The Woodmans

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Suicide

What caused Francesca Woodman, a prodigiously gifted 22-year-old photographer to throw herself out of a window in 1981 The daughter of George and Betty Woodman, respected artists who have been married for more than 50 years, she killed herself only five days before the most important show of her father’s career, a group exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Francesca became posthumously famous for her ghostly black-and-white pictures of herself, often nude, her face blurred so that she seemed to merge with the objects around her. Those pictures, augmented by shots of her journal on which quotations from it are printed (“I am so vain and I am so masochistic — how can they coexist?” reads one) run through “The Woodmans” like a countermovie. This sketchy anthology of her work is a silent rebuke to the homey atmosphere of the rest of the film, in which the surviving Woodmans tell their story to the camera. (The interviewer is unheard.)

Francesca’s pictures and quotations evoke an ambitious, driven young woman impatient for recognition, who is cursed with that volatile combination common to artists: a voracious ego and a fragile psyche. The word frequently used to describe her is “intense.” Making herself the center of so much of her work could only magnify that intensity. As a precociously brilliant student at the Rhode Island School of Design, she arrived there already knowing exactly what she wanted to accomplish. One fellow student recalls that she exuded a “rock star quality.”

Her story suggests the perils of becoming the subject of your work. As long as your creative fires burn, you are propelled forward. But if you are consuming yourself in the process, what is left when the fire begins to sputter?

That her posthumous celebrity now overshadows the reputations of her parents is inescapably rankling to her father, although he acknowledges her superior talent. If she hadn’t been so gifted, he confesses, he would resent it. In an earlier scene he says her photos “made my work look kind of stupid.” After her death he took up photography, and using young female models, made work that closely resembled his daughter’s.

Francesca’s tragedy casts a shadow over the larger portion of the film, in which the parents recall their family history, with Francesca’s older brother, Charles, a video artist, offering only a few disengaged comments.

George is a dour, prickly man born in 1932 in New Hampshire to an “ultra-WASP” family (his words) that never accepted Betty because she was a Jew. Their love began as the attraction of opposites; he found her “exotic.”

A stern believer in the Puritan work ethic, George states his belief that you should go to your studio every day, and if inspiration doesn’t arrive, “sharpen pencils” until it does. Art to him is an almost sacred calling. As you watch scenes of the parents at work and play in their homes in Italy and the United States, their shared creativity is obviously the glue that has kept them together.

After settling in Boulder, Colo., the couple never consciously decided to have children. These “gift calamities,” as George describes the appearances of Charles and Francesca, just occurred. Betty, two years older than George, devoted her energy to making “useful functional objects.” After Francesca’s death, Betty rejected mere functionality. She is shown in the film working on an enormous, brightly colorful installation for the new United States Embassy in Beijing. The most frequent comment that she hears about her work is that it makes people feel good.

Would “The Woodmans” have been made if Francesca hadn’t killed herself? Probably not. Does it exploit her tragedy? Of course it does, but not in a cheap, sensationalistic way.

If its message can be boiled down to one sentence, it is George’s stoic observation: “There is a psychic risk in being an artist.”

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