Coming to DVD in re-release this Friday, April 15:
THE FUNDAMENTAL GILBERT AND GEORGE
Director:
Gerald Fox
World Premiere:
UK television broadcast (1997)
Select Festivals:
NewFest
About:
An exploration of the world of Britain’s most eccentric, celebrated, and controversial artistic double act in which life and art are inextricably linked.
The doc screened at NewFest, for which our program notes read:
Take a trip through the heady, genteel, and elemental worlds of Britain’s unofficial godfathers of contemporary art, Gilbert and George. Gerald Fox’s documentary tours the life and work that they have inextricably entwined in their neo-gothic, minimalist, 25-year routine in London’s East End. During the making of this film, Gilbert and George develop a new series of works entitled “The Fundamentals” – studies of their spunk, piss, and blood. Whether attending the opening of a retrospective of their work, having their suits tailored, or taking us on a tour of their collection of rare homoerotica, they remain somehow strangely in performance. Are they gay lovers, geniuses, iconoclasts, anachronisms? The answers are all here and nowhere to be found. This film is probably the closest thing you will ever see to a biography of the internationally renowned “Living Sculptures,” and a marvelous thing indeed.
what (not) to doc 