Films

Artist’s statement

Over the last 35 years I have made some 26 films on art. Some films have been initiated by me or requested by an artist (Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Flora Natapoff, “Rachel of the Comédie Française”), some have been commissioned (Manet for the Metropolitan Museum, Pissarro for the Museum of Fine Arts, “Drawing, The Thinking Hand” for the Louvre, “Daumier, One Must be of One’s Time” for the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, “Monet’s Waterlillies” for the Orangerie Museum, and others). I was introduced to filmmaking by Charles Eames who invited me to co-direct two films with him, “Daumier, Paris and the Spectator,” 1976 and “Cézanne, the Late Work,” 1977. From Charles I learned about a way of looking and filming that has greatly influenced me. Over the years I have had other fruitful collaborations, most notably with Richard Leacock and Ned Burgess as cinematographers, and James Rutenbeck and Nicole Serres, as editors. From 1990-1904, Serge Lalou of Les Films d’Ici produced four films I directed in France. My early experience as a dancer has deeply effected my approach to filming art— the sense of movement, of rhythm, of what can be conveyed without words.

ln making films on art, you have to confront the stillness and silence of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and consider what the film might give back that makes such transgressions supportable. l’d like to think that the filmmaker can suggest a way of looking, raise questions by setting works in context, convey something about what the artist thinks and the way he or she works.

Making films on art means interpreting works visually, though often with the use of words, music and sound, which influence the reading. With each film, I try to understand what the artist is doing and how the work is done. I then try to make a film that corresponds to the artist’s work, in terms of emphasis, focus, pacing and rhythm. For example, on the film I made with Hans Namuth on Jasper Johns, we worked with the fragmentary quality of his work by using a text based on Johns’ writing, read by John Cage, who had used a chance procedure to put the words in new combinations, understood in relationship to the shifting positions of certain motifs in Johns’ work. For “Drawing, the Thinking Hand” for the Louvre, the film is constructed like a series of sketches each of which approaches a different aspect of drawing.

My hope is always that my films help open viewers’ eyes to a different way of looking, of understanding art.

Judith Wechsler

Selected Films

Excepts from the following films are available to view online. For a complete list of Judith Wechsler’s films see her CV. If you’d like more information about a particular film you can contact her directly.