DOKU.ARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
19.09.–14.10.2012

Without Gorky

Acts of suicide are notoriously inconclusive. When the abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky hanged himself in 1948, at the age of 46, it opened up rifts in his immediate family circle that have lasted to the present day. Who could blame his much younger American wife Mougouch from wanting to distance herself as swiftly as possible from the tragedy? And yet neither of her now grown-up daughters, Maro and Natasha, can quite forgive what they claim to be the callousness that their mother displayed in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Over 60 years later, the daughter of one of the sisters (and by the same token granddaughter of the artist) revisits the complications of the trauma in a bid to find definitive closure. Cosima Spender’s beautiful and elegiac film accompanies her mother and her aunt on a journey of exploration that takes us from elegant Manhattan townhouses to the shores of Lake Van, near the Armenian border of Turkey, unearthing many psychic secrets along the way, and demonstrating, almost casually, that in the right, sensitive hands, documentary is among the most powerful tools we possess for interpreting the work of an artist.