By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * )
The notoriously reticent artist Ralph Hotere doesn't speak - except in snatches of archival footage - in Merata Mita's long-awaited film.
"There are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing," he famously proclaimed and it's a line Mita
uses as an on-screen epigraph for one of the sections of her film about him.
"About" is, however, used in its loosest sense. In a programme note for the premiere screenings at last year's film festival, Mita remarks that the film does not view Hotere through labels, which is presumably intended to justify an approach which is discursive to the point of being often inscrutable and occasionally tedious.
The viewer will emerge from the experience little the wiser about Hotere either as man or artist. Issues such as his age, his artistic antecedents (no one notes the debt to McCahon), even his thematic preoccupations are deemed unworthy of mention, much less analysis. In its place is a rhapsody bordering on hagiography, which uses Hotere's work as a series of visual motifs and the poetry of the artist's long-time partner Cilla McQueen as a voiceover.
This would be irritating enough on the grounds simply that the film dazzles and bewilders with frantically intercut snatches of Hotere rather than allowing us to contemplate one of the country's great artists or long, tracking shots which seem more intent on showcasing the film-maker's skill than the artist's achievement.
But when Mita chips in to tell us about his "return from Europe" (when? why? what did he do there?) or the scandalous day when his Kuaka mural was "torn out of the airport" (when? why? what happened?) the motley superficiality of the whole thing becomes unbearable.
By way of explication we have on-screen talking heads - many apparently interviewed early in the seven-year production process - enunciating such crushing banalities as "the source of his creations comes from within, not from without" or "the work must speak for itself".
Those seeking an introduction to the artist - and those who already love him - might be better off looking at his work.
Director: Merata Mita
Rating: M
Running time: 82 mins
Screening: Rialto