BEFORE: My extended foray into documentaries continues tonight, and I'm sticking with the topic of art. Because why not make that a running theme for the year? I'm still working out the chain that will follow the documentaries, the first two weeks are looking really solid, but after that, the linking sort of falls apart. So I may end up moving a topic, such as time travel, into next year and bringing in some ringers from the bottom part of the list to plug up the resulting hole. Stay tuned, it's going to take a few more days to figure all that out.
THE PLOT: A look at the work and surprising success of a four-year-old girl whose paintings have been compared to the likes of Picasso and have raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
AFTER: In many ways, this is the opposite film to "Tim's Vermeer", where an adult with a sizable income spent weeks making a very meticulous painting for very personal reasons. Here we have a child with no income who could knock out an abstract painting in a few days, and they ended up being sold in galleries. Naturally, this led to speculation over whether the world had found a true artistic genius, or whether a child was being exploited (by her parents, the gallery owner, the media...) for personal gain. Yes, we live in a cynical world, but whose fault is that?
What I've realized, after just two films, is what most documentaries have in common - in absence of a narrative, often they have to create their own. The film touches a bit on the nature of abstract art - how naturally subjective it all is, which naturally leads fans of traditional art to wonder if it's all bunk. They said that about Jackson Pollock - geez, he's just a guy dripping paint on a canvas, isn't he? - and they've said that over the years about various attempts to have abstract paintings made by monkeys and elephants. (Never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.)
Both "Tim's Vermeer" and this film happen to use the same song over the closing credits - Bob Dylan singing "When I Paint My Masterpiece". In that song, following some questionable rhymes (girl from Greece, pack of wild geese, Botticelli's niece), there are two lines that are the essence of creativity. "Someday, everything's going to be different / When I paint my masterpiece." Right there, that's the thought process that fuels every creative person - artist, writer, filmmaker - and keeps them doing what they're doing. As soon as I find the right combination of words, images, brushstrokes, and I do the thing right, my whole life's going to change. I'll finally get some recognition, some press, some money and I'll be able to improve my life in a neglible way.
Now, I admire ambition in a creative person, but it's possible to be so focused on a goal that you miss out on the journey it took to get there. Writing a successful book, directing a hit film, making a treasured painting - these are equivalent to hitting the lottery, and some people might win on their first ticket, some might win after 1,000 tickets, and most people will never win at all. Logic says that if you hit the jackpot on your first ticket, you should stop playing, because you'll probably never win again - but that doesn't work for writers, filmmakers and artists. Once you're in the game, you keep playing. So if young Marla is really a painting prodigy, like Mozart was to music, then she's in it for life.
But we have this thing now called the 24-hour news cycle, which survives on information but feasts on scandal - so naturally the questions arose about whether Marla was really painting, without a little help from her father. All it took was a "60 Minutes" profile on Marla, with Charlie Rose questioning "What's really going on here?" and the damage was done. And the footage they chose to air on CBS had Marla saying, "Now you do it, Daddy!" or her father saying, "Work on this part now, Marla" and of course, no one remembers the hours of footage that they DIDN'T air. But that's how documentaries work, a director makes decisions about what story to tell by what gets left in and what gets left out.
With Marla, what needed to be factored into the equation was the possibility that making a documentary is a bit like quantum physics - the act of observing has the possible effect of changing what is being observed. So, according to Marla's parents, whenever she was being filmed, she painted in a different style, or she acted in different ways - and that's what led people to believe that someone else made her best paintings, her best work was always produced when there was no camera around. The audience (or anyone buying her art) had to decide if they believed her story, as part of the package. The parents did have success in filming her painting one complete work, "Ocean", but the skepticism still persisted. Viewers of the film similarly now have to decide if they believe in the art's pedigree.
There's no debate about whether stage moms and dads benefit from the success of their kids - of course they do. Even in animation I've seen so-called prodigies, 8 or 10-year old kids who want to make cartoons, and I question how much of that comes from them and how much from their momagers who want them to do something unique, which will look good on the college application. Does that 8-year old kid REALLY want to make a cartoon film to explain the Holocaust? That girl who's autistic, you're telling me that she was able to focus enough to make a stop-motion film, a process that would drive most adult animators batty?
It must be tough to raise a kid, especially if you're prone to second guessing the results of every little action. If I let him eat dessert, will he be obese as an adult? If I don't discipline him enough, will he end up in prison? You want to encourage your kids to pursue their passion, to even be good at something, whatever that is, but where do you draw the line between encouraging and nagging? Even helping with math homework could easily lead to doing it FOR them, and then the kid is learning nothing. That science project or soapbox derby racer sure could benefit from an adult with resources getting them what they need, and it's a slippery slope from there.
When I was a kid, I was into jigsaw puzzles, crosswords and cartoons - and I did well in school, so my parents encouraged me to strive to get into the "gifted" programs, once I reached a grade level where those programs existed. I had the scores, that wasn't a problem, because I always did well on standardized tests - but the problem was finding an interest in something that could be turned into a career someday. (Vocabulary and math scores only get you so far.) So I was signed up for summer courses at Framingham College that were geared toward junior high kids, in subjects like logic, chess, and radio broadcasting. I still didn't know what career I wanted to pursue until I was about 15 or 16, and when my brain hit on film production, it all sort of came together, as a "why not?" kind of answer. Filmmaking is logical, it's like a puzzle, it requires a lot of different skills, AND it's a form of art. Then all I had to do was learn the techniques and find employment. (Turns out there was a lot more to it than that, but I couldn't have foreseen it at the time.)
As a coincidence, today I received in the mail the first art from my niece and nephew that I've deemed "fridge-worthy" - (I don't HAVE to like art done by kids, because I don't have kids) really, up until now their work has been quite what you'd expect from children, a lot of white space on the paper and some stick figures that are almost recognizable as Disney characters. But this art was done to thank me for getting them trinkets from Comic-Con, so I got a drawing of Olaf the snowman from my niece, and of R2D2 and C3P0 from my nephew. Finally, some art that speaks to me, and has some value.
Starring Marla Olmstead, Laura Olmstead, Mark Olmstead.
RATING: 5 out of 10 nasty e-mails
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