love and art, 2006
SYNOPSIS
'Love and art'- Fictional Documentary/Biography
Part diary, part documentary, part tragic tale, this film follows a couple from Park Slope, Brooklyn — an artist, his muse wife, and their two small children — through their neighborhood and into the wide world of art. Through recordings of themselves and their travels in the contemporary international art world, we discover the intimacy of love, art, life and everything in between. A rare film about art that is itself art.
'Amazing and wonderful... one of the most intimate films I have ever seen yet underlined with strength and ballast.'
Alan Berliner
filmmaker, three time Emmy award winner
'This is the rare film about art that is itself art. The lover becomes love, and the artist becomes art. This film is not really about either love or art. It is love; it is art. '
Daniel Coffeen
author
Marc Lafia’s film, ‘Love and Art’
by Daniel Coffeen for ‘JoyfulComplexity’
There are at least two threads that run through Marc Lafia’s film, ‘Love and Art’. On the one hand, there's a love story, a sensual, sentimental tale of two lovers. On the other hand, there's the world of art: artists, openings, museums, seeing and being seen.
These two threads ‘love and art’ are absolutely distinct and simultaneously one and the same thing. Both are forces that act upon us just as we act upon them: we don't quite choose to love just as we don't quite choose to make art. And yet to say that we do not choose is not right, either. Love
and art happen. They are forces that take us up but that don't exceed us per se: we become their equal. The lover becomes love, is love; the artist becomes art, is art.
And both birth˜and are birthed by˜a supreme generosity. It is a generosity that this film not only captures but performs. For this film is itself supremely generous. It never seeks to reduce the world of love or the world of art; it is never didactic. And even when letting academics speak, it is never academic. Rather, it indulges its world˜love, art, and the viewer alike.
The two threads of love and art find themselves taken up by an eye that sees multiply, that allows both love and art to go as they go, in all of their texture, ambience, play, ambiguity, pleasure. This film makes us privy to the clamor of gallery voices, the not-so-subtle scent of cheese meeting not-too-expensive wine, the pitter patter of museum shoes, the intent looks of befuddlement, interest and boredom, the whispers of tongues, the grace of a metered caress, the drive to live well.
This is the rare film about art that is itself art. The camera here does not just capture the world; it makes the world by letting it happen in all of its teeming multiplicity. Just as the lover becomes love, and the artist becomes art, this film is not really about either love or art. It is love; it is art.