If asked to name an American female photographer who committed suicide, you
'd probably first think of Diane Arbus. Until now.
Francesca Woodman may be about to give Arbus a posthumous run for her money. The doomed heroine lives on in The Woodmans, which won Best New York Documentary at the ninth Tribeca Film Festival.
Best known for her dreamy black-and-white stills and videos, Francesca often appeared in the raw. Ophelia herself couldn't have composed more intimate, unearthly meditations on the feminine and the floral. Francesca's work has entranced art insiders for 30 years, and now its mystique is spreading to the cinema world as well.
C. Scott Willis' filmed eulogy is at once mournful, celebratory and transcendently beautiful, making it easy to imagine that Francesca would be pleased with the result.
Willis knows that audiences are vulnerable to the tragic chic of an artist jumping to her death -- as Francesca did in 1981 at age 22 -- and that they ache to see omens of her mortality in every frame. So he homes in on the joyful act of her creativity, and prevents us from reading her work "as one long suicide note," which is how the Emmy-Award-winning director put it after a Tribeca FF screening.
Rather, it was Francesca's artistic slumps, when she ceased to produce, that summoned her inner vultures. So says her Rhode Island School of Design roommate in one of many perceptive insights she shares on camera.
Commentary by friends and family reconstruct a persona who was as light and dark as her compositions. Yet, as the movie title implies, The Woodmans is no mere solo tribute, but a family portrait. It took Willis three years to lure Francesca's next of kin to the project and an additional three for the shoot. In telling their stories, they toggle between biography and autobiography, and reveal their own artistic merits and ambitions.
The mother, Betty, creates ceramic art whose parakeet hues enliven the screen, and, at a climactic moment in the film, the U.S. Embassy in China to boot. George, the father, is a painter of nearly as dazzling a palette, who embraced photography spookily reminiscent of his late daughter's. And Francesca's brother, Charles, trucks in electronic art. 
As if taking the artistic cue from the Woodmans, Willis layers his film with eclectic textures and tones. Exuberant colors flow from the family studios and homes, both in Italy and America, and offset the elegiac blacks and whites of Francesca's realm.
The narrative structure is an assemblage in its own right. Granted full access to Francesca's portfolio and personal writings, Willis treats them with the sensitivity and respect that is due found art.
Diary confessionals give the deceased her own dialogue and commentary. “I am so vain and so masochistic – how can they coexist?" she wrote. And lest anyone doubt her fragile spirit, it suffices to note, "I confuse everything for myself," and "I just feel so alone." We get an unvarnished glimpse of what it was like when the RISD grad struggled to find work in New York.
But her pixie nature also comes through in these private scrawls. “I am very feminine in the pink and lacy fashion…and mother is not," she zinged in her coming of age.
Is there a villain in Francesca's sad tale? Admirably, Willis withholds judgment. At most he sniffs around the atmosphere of competition among the Woodman artists. And we get hints that Betty and George's love affair contributed to Francesca's sense of apartness. ("My parents are so very married," she confided in her diary.) Yet there's no mistaking their support for her prodigious talent.
Similarly, the director refrains from sudsing up Francesca's suicide. For him, the impact of that act on her loved ones – and on their art -- is the richer theme. Betty and George deal with guilt and mourning in different ways. "There's a psychic risk in being an artist," George offers by way of imposing sense on the loss.
Three decades into it, neither sheds a tear. Yet some viewers may accuse Willis of milking the ordeal via weepy friends. "If no one cried for Francesca, it wouldn't feel right," explains the filmmaker. "I wanted to signal to the audience that it was okay to cry."
But don't expect to find any violin swells in The Woodmans. "A violin says, 'Cry now,' " per Willis. Steering clear of instruments that "carry predictable emotional value," he tapped composer David Lang (Bang on a Can) to work up the film's musical voice. The Pulitzer Prize-winner allegedly tested untold flower pots until securing a proper section of B-Flat and C-Flat terra cottas.
Mostly the score hits its mark. One early exception is a moody, suspenseful manipulation surrounding Francesca's "aloof" and "special" character, visually underscored by her cool stare and the way she "held herself apart."
It's a minor quibble in a film that justifies the trust of its complex and compelling subjects.
"Was it dangerous to make a documentary about the Russian mob?" director Alexander Gentelev was asked after his Thieves by Law premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival (April 22 to May 2, 2010).
