A part of the creative artist that tends to be as inseparable from his work as from his personality and character, a certain egotism often comes with the territory. Immersed in the creative process and the material of her work, drawing from the murkiest depths of her mind as a creator, she finds herself face to face with a creative legacy teetering on the ledge of absolute oblivion but with the possibility of some kind of lasting, precarious immortality. It doesn’t matter that this immortality is an illusion; as much a part of life as its counterpart, death concerns the artist, who cannot escape from touching on it.
In The Woodmans, directed by the documentary veteran Scott Willis, the madness and the energy of this kind of artistic life is exemplified by Frencesca Woodman, who in the 1970s left a lasting impression on the world of photography with her laser-focused presentation of body imagery at play with ambient elements such as wallpaper, clothing, mirrors, and flour. Coming from a family of artists, Francesca grew up surrounded by the intense creative vocations of her parents—her mother was a ceramicist and her father, a painter—and perhaps inevitably, as this documentary reveals with photographs and home videos of her life and development as an artist, she came to embody this intensity of vision. Then she surpassed even her family, creating a body of work ahead of its time.
Her parents were well-meaning, but it was obvious that they struggled to conform their lifestyle as tried-and-true artists to that of being parents, which they admitted had not been their first priority as a vibrant and creative married couple. Francesca, who had taken an early interest in artistic and aesthetic things and showed talent for the family vocation, went off to boarding school as a teenager and there developed her genius as a photographer. And the story takes off from there.
The Woodmans is a fascinating documentary about the artistic process, about the risks and rewards of creation, and about their constellation in the work of one gifted and brilliant woman who ended her life with an inauspicious suicide. But the critical reflection of the film is that of an interesting difference of perspective on art and the artist: does making art heal more than it harms, as discovered by Francesca’s mother who found in her ceramics a path to recovery? Or does it harm the artist, as evinced by the life-ending psychiatric struggles of her daughter? Or is it neither?
Asking questions and leaving them unanswered, The Woodmans ends with our staring at the pellucid images of the young Francesca, who has perhaps remained—if only as a captured image—immortal.
