particular, to see how Golub was facing his own mortality and, near the end of his life, how this affected his artistic process. We were also able to tell more of his wife Nancy Spero’s story and, to a greater extent, show the working relationship between these two major artists.” Aaron Cutler (August 28, 2:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Kartemquin retrospective)