Director: Sacha Hulsebosch
Writer: Sacha Hulsebosch
Running time: 37mins
Dancing about architecture… writing about music… filming the visual arts. How do you make great cinema from mostly inert objects that are fixed in place on the walls and floors of art galleries?
An idiosyncratic but wildly successful approach, which I reviewed for IFL, was taken by the German artist Errkaa in their short film, Das Kulturgesprach im Radio – turning the delivery of a piece of their artwork into a delirious noir road movie. Sacha Hulsebosch instead opts for a more conventional art documentary format with Emerge: The creative journey of visual artists – talking heads and footage of art works.
Hulsebosch worked in television in the Netherlands before moving to Australia – Emerge is their second film shot in their new country. The subject of the movie is NotFair – an art fair that has been running in Melbourne for the last fifteen years or so. The conceit of the story line is that NotFair is an alternative to conventional art fairs. The director gives us two explanations for Notfair’s alternative status. NotFair has a curator, presumably to provide a theme, as opposed to simply being a random assemblage of art for sale, but it also aims to provide opportunities for artists outside the mainstream of the local art scene.
A major problem which I had with the movie is the opening ten minutes or so – they are perhaps the most boring minutes of cinema that I have watched in my time as an IFL reviewer. The time is taken up with talking heads describing the process of setting up an art fair. Starting with this, if it was to be included at all, was not a great idea. For anyone not involved in the art ‘industry’ the subject matter is utterly tedious – akin to being forced to watch a discussion on how to set up a successful dental hygiene practice, or a successful management consultants’ conference.
In their director’s statement, Hulsebosch writes of their commitment to social change and of reaching a broad audience. However, I am reasonably certain that only a handful of people with an especial commitment to NotFair would have actually made it through the opening section alive.
I whiled away the tedium by musing on the extraordinary choices middle aged arts academics make when choosing their eyewear, and whether Melbourne opticians have a dedicated ARTISTS range.
But your indefatigable IFL always makes it through to the end. And I am glad that I did because in the last two-thirds Emerge comes to life – the director actually spends time showing us individual art works and the featured artists talking about their work.
I was impressed by the quality of the artwork. I enjoyed Chelsea Lehmann’s portraits that ambitiously attempt to subvert the male gaze in particular. In the filming of the artists, the director comes across as empathic and draws out interesting responses as to how the works were created.
In this section, Hulsebosch does a fine job of picturing what comes across as an amiable group of people working to produce art – some of which is very good indeed. However, the director is less successful in making us, the cinema audience, wonder why we should be remotely interested in NotFair – the movie gives us no universal conclusions that we might draw from the particulars of the Melbourne art world.
The movie makes a huge deal of NotFair’s uniqueness for an art fair as to having a curator yet at no time do we get an explanation as to why that is so important and what the curator actually does. I assume that there are advantages for the artists in collaborating with a curator as to where their work is displayed rather than it being randomly displayed as in a conventional art fair – but the director fails to enlighten us on this.
The director’s claim that NotFair provides an opportunity for neglected artists comes across as somewhat spurious. From what we are shown of the featured artists’ work nothing they produced seems especially outré – Lehmann’s work would walk into most galleries worldwide. One beautiful work where an artist reconditioned a large scientific apparatus plugged a Geiger counter into it and the joined it up to a bunch of bananas to measure their radioactivity might pose problems due to its weight but even this, I could imagine being accommodated in my local art gallery. The explanatory failure led me to conclude the posited exclusion was a promotional device and the real cause was fissures within the local art world.
Note to the director. If you are going to tell in a film, you have an obligation to also show. When one of the talking heads discusses how NotFair managed to mount an exhibition during a brief break from Covid-19, they tell us about a blockbuster lightshow they mounted to accompany it. The director then shows us a still photograph looking into the gallery from some distance outside it of what indeed appears to be an astounding lightshow underway. The shot is bound to piss the audience off – if you have not got any live footage to the event do not tell us how wonderful it was. In a sense the shot acts as a metaphor for the movie’s ultimate failure – we are told that something wonderful is going on, but we can only glimpse it for a single frame.
Tonally this has been a harsh review, particularly for a film by someone starting out in Indy cinema but Emerge is a deeply frustrating movie to watch. The director gets a lot right – the production values – the editing and cinematography are fine, and they show great empathy in portraying individuals – but they fail to convince us as to why we should be interested in NotFair as a specific phenomenon or as a unique way of doing art. For future work, I would suggest Hulsebosch not assume the inherent interest of that broad audience in whatever social group they happen to be working with.
An aside for IFL readers, if you happen to be in London this summer, do try and catch the Edward Burra exhibition at Tate Britain. I was lucky enough to go last week, and it is truly something. The monumental pieces on the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and World II will stay with me forever – they are right up there with Goya’s dark sketches and with Guernica. Burra was wracked with rheumatoid arthritis and could only paint in watercolour. For the large works he had to stick pieces of paper together to assemble – they are a hymn to the triumph of art over pain. Famously reticent, Burra in his only filmed interview memorably told his interlocuter – I never tell anybody anything.
Maybe fine advice for anyone working in the visual arts – maybe even for the exhibitors at NotFair.