My monthly set of varied reflections on whatever takes my fancy. For June; five documentary reviews, a Buddhist momento mori, Wittgenstein’s blobs of colour, Stephen King and bullying. As usual a couple of sections are free and everything related to sex and death is for paying guests…
Capsule Documentary Reviews
Five documentaries I’ve seen recently…
Sly Lives - A young, handsome, sensitive and creative black man writes some superb songs, creates a live act like no other, becomes stupendously rich and famous, gets addicted to drugs, loses his creativity, his fame and his wealth and completely goes off the rails. Familiar story? Something that could, in principle, happen to anyone, regardless of the colour of their skin? Not according to the director of this film and the hip-hop artists he interviewed who got rich and famous from stealing Sly Stone’s classic riffs. No, you see, the whole terrible tale was due to racism, because poor old Sly was burdened with ‘black genius’.
Hold on though! Or was it? Sly’s own noble outlook blatantly contradicts this interpretation—his final words in the documentary, when asked if he was ‘judged too harshly’ are ‘no, not at all; we deserve everything we get in this life’—and the word ‘black’ is crossed out from the title card, so either the director is a) making a clever but concealed critique of black-prop, or b) he’s concealing his black-prop behind a light veneer of irony, or c) he’s an imbecile. I‘m going for b, but I wouldn’t rule out c.
China’s Van Goghs - In ‘Dafen’, an area of Shenzhen in China, hundreds of peasant painters produce replica oil paintings, in their thousands, for sale in Europe. A group of these artists, who spend their every waking moment making not-too good Van Gogh rip offs, then visits Amsterdam to see the originals they’ve spent, in some cases, twenty years imitating. After their trip the principle character is inspired to start creating his own original[ish] pieces. It’s a charming tale, although hard to believe the whole thing naturally unfolded before the cameras. A fake documentary about fake artists?
Anyone who has read Byung-Chul Han’s book, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese will be reminded, watching China’s Van Goghs, of Han’s defence of Chinese ‘counterfeit culture’ as a form of generative creativity that reflects, rather than betrays, nature. Shanzhai is a persuasive and even inspiring counterbalance to our Western fetish for originality, but, as this documentary reminds us, with its parade of hideous counterfeits, it goes too far. To make his argument Han, rather depressingly, uses Nokias, Adidas and Harry Potter, which are nowhere near as difficult to improve on as a genuine artistic masterpiece, like the sunflowers. Nature does produce billions of imitations, but it also produces unique masterpieces. In any case, I’d rather fetishise an original Van Gogh than have to live with a 750,000 Chinese knock-offs and, if this documentary does tell the truth of its subjects, so would a good many Chinese!