"We will find out after the protagonists see the movie," he deadpanned. ![Alexander Gentelev (photo: B. Balfour]](/images/stories/al-gentelev.jpg "Alexander Gentelev (photo: B. Balfour]")
The heroes Gentelev was referring to are three retired godfathers of Russia’s underworld who muse about their colorful exploits on camera. As he explained, "A lot of criminal kingpins were willing to mouth off, but not on film." Finding insiders willing to help lift the "veil of secrecy" surrounding followers of the so-called "Thieves Code" took the Russian-born director two years. It was well worth the wait.
Leonid Bilunov is the smoothest of Thieves' unholy trinity. The Ukrainian native shows us around his Antibes and Paris homes, whose doors are twice as fortified as a bank's and whose art holdings would be the envy of any museum.
He fairly glows over his generous support for the Russian Orthodox Church in Cannes. No government official gives as much as thieves by law, he rhapsodizes. Omertà, which requires a bandit to share his wealth with the gang, dies hard. (Renunciation of family, employment and a steady address also figures in the original honor code.)
For his part, former card shark Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov compares a thief's function with that of a member of parliament: both "help people." A dedicated sports patron, the Uzbek-born topper of Interpol's Most Wanted List made 2002 headlines for allegedly fixing the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Baby-faced Tokhtakhounov shows off his "I Made It in Life" slippers. Whether he or his fellow honchos can actually read, though, remains unclear.
Like Bulinov, he had moved his business headquarters to Israel until that country got wise to the wise guys exploiting its relatively lax policies. Tokhtakhounov departed after a half a year. Left to imagine how Israel's rough edge would offend his delicate sensibilities, we can't help but admire Gentelev's way with irony.
Our third crime boss, 40-ish Vitaly Dyomochka, is two decades younger than the other two. He unwittingly authors one of the funniest lines in the movie. Appalled to hear that convicts are not even eligible to run for mayor in the U.S., he tsks, "Damn! What kind of a place is that?" Yet his love affair with American-style crime flicks remains unmarred. He stars in his own productions, where real debtors get smacked down as a way of paying up. 
While Gentelev's film is no action thriller, pacey editing and thumping music advance it at a breathless clip. The stylistic crackle revs our suspense. Add to this the rugged charm of these bold men – and their lushly captured lifestyles of the rich and infamous – and we find ourselves sympathizing with the very objects of our revulsion. Part of the documentary's appeal is that it traffics in a fantasy most wouldn't cop to having.
It also takes care to explain history. Using period footage, Gentelev traces the brotherhood's roots to Stalin's gulags of the '30s. We learn that, sequestered from totalitarian rule, a parallel gang society evolved with its own rules, ethics and hierarchy. Additionally we get a remedial reading course on those tattoos -- last seen in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises -- which mark a thug's rank, modus operandi and back story.
Another handy footnote is perestroika. Mikhail Gorbachev's late '80s restructuring gave rise to private fortunes, which organized crime horned in on. Through such business practices as assassination and extortion, syndicates would soon lord over legitimate and illegal ventures alike, including arms smuggling, money laundering and the oil trades. Six years of warfare, from 1994 to 2000, among the hundreds of gangs ruling Russia meant a redistribution of assets and new opportunities for those who survived.
Trumpeting their current credentials as respectable businessmen, our three lead characters provide the film a peculiar redemptive arc -- if by redemption is meant a lingering taste for predation. 
Other heads that talk us through the story include a mob lawyer, an Interpol agent and an Israeli general. Gentelev's touch with the brain trust is assured. On occasion, though, he permits a too-literal illustration of their words, as with a cut to raw beef being boiled when Bilunov recalls the first time he cried, because he "couldn't shoot to kill."
Not to complain, but Thieves by Law (aka Ganavim ba Hok) may raise as many questions as it answers. For example, why did the three bosses agree to participate? Did the film serve as free advertising for them?
Gentelev speculated that Tokhtakhounov is "dreaming of going back to the West, where he's not allowed in -- he says he didn't do anything bad in the West." As for Dyomochka, he felt that the only one of the three who still observes the thief's code "really wanted to tell the story of his life." And Bilunov? In the film, he warns that he's the "lion … and wouldn't recommend that anyone take it away from me." What's that if not a message?
"I think Bilunov agreed just because he was bored," shrugged Gentelev.
Whatever their motives, the three retired bosses who reflect on their lives of crime offer insights raw and rare enough to make some viewers suspicious. "They're fakes," argues a distributor who prefers not to be named. Gentelev's response to Thieves' naysayers?
"Check with Interpol."
