Manages to overcome its relatively dull execution with one thing (and one thing only, for the most part): Giant, beautifully displayed images of Francesca Woodman's photographs. As someone who is distressingly uninformed about the art world, I had never seen any of Woodman's photographs before. But, to spin that in a positive way, there is almost no better way I can think of to see them for the first time than blown up to awe-inspiring proportions in a darkened movie theatre. They are as incredible as the movie makes them out to be, at least from this amateur enthusiast's perspective.
The rest, however, is an experience that is, at best, not bad. I feel that the talking head documentary is such a compositionally and structurally restricting format that it makes all the other cinematic devices a director has (editing & sound foremost) of even more importance than usual in order to be successful. The cuts must be so smooth and emphatic and perfect that the viewer could never suggest there might have been a better way to do that. Scott Willis has not done that. The Woodmans, as a crafted cinematic expierence, is only a few shades above middling. Some sections even descend into outright amateurism, as the camera shifts and makes slight zooms to better arrange the composition as the person is talking. Perhaps he thought these moments of haphazard improvisation would lend more credence to the talking head formula, as if to convince us that there wasn't any rehearsal for what's going on -- one take and that's it. To me, this is not so important. I have an inherent awareness that nothing I watch in a movie is there for the first time and, quite frankly, I prefer that kind of practiced artifice to the strange, stage-y feeling artifice of unrehearsed reality television.
On top of the rather static, uninteresting creation of the movie, is the strangeness of the people talking. There is always going to be an element of suspicion in watching people talk about someone who is famous, dead, and has been dead quite a long time. Nostalgia seems like an inescapable aspect of these interviews, and one which is never actually addressed. No one they spoke to is willing to admit they weren't amazed, astounded, floored by her photographs when they saw them. The world, the movie posits, was not ready for her pictures when she was alive. This is no doubt true, in a way, because she is famous now and could not sell her pictures then. But it would be interesting to find people who were active in the late-'70s and early-'80s New York art world and find out why people weren't ready. I mean, can you do that? It's not as if she wasn't putting herself out there. The only moments of strange revelation come from later interviews of her father, both watching him work and hearing what he says. There's something decidedly weird and creepy about the way he talks about his daughter, and then the way he emulates her work with his photography as something like a coping mechanism. The whole movie could've been about that and it would've felt like something that was about a real moment -- something inescapable and odd and human in a messy, uncomfortable way.
So it somewhat fails as a movie, yet to anyone, like me, who was unlucky enough never to have seen Francesca Woodman's photographs before, I would not hesitate to recommend it while it's in the theatres.
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