Eight years ago, about the same time that Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy was showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in Rome and at the Saint Louis Art Museum, two filmmakers were inspired to take on Artemisia in a documentary.
A Woman Like That, made by Ellen Weissbrod and Melissa Powell, is now complete, and being marketed. Let me say right here that I haven’t seen it, partly because it has had only one showing, at the Berkshire International Film Festival on June 5th and 6th. But I have viewed the trailer they’ve now posted on the website in an effort aimed at getting the 93-minute film shown, in the near term, at museums, universities, festivals and other institutions. Consumer DVDs are a year-plus away.
Artemisia’s merits as a painter are sometimes debated (that’s a self-portrait, as a lute player, at right), but I am among the many who think she was at least as good as many other male painters of her era (who, in contrast, don’t seem to be doubted). Her name is known in part because of her steamy life story, which includes a rape by a friend of her father’s and a resulting public trial.
The film, judging by the website, seems to take on that notion, noting that her achievements as a painter are greater for the difficulty she had being an artist. I’m not so sympathetic to that argument — either she is great or she isn’t.
Artemesia has been the subject of films and novels, but A Woman Like That asserts that it’s different because Weissbrod
merges her own coming of middle-age story with her pursuit of the truths behind the legends of 17th century female painter’s…dramatic art and life. This unconventional but heartfelt hunt upends typical artist biographies and delivers instead a funny, engaging and all together different kind of documentary…a freewheeling tribute to an artist whose own bold life and inspiring message leaps across centuries to speak to us all.
Hmmm. I’m not sure what to make of that without seeing it. But I found the website for the film intriguing — certainly enough to help get the word out. If museums and other art centers want to include film programs among their offerings — and many do — A Woman Like That would seem to fit the bill.