Exactly how creative types do what they do is a subject of perennial fascination to Hot Docs audiences. This year, programmers cater to that curiosity with a special focus on “Artists & the Artistic Process,” though a quartet of bio-docs in other programs also delve deeply into the lives and works of artists, writers and filmmakers.
In Flicker (****; April 23, 7pm, Royal; April 26, 7pm, Isabel Bader), Toronto director Nik Sheehan recounts the strange days of Brion Gysin, the visionary painter and writer who blew minds with two inventions: the literary cut-up technique (as popularized by his pal William S. Burroughs) and the Dream Machine, a mysterious contraption that offered the prospect of a drug-less high. Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo (pictured) are just three of the luminaries we see experiencing the machine’s effects in Sheehan’s captivating portrait of an artist whose influence far outweighs his fame.
The same could be said of David Maysles, the cinema-vérité pioneer who made a series of seminal documentaries with his brother Albert before his death in 1987. Wild Blue Yonder (****; April 21, 7pm, Cumberland; April 23, 11am, Isabel Bader) charts a difficult journey for his daughter Celia as she tries to gain a greater understanding of her father and his work. Unintentionally rekindled by her efforts, old family conflicts give her film a discomfiting emotional charge.
Charting the efforts of artist Vanessa Beecroft to adopt two Sudanese children who she also features in her works, Pietra Brettkelly’s equally unsettling The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins (****; April 21, 9:45pm, Cumberland; April 24, 1:30pm, Cumberland) examines both the vagaries of the contemporary art world and the ethics of adoption as practised by Madonna and Angelina Jolie. Given the clashing imperatives of conceptual art and contemporary altruism, it’s no wonder that Beecroft seems so frantic.
More ruminative by nature is As Slow as Possible (***; April 18, 9:30pm, Royal; April 22, noon, ROM), in which Vancouver writer Ryan Knighton — who wrote about the loss of his sight in the memoir Cockeyed — experiences a revelation of the aural variety. Filmmaker Scott Smith accompanies Knighton on a moving pilgrimage to the German church where a performance of John Cage’s titular composition is set to continue for the next six centuries or so. Not so immodestly scaled, Smith’s movie only lasts an hour but it’s time well spent.