R B KITAJ UK | 1967 | black and white, colour | 19 mins
Credits: Production Company: Maya Film Productions Ltd Sponsor: Arts Council of Great Britain Director: James Scott Cinematographer: Adam Barker Mill Interlocutor: Christopher Finch Editor: Adam Barker Mill, James Scott Titles: Sam Lord Music: Five Pieces for Orchestra, op10 by Anton Webern Painting: Juan de la Cruz, courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London
“The American artist RB Kitaj, who came to England to study on the GI bill, first to Oxford and then to the Royal College of Art in London, is another subject. Talented and painfully sincere, the controversial Kitaj, who like Hockney passionately espoused representational art, could not help his fancy verbal pyrotechnics, obscuring rather than explicating his artistic passions. Kitaj was hardly ever filmed: made in 1967, the sheer rarity of his presence here makes Scott’s film invaluable.”
This is one of my favorites, although at the time, it did not get the attention that was given to my other artist films. The elements of Kitaj which I liked so much were in fact the elements that made viewers of the film at the time have problems with it. Much as today, sixty years on, the word used to describe his oeuvre is obsucurantist and this may well be one of the reasons that Kitaj decided to leave London and come to Los Angeles. For me, the film’s focus on the didacticism of the artist was essential in showing his character and expressing the contradictions thrown up between an ‘art politics’ and a social conscience, which were an essential part to the understanding of the painter. Although politically conscious, Kitaj’s commitment to Modernism, his mastery of draughtsmanship, printmaking, his aesthetic sensitivity and the complexity of his compositions often would obfuscate the message, be it the Vietnam war, racism, or feminism.
Yet for me, these inherent contradictions were what actually made Kitaj such an important artist to look at. The fact that these contradictions fed directly into the way that the film was distributed, or rather censored by the English Arts Council and stamped with an embargo shortly after it was made only speaks to how clearly the film touched on a corporate nerve. In the late sixties for a film on an artist to be officially and secretly banned sends a chilling message. Now after 50 years the film is at last available to audiences.
