GOLUB
While there are a handful of interesting and respectable art documentaries in the history of film, such as Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh (1948) and Gauguin (1950), and Sergei Paradjanov’s recent Arabesques Around a Pirosmani Theme–all three of which significantly happen to be shorts–the overall failure of film to record a painter’s work without recourse to a gliding Cook’s tour or a mincemeat dissection of the work in question has been far from encouraging. Overlooking such uneven biopics as Lust for Life, Moulin Rouge, and the more recent Frida, Wolf at the Door, and Vincent, the challenge of filming a static canvas kinetically has defeated practically everyone.
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This scene is eventually succeeded by the film’s main course, in color–an extended process that allows us to follow Picasso’s hand from the reverse side of the canvas, yielding a sort of animated evolution of a painting, accompanied portentously by classical music. But far from a revelation, this spectacle is only further mystification. And if we assume that the main thing that went on in Rimbaud’s head when he was writing “The Drunken Boat” was precisely “The Drunken Boat,” the implication is that Clouzot’s foray into Picasso’s methods is an equally tautological exercise.
This is not to imply, however, that Golub is just another talking-heads documentary. Before the painter even appears, there is a prologue (of less than three minutes) of more than two dozen shots–a remarkable sequence that manages to give us a multifaceted precis of what is to follow without providing any kind of obstacle course for the audience.
Turning next to paint, Golub mixes colors and fills in certain details with a brush. Then, with the help of students, he pastes strips of paper around the outlines of the figures, switches to larger brushes and a roller, transfers the canvas to the floor, adds a solvent, and goes through an elaborate process of blotting, scraping (with a meat cleaver), and further sketching and painting, which continues after he moves the canvas back to the wall.
There are a couple of minor flaws in Golub; neither can be regarded as serious, but both seem to be worth noting. While the film certainly acknowledges the presence of Nancy Spero, it never seems entirely comfortable about how to deal with her as an artist distinct from her husband; the only facets of her work that are broached are those that relate to his, and her work is treated rather reductively as a consequence. The film also isn’t entirely confident about where to end; after a stunning match cut from wall graffiti in Northern Ireland to Golub walking past wall graffiti in New York, the film continues with a brief anticlimactic section in which Golub discusses a couple of his other paintings, and brings up the question of his capacity to depict blacks in one of them. The sequence is interesting enough in its own right, but it adds nothing indispensable to what has gone before.
