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Artist Makes Films about Artist
Nat Segaloff, Boston Herald
"I just turned 40," Waban-based filmmaker David Sutherland admits, "and I'm real hard on myself. Most people who go right into a career know their limitations by the time they reach 40. Now I'm just getting going. I no longer have the tire store; I'm really out there."
Sutherland, who relocated to New England after attending film school at the University of Southern California along with such luminaries as George Lucas (STAR WARS) and John Carpenter (HALLOWEEN), doesn't like to compare his film work with that of his Hollywood brethren.
"There are so many good artists out there, and some may be better than you. To compete, you have to do something different -- not just for the sake of being different, but to find your style. I'm interested in entertaining, but I'm not a narrator. It's not natural for me. So I work in this genre."
The genre in which Sutherland works is that of an artist who makes films about artists. But he's not a documentary-maker, he insists, because of the way he makes his filmed portraits.
"I shoot a 'sketch' on Super-8 and then structure it, going back with a 16mm camera to direct the artist in his own performance." Sutherland explains: His previous film, PAUL CADMUS: ENFANT TERRIBLE AT 80, has won some 20 international awards and looks at the life and work of controversial painter Paul Cadmus, whose libertine expressions got him commissioned, then banned, from Works Progress Administration showplaces in the '30s.
Sutherland's new film on artist Jack Levine, which premiered at the MFA last spring, will debut tonight at 8 at Lincoln's DeCordova Museum.
Levine, now 71, is a Social Realist painter whose commentary addresses targets from McCarthy and Chicago's Mayor Daley to Frank Sinatra and international arms brokers. JACK LEVINE: FEAST OF PURE REASON is a change for Sutherland who found himself dealing with a more varied, but also more irascible, human subject.
"Levine speaks in paragraphs," Sutherland recalls. "Cadmus speaks to the camera. We had to feed Cadmus his own lines back, but Levine would go on and be very bold, very layered. You see different sides of his personality. A lot of time went into his performance. He's articulate and interesting, but I had to get him to look into the camera."
Although he has worked in New York for 40 years, having married artist Ruth Gikow and stayed in the city, Levine was born in Boston and still considers himself a Bostonian. Sutherland's film brings him to Fenway Park as well as to his Manhattan studio where he muses on Hollywood, Brecht, the Old Masters and the other influences on his art.
"Jack's work hangs in the Vatican as well as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Metropolitan," Sutherland reports. "He is the only American artist who never stopped painting as a Social Realist even when it went out of vogue in the 1950's and 1960s. He deliberately cut himself off from the mainstream."
Yet Levine still circulates socially, and his presence at last spring's informal opening of Sutherland's film at the MFA (hosted by film curator Deac Rossell) was an SRO event of the artist's friends and admirers. "Jack was very happy with the way it turned out." Sutherland says of the showing, somewhat relieved. "It meant a lot to both of us."
Sutherland's intimacy with his subjects is born of his process of following them around with cameras, tape recorders and a shared soul. "Preparing a dual version in Super-8 and then going back for 16mm is financially ridiculous," Sutherland admits, "but perhaps it allows my films to come alive as portraits."
The filmmaker notes another kinship with his subjects which he discovered while preparing his Paul Cadmus film for its PBS airing last May. "I had to cut six minutes from it and I saw things, in re-editing it, that I would have done differently the first time. Strangely enough, the Jack Levine film ends with him putting some touches on a painting of his daughter that he had done 25 years ago. I like having a second whack at it too."