"Modoki" is the Japanese word for "similar, yet different." Take for example the Tribeca Film Festival (April 21 to May 2, 2010), and October's New York Film Festival. Both are Manhattan cinema extravaganzas — whose overlaps end there. Populist Tribeca plays teriyaki to artsy NYFF's sashimi. 
Almost four decades the Lincoln Center event's junior, Tribeca was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff to goad downtown development in the aftermath of 9/11. Never mind that the "Triangle Below Canal Street" has since ceased to be ground zero for the Festival. And who of today's TFF ticket buyers thinks he or she is subsidizing lower New York's economic and cultural revival?
Rather, what continues to flourish are the Spring fest's display of popular, indie and world cinema and the celebratory mood that envelopes it. For the non-auteurist crowd, there are accessible Hollywood entertainments, ESPN-sponsored sports docs and family movies. Bring your kids; wear your sweats; Tribeca is the cinema equivalent of a cherry blossom festival.
The inclusive spirit has its downside, however. TFF still grapples with the bad rap earned during its embryonic years, when the slate was crammed with duds. Around 2008, the Festival learned how to prune and the yield has generally improved.
Not that you won't find some clunkers among this year's 85 features and 47 short films, handpicked from 5,050 submissions. Where exactly the head was buried of the programmer who saw Buried Land, and said, "We have to show this," I'd rather not imagine. Any conversation Steven Eastwood and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes' docudrama about ancient pyramids in Bosnia may have spurred about its hybrid form was surely more fascinating than any draggy frame of the actual work.
Likewise, the choice of Alex Mar's documentary on alternative religion, American Mystic, is a head-scratcher. It's a terrific idea in larval stages of narrative and character development.
Happily, the Festival also has its share of worthwhile diversions. Of the fiction features, Cairo Time and Please Give qualify. The former supplies a fluid narrative and sultry near-romance that gently gets under your skin. Minor distractions are Patricia Clarkson's bared shoulders and Cairo's sanitized streets. (A novice traveler, much less a sophisticated magazine editor and the wife of a UN staffer, would know never to flaunt skin in the Arab world; and don't expect to smell the lived-in, overripe Egyptian capital from Luc Montpellier's Chamber of Commerce cinematography.) Otherwise, Ruba Nadda's 17th film is an understated charmer.
Please Give is the fourth and most cackle-worthy of Nicole Holofcener's urban comedies. As in Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing and Friends with Money, Catherine Keener leads the charge. This time she plays a privileged Manhattanite who co-owns an antique furniture shop with her husband (Oliver Platt), and can't get past her guilt. Whether you recognize yourself in their flawed souls and complexions may be a correlate of your sense of self-worth.
For a "How To" on strutting your imperfections, look no further than the ecstatic duo in Arias with a Twist: The Docufantasy. Performance artist Joey Arias and puppeteer Basil Twist make you wish you were weirder per Bobby Sheehan's sensational visual romp through the New York downtown art scene beginning with the 70s. Fueled with perverse amounts of talent and vim, the co-leads and such fellow fantastics as David Bowie and Klaus Nomi should knock you clear off your cinema seat.
As stupendous as Arias with a Twist is, the Festival revelation has to be Thieves by Law/Ganavim ba Hok. Remember the Viggo Mortensen character in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises — that Russian gangster with the scary tatoos? Alexander Gentelev's documentary introduces you to the real wise guys of Russia's seething underworld whose pedigree can be traced to Stalin's gulags. One of the film's many worthy provocations pits the "Vory v zakone," or "thieves' code," against the lax morality of Russian government officials, and probes which is the sounder. Tough choice. As opposed to the choice of seeing this slam-whiz Festival selection.
Another no-brainer is Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda. The new documentary from the maker of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and Oscar laureate Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) is based on Lawrence Wright's book and stage play, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and Road to 9/11.
Gibney's work-in-progress, Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film, will also be screened at TFF. At the Festival's opening press conference, the filmmaker acknowledged the organizers' anxiety-soothing embrace of unusual fare like his unfinished films.
They aren't among the handful of titles slated to reach viewers around the country through TFF's new distribution initiative, which includes video-on-demand and pay-TV. Yet, as Chief Creative Officer Geoff Gilmore said at the same press conference, such digital delivery solutions give him "great hope for the future of independent film.”
“We are in the process of reinventing what festivals do and how they reach audiences,” said Gilmore.
Here come the neighborhoods.
Visit www.tribecafilm.com for the full TFF program.
Tribeca Film Festival
Apr. 23 - May 2, 2010
Chelsea Clearview Cinemas
260 West 23rd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues
New York, NY
Village East Cinema
181 2nd Avenue@ 12th Street
New York, NY
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