KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: ***
Director: Michael Health
A feast for the ears as well as the eyes, this is a nicely realised and long overdue documentary portrait of underrated artist Edith Collier.
Its pace - both contemplative and reverential - allows the viewer to linger over the generous assortment
of canvases, which are mostly shown complete rather than in the distracting details beloved of film-makers, who like to think they know better than the artist.
Heath, who wrote the screenplay for the film version of the iconic New Zealand novel The Scarecrow 25 years ago, assembles a portrait of the artist who, although she died in 1964, was so cruelly ignored that she survives in no sound or film archive.
As a result, she remains a distant and mysterious figure, tantalisingly out of reach despite the engaging testimony of the nieces and nephews the film-maker has tracked down, and the intelligent input of art historian and Collier biographer Joanne Drayton.
Wanganui-born Collier did her best work between 1913 and 1922 in London, where she marked herself out as an extremely accomplished modernist landscape and portrait artist. But, finally relenting to the pressure of her father, a dour Englishman who was bankrolling her OE, she returned to the duties of the eldest daughter, with all the implications for her creativity that that implied.
Making matters worse was the hostility she encountered in the artistically narrow-minded land of her birth, not just to her aesthetic approach but also to her subject matter.
Drayton properly contextualises the horrendous step her father took to express his disapproval of Edith's work: Wanganui was in the grip of a sensational homosexual scandal and groups of nudes were not well-regarded as proper material for the eyes of polite society.
In attempting to find the human behind the history and the canvases, Heath labours the point at times: the narration, delivered in his funereal tones, is full of sentences like "perhaps we can imagine her sorrow in seeking utmost solace in this lovely lonely place", or "and what of the regret and disappointment that must have been in her heart?", which seem somewhat redundant.
Some of the editing is clumsy and distracting. But Stephen Latty's sublime cinematography - particularly effective when his shots seem to draw breath from Collier's canvases - and the beautiful music (Chopin, Elgar, Bach and Beethoven as well as a lovely original score by Aaddil Behram, M. Prashant and Richard Nunns) make this a pleasing and poignant portrait of a life that, like those of so many New Zealand artists, was richer in frustration than recognition.