Coming to PBS’ Independent Lens tomorrow, Thursday, December 22: THE WOODMANS
C Scott Willis premiered his captivating portrait of a family of artists at Tribeca last year, and walked away with the award for Best New York Documentary. After screening at additional festivals including Silverdocs and Cleveland, the doc had a limited theatrical release earlier this year.
While the spectre of Francesca Woodman seems to always lurk in the periphery of every frame of Willis’ film, true to the doc’s title, the focus is not exclusively on the celebrated youngest member of the family, who committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22. Instead, a portrait emerges of the entire nuclear family, made up of artists in their own right. Francesca’s story serves as a structuring device, with her work and her diaries offering insight into the provocative body of photography she left behind. At the same time, intriguingly, she (or her success) serves as something of a standard against which the other members of her family inevitably measure themselves against. Parents George and Betty Woodman, speaking openly about harboring a certain level of jealousy that their own work may not be as lauded as that of their prematurely deceased daughter, may seem offputting to some viewers – parental love in some way eclipsed by professional envy. But their professional response to the personal trauma of losing their troubled daughter – the creative wellspring it seems to have brought them both – speaks to the power and uncompromising centrality of art mediating their experience of life and death.
what (not) to doc 