The Fine Art of Art on Film
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Ever since Vasari, the lives of artists have aroused the public imagination: the vision, the struggle, the madness, the stardom, or the neglect. From Caravaggio to Jackson Pollock, there’s always drama.
The 13 documentaries featured in Art on Screen 2007, a three-day festival of award-winning art documentaries from around the world running this weekend at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles, are a good deal more sober than the Hollywood biopics that usually exploit the turbulence lurking in the creative spark. True, there are spirited portraits of such idiosyncratic originals as Yves Klein and Robert Indiana, but the festival’s centerpiece — Ric Burns’s four-hour “Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film” — is a far more studious appraisal. The silver-wigged pop artist and underground filmmaker gets the canonical treatment, with all the sublime and reckless craziness of Warhol’s 1960s Factory era subdued by the overly deliberate format PBS viewers know too well.
True, that is Laurie Anderson delivering the didactic narration. But the liveliest voice belongs to Billy Name, the one-time Factory manager who cheerfully takes the blame for bringing a slew of speed freaks into Warhol’s space-age demimonde. Resembling nothing so much as a burly biker dude, Mr. Name boasts remarkable recall given his admitted drug intake.
Even at its extended length, “Andy Warhol” rewards the patient viewer with recurrent snippets of those fabled 16 mm films shot at the Factory, as well as meticulously edited glimpses into the engine room of the ’60s. But it’s disappointing, given how much music Warhol inspired, that the soundtrack recycles the same handful of rock and classical themes. Surely, David Bowie might have donated his paean “Andy Warhol” to the cause: “Andy Warhol looks a scream / Hang him on my wall.”
Not all the entries, which have been selected from the best-received screenings at the 25th Montreal International Festival of Films on Art, are glued to the canvas — or fixated on cultural icons. One of the most topical documentaries is the touching “Between Two Notes,” by the Paris-based architect Florence Strauss, who took the plunge into filmmaking when she became fascinated by Arabic classical music. She tracked down an assortment of Iraqi Jewish exiles who carry their centuries-old traditions across the Middle East and North Africa.
“It took me years and years to really listen and get into the music, to be able to listen for the quarter tones,” Ms. Strauss said. “It’s something that speaks to us, this whole culture that came out of Mesopotamia.” Reflecting that heritage, the film’s French title is “Le Blues de l’Orient,” and it hints at the expansive geographical influence of the music and its profound soulfulness. When her camera circulates among a small group of musicians, now in their 80s and 90s, Ms. Strauss’s film shares a sense of discovery that would become doubly significant to the filmmaker. Growing up in France, she had never come to know her Mizrahi Jewish roots in Egypt. Her grandfather was Robert Hakim, a major French film producer (“Belle de Jour,” “L’Avventura”) who was expelled from Egypt, along with other Jews, in 1955. He subsequently sought to erase that aspect of the family saga, with which Ms. Strauss only came to terms while shooting her film.
“I started out in the art department, then I wanted to be a director, and now I’m in the family business,” she said, speaking by phone from Paris. If anything, she hopes that the film can provide “a way to listen to the other culture,” much as she has learned to do.
Not unlike the octagenarian Cuban son musicians in Wim Wenders’s “Buena Vista Social Club,” the oldest singers, as well as oud and santur players featured in the film, are grateful for the attention, even though many of them wished Ms. Strauss had discovered them sooner.
“They were 85, 90 years old and some of them couldn’t play anymore,” the filmmaker said. “One woman told me, ‘You are 10 years too late; I can’t sing the way I sang before.'”