By Edward Sozanski, Inquirer Art Critic
The Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists was founded three years ago to promote the achievements of artists who work or worked outside the mainstream art world. Some by now have become somewhat well-known within the larger art world. James Castle of Idaho (1899-1977) is one of them.
He is the subject of the Philadelphia-based foundation's first biographical project, a 53-minute documentary film - James Castle: Portrait of an Artist - that is scheduled to make its world premiere Saturday as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival. The film was written and directed by foundation trustee and professional film editor Jeffrey Wolf.
In Castle, the foundation, started by Wolf and local collectors Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, chose a perfect subject to launch its organization publicly. Almost every self-taught artist offers historians and curators a colorful backstory. In Castle's case, it was the fact that he was born deaf in rural western Idaho and never learned to speak, read or write, or to communicate in sign language (because he refused to do so). Supported by his family, he spent his entire life making art - drawings, collages and constructions.
Fortunately for the film, and especially for the artist - and most especially for the public's understanding of "naive" art - Wolf hasn't allowed the backstory to dominate. Castle might have led an unconventional life, but he was a gifted artist who deserves to be judged on what he produced.
The film does a better-than-average job of conveying the subtlety and complexity of his art, especially of his drawings. (Philadelphians will be able to contemplate the full range and depth of his imagination through a retrospective exhibition scheduled to open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-October.)
Yet while the film respects Castle's art, it does a less satisfactory job of re-creating his life. Wolf hasn't supplied a clear linear narrative. Rather, he has spliced together, sometimes in excruciatingly brief slices, fragments of interviews with two dozen people. They include art historians (the Art Museum's drawings curator Ann Percy is one), artists, critics, artist-critics, collectors of Castle's work, and a number of his relatives.
Rather than providing a structured story line that logically establishes the basic phases of the artist's life and career, Wolf relies entirely on quotations from his interviewees. Sometimes the quotes advance the story by providing essential biographical facts, but sometimes they don't.
This is a common failing of contemporary documentary. Whether Wolf chose this strategy or was just too close to the material to realize that he was making his audience labor to fill in the blanks is hard to determine. But the effect is particularly curious, given that the foundation says it made the film for a general audience; an art-savvy audience would have better luck with it.
The multiple-narrator scheme might have worked better if there were fewer people in the film, and if those who were included had been allowed to speak more than two or three sentences at a time. One notices particularly that Wolf seems to have interviewed every living relative. Perhaps this was smart politics, but not all the relations make substantive contributions. One who does is grandniece Pamela Kester, who recalls that Castle "always smelled like soot."
At least James Castle: Portrait of an Artist isn't so long that Wolf's mosaic approach becomes intolerable. The life is truly inspirational, and the art can be sublime. Re-creating the life of a mute, illiterate artist who has been dead for more than three decades is a daunting challenge. The life must emerge in the art, and in this film it does so eloquently, if too often in fast-forward.