Hockney (2014)The creative process is an endless source of fascination – and mystery. Most of us have artists we admire, and we’re consequently intrigued by how and why they do what they do. But the answers to our questions are seldom simple or clear. No matter; we still want to know, and if one creative type fails to clarify the particular nature of their inspiration, there are plenty of others we can look to for illumination.
Happily, this year’s London Film Festival offers opportunities galore to explore themes surrounding creativity, taking in painters, poets, novelists, musicians and filmmakers, both real and fictional.
For our purposes here, I’ll leave music alone, as I’ve yet to see any of the very appetising titles in the festival’s Sonic strand; nor, for that matter, have I seen Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, which comes garlanded with Sundance prizes and brandishing enthusiastic plaudits from critics lucky enough to have caught it already.
Of the movies about filmmakers, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini is another title I haven’t seen; since it’s set on the last day of the controversial Italian’s life, just before his murder, I can’t say how far the film centres on creativity, though there’s been widespread praise for Willem Dafoe’s performance.
Ron Mann’s documentary Altman, however, really takes as its main subject what made Robert Altman tick. Films like MASH (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001) and a great many others which no other director could have made were not only stylistically innovative but clearly display a highly distinctive way of looking at the world (hence Mann asking various contributors to try and define ‘Altman-esque’.)
How and why did Altman make the films he did? Answering this question, Mann’s film is blessed with a wealth of footage of Altman at work, at home and in wonderfully witty, articulate, forthright conversation. He had the courage (and the capacity) to explain his actions, which helps enormously, especially when the many glorious extracts from his work illustrate the precise points he makes.
The art of writing is often regarded as a particularly difficult subject to deal with convincingly in the cinema; it’s such an internalised, solitary endeavour. It’d be pretty unilluminating, not to mention tedious, just to show someone writing for hours – be it with a quill or biro, typewriter or computer – and there’s no way, really, without heavy voice-over, or animated thought-balloons, to suggest the impulses that result in the selection of words.
With this in mind, it’s intriguing to see how three very different films deal with writers. The newly restored The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), by the late Sergei Parajanov, was supposed to be about the life and work of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova; Parajanov being Parajanov, however, he steered as clear as he could of biopic conventions and came up with a profoundly mysterious and metaphorical narrative that seems to have emerged intact from the deepest levels of his (or Sayat Nova’s) unconscious. In short, the film itself is a poem.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme d’Or-winner Winter Sleep and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, for all their many conspicuous differences, share certain strategies in common. Though each takes a rather more linear approach to narrative than the Parajanov film – how could they not? – it’s revealing, perhaps, that both the Turk, in dealing with a retired actor turned occasional columnist and would-be theatre historian, and the American, in focusing on a young novelist taken under the wing of a literary lion, opt not to allow us to hear anything their protagonists have written. Rather, we are invited to divine the kind of writing they’re foisting upon the world both from their self-centred and self-deluding personalities and by the language they use in conversations with others.
Each is given to somewhat ornate pontificating and to degrees of embittered aggression (gently passive-aggressive in the ex-actor’s case, outright hostile in the upstart tyro’s). Moreover, the form of each film feels literary (and here, of course, that is a good thing) – Ceylan’s film partly through allusions to Chekhov, Shakespeare and others; Alex Ross Perry’s through the frequent use of a sharp, detached expository narration.
Painting, you’d think, would be easier to shed light on than writing: after all, it’s a visual medium. But it’s not that straightforward, especially when you’re dealing with artists like J.M.W. Turner and David Hockney, whose ways of seeing the world differ notably from our own everyday perceptions and who may even be seen, here and there, as leaning a little towards the abstract.
Randall Wright’s Hockney, rather like Ron Mann’s Altman documentary, benefits no end from having access to extensive footage – historic and recent – of the man himself going about and talking about his work, and just getting on with the business of living; like the many friends, family members and fellow artists who discuss him, he is admirably articulate yet unpretentious about where his art comes from.
Mike Leigh, of course, has a different issue to deal with, in that Turner is dead, and so cannot speak for himself. Mr. Turner, however, uses things other than words to give us some idea of why Turner painted the extraordinary way he did: there is the landscape itself (very evocatively and often ravishingly shot by Dick Pope); Timothy Spall’s linguistically spartan but otherwise equally evocative performance as the artist; and a narrative which, in depicting aspects of Turner’s everyday existence, includes his encounters with various other figures in the art world.
By way of contrast, they and their achievements say as much about Turner’s genius as anything he himself might happen to utter. And it’s to Leigh’s and his team’s credit that we get a sense of the remarkable passion – focused, private, probably inexplicable – that enabled an otherwise unremarkable man to become one of the greatest painters the world has known.
