Word: antonios
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...What De Antonio's film fails to do above all is to provide through the interviews discussion of the reasons that artists have chosen to make their paintings this way. And to have done that would also have meant to depict the painters themselves in greater depth...
None of the sixties painters shown in Emile de Antonio's curious new film, Painters Painting, has the uniqueness, the personal elan, or the tragic fascination to foster any myth like those Pollock became. Painting has grown more varied since those days, and its leadership has spread out among a number of men and movements. But most importantly, the kind of abstraction which Pollock was instrumental in starting produces paintings before which even the painter himself seems a stranger...
What Painters Painting actually shows is mostly painters talking, and talking even less profoundly than might have been expected. De Antonio, who created Milhouse, a pastiche of old newsreels about Yorba Linda's favorite son, seems qualified to make the current film chiefly by his acquaintances with many of the painters featured, who from time to time address him affectionately as "De." Whatever unkind things might have been said in this space about the documentaries of Marcel Ophuls, De Antonio's interviewing technique clearly demonstrates how much Ophuls has in fact achieved. There are long pauses, inane phrases left hanging...
...this would suggest that the return of abstract expressionism, or the arrival of its offspring, is in the offing, and that the artist as personality may be about to emerge again from behind the anonymity of his work. Still--and De Antonio can't fail to show this much--there is a certain incongruity between say, the spare stripes or chevrons of Kenneth Noland and the explanations the artist delivers in a North Carolina drawl. Or, equally incongruous, the contrast between Frank Stella--sitting on the floor of his studio, dressed in an old sweat shirt and looking...
HILLES LIBRARY. Painters Painting, by Emile de Antonio, New England premiere of a full-length film on American painting, reception with director immediately after the showing, March 2, 8, $1--sponsored by South House...