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“Without Gorky” a documentary about the family of Arshile Gorky
made by his granddaughter Cosima Spender was shown this past Thursday at The
Wasserman cinematheque at Brandeis to a large crowd mostly of Boston Armenians.
Cosima was present and did a Q&A after the film. Gorky committed suicide in
1948, when his daughters Maro and Natasha were still children. The story is
about his looming presence in their lives to this day. This is a story about
victims and victimizers and unresolved guilt. It has much in common in its
format with Dominic Dunne’s TV “who done it” series of the crimes of the rich
and famous “Power Privilege and Justice”. The film’s premise is that something
horrible if not quite a crime happened and seventy years after the event, the
victims are interviewed and fingers are pointed at the guilty. Like a jury
taken to the scenes of the crime, the mother, daughters, Matthew Spender and
Cosima from behind the camera visit the locations where Gorky and Agnes had
lived from the Union Sq studio in New York to the Sherman Ct farmhouse, where
Gorky committed suicide and finally, in at attempt to rise above the horizon of
the family drama, they all make a
visit to the remnants of Khorkom near Lake Van in eastern Turkey where Gorky
was born. The documentary ricochets between the lofty and the petty and at
times with the way it piques our love of gossip and voyeurism it might easily be
serialized into a reality TV show like that of another metis Armenian family,
the Kardashians.
The victims are Maro, Natasha and Agnes, although Agnes gets
her share of criticism as a victimizer as well. She is a still stunning woman who radiates a kind of
aristocratic hauteur, even in her late 80’s. Cosima, who hints at a not so easy
childhood as the daughter of Maro, appears to be unscathed enough to be the
disinterested observer of the crime. I think she made this film as a catharsis
to get over Gorky’s svengalian power to define the life of her mother and aunt.
The film could have easily been entitled ”Getting Over Gorky”. Both Maro and Natasha
seem damaged to varying degrees psychologically in particular Natasha*. Just a
toddler when Gorky committed suicide, she has no memories of her father, although
upon a return to the Sherman CT farmhouse some long repressed memories do resurface. Matthew Spender who wrote a book on Gorky interjects insights about him
in the detached manner of an art historian talking about Gorky as the important
art historical figure that he has become. At one point on a tour of Union Sq he
comments about the way the urban environment inflected his work and at the end at
Lake Van on the manner in which the landscape of his childhood gave him an
endless source of memories and images that would nourish his work as an adult.
The film pointedly reminds us that when the family shared
the same physical space Gorky was an impoverished struggling artist. Family
life was fraught with tension and possibly violence. “Mougouch” the affectionate name Gorky
gave Agnes and which she seems to prefer, had pretty much abandoned any
artistic ambitions to keep Gorky painting. Agnes after Gorky’s suicide put both
daughters in a boarding school for six months to travel around Europe with her
lover and Gorky’s friend Matta. It apparently was more devastating to them than the
loss of their father. In the end it is hard to place any blame on anyone still
alive who lived with Gorky. Gorky’s deteriorating health, his old fashioned
attitude toward women and the years of Agnes’ subservience to his goals finally
absolves her of any guilt of abandoning Gorky before his suicide and her
children for six months after his death, at least to this viewer of the film. The
films strength is that it accepts the messiness of life and love and
eschews the elegiac.
And how does Gorky fare? He is not around to defend himself.
We depend upon the words of Mougouch to know what happened. She describes him as
a “full catastrophe” to use Zorba’s words for marriage. However, what seemed to
hover around the edges of the film to its credit and that transcends the often
pathetic gorging on the reputation of being a “Gorky “ is that something larger
than life happened when Gorky and Agnes met. On the surface he was a handsome
bohemian with a reputation for being an exotic, who would save Agnes from her
predictable destiny as an upright flower of Yankee culture. But beneath the
surface was his history, which she wasn’t prepared for. Gorky was a man with a
destiny that he had to live out. The shared life could not help but be
explosive. On the one hand was a need to work out all the disparate influences
he has absorbed from Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and the Surrealists and that lead
many of his generation to see him as talented but unoriginal. On the other hand
those mysterious years of his childhood are a mystic source that he drinks from for the rest of his life. They are so sacred that he hid them from everyone, including
his wife. It was a sacred font that he has to honor and cherish in the way he
cherished his mother’s memory in that evocative painting he did from the
photograph taken in Armenia.
ADDENDUM#1:
I see in Gorky an example of a shamanic personality that I've witnessed in other Armenian artists, for example Varujan Boghosian and the late photographer Arthur(Harout)Tcholakian. Stories I’ve heard about Saroyan , Gurdgieff and the filmmaker Parajanov seem to point to the reality of an Armenian wizard with a Zorba-like predilection for the unpredictable. They reach beyond the rational to the creative power of the irrational. A quote from Kazantzakis seem apposite here:
I see in Gorky an example of a shamanic personality that I've witnessed in other Armenian artists, for example Varujan Boghosian and the late photographer Arthur(Harout)Tcholakian. Stories I’ve heard about Saroyan , Gurdgieff and the filmmaker Parajanov seem to point to the reality of an Armenian wizard with a Zorba-like predilection for the unpredictable. They reach beyond the rational to the creative power of the irrational. A quote from Kazantzakis seem apposite here:
Alexis Zorba: Damn it boss, I like
you too much not to say it. You've got everything except one thing: madness! A
man needs a little madness, or else...
Basil: Or else?
Basil: Or else?
Alexis Zorba: ...he never dares cut
the rope and be free.
ADDENDUM #2
My great uncle taught Gorky in Boston.Here is the blog on that topic: http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-gorky-connectionmy-great-uncle.html
ADDENDUM #2
My great uncle taught Gorky in Boston.Here is the blog on that topic: http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-gorky-connectionmy-great-uncle.html
addendum #3 Here is a blog on the Armenian as perennial outsider
*
When watching a documentary one is lulled
into the belief that what one sees is fact when it is just part of a storyline. I sensed this when I watched “HarvardBeats Yale 29-29” about the classic game in 1969 where Harvard comes from behind
to tie what looked like a certain loss.( I did attend that game,which claims
twice the number of attendees as seats at Harvard Stadium) The story is based
on interviews with the players about their recollections of the game around 40
years later. Yale player Mike Bouscaren turns his experience of the game into a
transformative story of how he learned to get beyond a grudge match against
Harvard’s Hornblower so as to finally see the opposition’s humanity. It fit
nicely into the background references to the ongoing Vietnam war and the
machismo that lead American into the war. By the same token Natasha’s forlorn
look played into the theme of victim and victimizer and as in Bouscaren’s case in
the end may not be factual.
