The Woodmans

So Percussion Director: C. Scott Willis

Overview

Art is largely about self-expression -- about the artist's desire to tell us something -- but do we always know what it is the artist is trying to say to us? This question comes to mind while considering the life of photographer Francesca Woodman. Francesca grew up in a creative household -- her mother, Betty Woodman, worked in ceramics; her father, George Woodman, was a painter; and her brother, Charlie Woodman, became a video artist. From an early age, Francesca was taught about the importance and value of art, and she displayed a precocious gift as a photographer. In 1975, at the age of 17, Francesca began creating remarkable and unusual images, often featuring nude women, and after studying in Italy and at the Rhode Island School of Design she seemed on the verge of a long and distinguished career until she committed suicide in early 1981, just days before the opening of the first major exhibition of her work. Filmmaker C. Scott Willis offers a moving portrait of an unusual family and how Francesca's family recognized her genius but not the demons that haunted her in the documentary The Woodmans. The film received its world premiere at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.

Product Details

Release Date:	06/05/2012
UPC:	0738329074128
Original Release:	2010
Rating:	NR
Source:	Alive Mind
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	1:23:00
Sales rank:	49,111

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

David Lang

Composer

Technical Credits

C. Scott Willis	Director,Producer
Jeff Werner	Producer
Neil Barrett	Producer

Editorial Reviews

It may be borderline impossible to verbally articulate all of the emotional and psychological factors leading up to the 1981 suicide of visionary 23-year-old photographer Francesca Woodman, but The Woodmans, a masterfully gauged and composed bio-doc by C. Scott Willis, gives us such an approximate level of insight that the results are blindingly uncomfortable. The film's title spells out much of its approach, as a reference to the family as a whole in lieu of the photographer herself. Drawing on interviews with artist parents George and Betty Woodman, older brother Charles, and various friends and classmates, Willis builds as a thematic foundation the concept of a young woman of preternaturally gifted visual instinct and emotional self-awareness, born into a family so unconventional and offbeat that obsession with artistic expression and a sense of isolation only added to her complexities. He doesn't blame the family -- that would be naïve, myopic, and cruel -- but he does enable us to see with utter clarity how the Woodman familial unit shaped a personality and an outlook as delicate and fragile as Francesca's. The documentary uses the Woodman photographs (which repeatedly flash onscreen) on a couple of key levels. On the most fundamental and obvious level, they unveil a brilliant artist decades ahead of her time -- in the same sense that Van Gogh was ahead of his -- born into a world not yet prepared to embrace and accept her; therein, Willis reminds us, lies one of the core tragedies of Francesca's life. But at the same time that the movie functions as a long-overdue homage to its subject, it also uses the photographs themselves (and obscure, self-reflexive black-and-white videos that Francesca shot) as analogues of an unassailable loneliness -- the cries of an individual who was desperately and unsuccessfully screaming to be heard. This is true to such a degree that when Betty Woodman turns up and dismisses the notion that the photographs are autobiographical expressions, the very idea seems ludicrous to us. Not only do the images contradict Mrs. Woodman's insistences by demonstrating an inimitable and fixed view of the world -- a personal stamp instantly identifiable as Francesca's own -- they contain haunting and heartbreaking metaphors of self-denial. From the recurrent motifs of the young woman's body buried in peeling and crumbling wallpaper to a conceptual art piece that Francesca created, which ends with the outline of her body in flour -- eerily foreshadowing the nature of the young woman's death -- we get a concrete impression of her crumbling inner self. Willis wisely avoids overplaying his hand. What he gives us, time and again, are glimpses into the depths of Francesca's soul, in both its stunning beauty and its tortured complexity. That duality sustains the film: Willis suggests that the photographer's level of sensitivity, both to her inner landscape and the world around her, may have been a gift in addition to an impediment -- which may be the documentary's gutsiest implication. In viewing Francesca's work, we're reminded of the same conclusion that we may draw after reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and learning of Plath's unconvincing later assertion that she wanted to rewrite the same story "from a healthy perspective" -- that the suicidal thrust and the haunting acuity of the work itself may well have been inseparable.