We're already in the second week of the new DocFilms season. Besides the Friday and Saturday offering of recently released films, we have Frank Capra on Sundays, Francois Tuffaut on Wednesdays and "Cinema of the Apocalypse" late on Thursdays. Plus EvanEvanEvan chose a retrospective of Charles Laughton films for Thursdays early; his blog entry on Laughton and the series, as always, is well worth your time. Plus Evan and his friend Hannah put together the Tuesday series called Downtown 81, based on the Manhattan art scene of the seventies and eighties. I'm using that art scene series as a jumping-off point to talk about a couple things.
The films I've seen from the Downtown 81 series-- Stranger Than Paradise and Swimming to Cambodia-- were, er, valued more highly by other people whose opinions I respect. Ditto the Talking Heads, featured in two more Tuesday films. There's a certain soul-less, art-for-art's-sake quality to these works. That's how they strike me, anyway. And I feel the same way about Patti Smith's music or Robert Mapplethorpe's photography. My guess is that most of my gentle readers have different sensibilities than I do, as most of my friends have. So, by all means, check out this series.
I'm usually more interested in biographical pieces about these artists and Sunday found me watching Black White + Gray, a 2007 documentary about Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith and art collector Sam Wagstaff (via Netflix streaming). Centering on Wagstaff, the film does a great job of capturing the cultural currents of Manhattan during the seventies and eighties.
Wagstaff, as an art curator, developed an eye for minimalist pieces, famously staging a 1958 exhibition in Hartford called "Black, White and Gray", which featured no other colors. A few years later, Wagstaff plunged into collecting photography, putting together an enormous selection of prints from the 1800s and early 1900s, now part of the Getty. I can't help but believe his eye for minimalist art helped develop his eye for these black and white prints.
Wagstaff was also Mapplethorpe's sugar daddy, leveraging his own reputation as an art curator to promote the much younger photographer. This May/December relationship-- calling it a romance seems wildly inaccurate-- was satisfying to both parties, apparently. Well, you know how all relationships end, of course. Never happily. Either someone gets dumped or someone dies. (But in the meantime, ain't we got fun!) In this case, death would visit Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe, a couple years later, via AIDS.
And that's how this documentary ends-- with a graphical rendering of the names of artists who died of AIDS in the late eighties and early nineties. Words fail me in conveying how concentrated this plague was. The building in Center City Philadelphia that I and my boyfriend moved into in 1991 had five apartments. The flat we leased was vacant because the previous occupant had died of AIDS. In the next four years, the tenant in the apartment above us went home to die of AIDS and the tenant in the front apartment died suddenly of AIDS.
Typically, the victim had health insurance as long as he could work. When he was too sick to work, when he really needed health care the most, that health insurance became unavailable and the City of Philadelphia paid the bills. I saw this again & again. For the rest of my life, I'll trust municipal governments to do the right thing when it counts. The private insurance industry can go to hell for all I care.
I vividly remember the day a patient of ours called for his prescription and his insurance had "cut him off" without his knowledge. He could only afford 3 days of his 3 AIDS meds - one of which cost him $387. Before that day they'd been $30 total for the month. So, yeah, I DO believe that health insurance companies are from hell. If you would like more examples of how they screw people, I have DOZENS.
Downtown 81 doesn't interest me so much - I "don't get" Basquiat, for example - but I will have to stream that Mapplethorpe/Smith/Wagstaff.
Posted by: Jolene | Tuesday, 13 October 2009 at 14:29