Sundance. My Kid Could Paint That.

Following up on the Reeler interview with filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev, ST VanAirsdale reports on the story behind My Kid Could Paint That - Marla Olmstead becomes an art world star at the age of 4 - and the controversy that spills over into the making of the documentary as Bar-Lev and Marla's parents fall out.

Updated through 1/27.

"Director Amir Bar-Lev had originally conceived the film as a meditation on modern art, but after 60 Minutes suggested in a report that Marla, who had been compared to artistic lions of abstract art like Kadinsky and Pollock, was being assisted by her father," explains David Carr, the "documentary then morphed into a consideration of where truth comes from and who has custody of a story."

ST VanAirsdale tosses in his own opinion: "It seemed fairly obvious to me just in viewing the pieces on their own (without the commentary from child psychologists, collectors, Charlie Rose and Times art critic Michael Kimmelman) that the paintings in the first Marla Olmstead show boast a complexity and construction that is entirely absent from her subsequent work. Whether it means she changed her style or approach or aesthetic is anybody's guess, but execution of the girl painting on camera in Bar-Lev's film pretty clearly lacks the technical sophistication required to pull off the detail pointed out by observers onscreen."

And here's the indieWIRE interview.

Update, 1/23: the most inadvertently profound and wide-ranging documentary since Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills," announces Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "[W]hen Marla's mother bitterly refers to one development as 'documentary gold,' it's at once a scathing rebuke and an undeniable truth."

Updates, 1/25: As noted, David Carr's blogged about the film; now, he's got a story in the paper: "The film raises questions about the custody of a given story. Very often regular people are enrolled in the effort, but in the end, the author, not the subject, is the owner of the narrative. The choices are his — in the editing, in the framing, in the end."

ST VanAirsdale: "I have doubts that any 'judge for yourself' marketing campaign (already begun at Sundance with the installation of Marla's art at a gallery on Main Street) can trump the resentment of a devastated family. Am I overthinking this, or are we gazing at a blueprint for bad buzz?"

Updates, 1/26: Susan Gerhard at indieWIRE:

Like [Capturing the Friedmans] which welded together a family portrait with essayistic takes on 80s sexual hysteria, My Kid marries its portraiture and investigation to an essay on art. Unlike Friedmans, the filmmaker will not really bend the stick back toward his subjects, but instead offer audiences an insider's criticisms of his own project, approach, and conclusions as an act of intellectual generosity.

[...]

If a "kid" could truly paint a Pollock, in this case a 4-year-old who could be at home on a Gerber label, is a Pollock really worth that much? That question about art, however, leads to another about ethics: If a kid's Pollock was actually created by an adult, is the adult more fraudulent than the too-easily replicable modern art? And that ethical question - which finally sends the director's sympathies away from his subjects - leads to yet another about documentary filmmaking itself: Whose story is it, anyway?

As ST VanAirsdale notes, the film's been picked up for $1 million by Sony Pictures Classics; more from Variety).

Update, 1/27: Eric Kohn in the New York Press:

In some ways, Kid plays as a companion piece to last year's Who the Bleep is Jackson Pollock?, which was about a trucker who navigates the snobbery of the art world trying to sell a supposedly original Pollock work. I'm also reminded of the serialized Jules Feiffer comic about a young opera singer whose parents force him to perform, until he escapes to the streets and has a lot more fun being a regular young boy. Marla's parents don't seem antagonistic, but like everything in the creative community, surface appearances can be misleading. An arts editor for the New York Times explains that Marla is "an innocent," and that's what makes her work popular. "Nobody is saying 'fuck you' in this painting," he says. Unless, of course, they are.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Posted by dwhudson at January 22, 2007 12:50 PM