The tagline for The Woodmans is “Four lives caught in a world where art hurts… And sometimes heals.” More fitting perhaps is something like “An accidental indictment of the professional artist as self-absorbed and tragically vain.” The film’s title at least is appropriate, because while the subject matter is largely the work and life (and suicide) of Francesca Woodman, most of the storytelling is done through interviews with her parents, as well as her brother, friends, and acquaintances.
The film engages in a lot of speculation regarding the causes of Francesca’s decision to jump off a building at the age of 22, most of which has a folk-psychological, 19th-century Romantic quality. For instance, the father suggests something like, “There’s an element of psychic risk to being an artist,” and he says in so many words that Francesca’s wild creativity and obsessive personality were what endeared her to him. Is it monstrous or honest that George admits his love for his daughter was motivated not by the fact of his relationship to her (i.e., that she was his daughter) but primarily by their shared interest in art? Do we really still believe that the artistic temperament is necessarily manic-depressive, or that despair is a necessary condition for the production of good art?
What is good art? It’s the unasked question at the center of the film, a hole of doubt that poisons the representations and relations of a family sick for success. Betty makes tacky painted ceramics, and George makes tacky abstract paintings; both adhere to a strict work ethic; both live for the promise of recognition. It didn’t take long for me to grow to hate the Woodmans’ capacity for reifying their experience and commodifying their labor. “Art is making something out of nothing and selling it,” as Frank Zappa said. Unfortunately for their children, George and Betty were a binary void, the gravity of their studios pulling the light from the privilege of a bourgeois home. They imparted to Francesca and Charlie their hungry way of seeing the world as well as their foundational belief in the importance of making art.
Of course, what I’ve been doing is building a case against Francesca’s parents, trying to establish the mark of their guilt in her disease. But while her toxic ambition and neurotic estimation (e.g., “I am a genius, I am worthless”) were an undeniable inheritance, what ultimately paralyzed and drained the RISD grad was depression. She attempted suicide, she went on medication, she went off medication, she killed herself. One almost wishes there were fewer expensive pots in the house and more books, perhaps among them The Bell Jar.
My complaint with the film isn’t that it spends too much time with despicable people — although they are, as becomes undeniable when George notes that staying alive into one’s 70s is an accomplishment his daughter didn’t enjoy, or when Charlie whines that his successes appear less valuable than they really are in comparison to those of his sister and mother, or when Betty marvels at the therapeutic potency of her piece installed at the US Embassy in Beijing — my complaint is that the film is structured not as a reflection on the stupidity and depravity of the business of art but rather as an even-toned portrait of a regular-old American family with a streak of special talent going through tough times and coming out the other end with health and careers intact.
