|
Invisible to Visible — in Zero to Sixty
By Julie Checkoway, director of Waiting for Hockney
(from the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival)
I never thought I would make a film about the desire to know God, but I seem to have done so. I don't mean God-God, some easy and precise monotheistic deity, but rather the object of an abiding desire in ourselves to connect with something greater than ourselves. I thought I was making a documentary about something entirely different.
Waiting for Hockney is less a film about art - its ostensible topic - than about spiritual matters both personal and cultural. Billy Pappas, the working-class protagonist of the film, is our era's anti-anti-hero. He spends nearly 10 years at work, alone, on a single pencil, egged on by an eccentric group of supporters, and believing that he is a revolutionary. He wants to make a portrait as bombastic as a live performance, a portrait to rival Dürer, Ingres and da Vinci. He wants to make the old masters, as he says, look at his work and say, "Holy shit! You drew that?" |
Billy is a consummate dreamer and a strangely recognizable American original. He is a dreamer who works for years in shadowed obscurity to achieve, in the end - he hopes - something Olympian and ethereal, through work that is meant to be more than the sum of its parts and days. Billy's concrete goal is to obtain an audience with the famous artist David Hockney, a man whom Billy believes can help give him access to the art world. That has been a locked door to which Billy has not yet been able to find the elusive combination. Specifically, Billy wants David Hockney to see the remarkable portrait on which Billy has spent nearly 10 years, and, after doing so, to "make a phone call to a man" who will be in a position to introduce Billy's work to the world.
But if Billy is an original, he is also an archetype: Horatio Alger, Willy Loman. And his Hockney is God, Godot, Guffman.
And we are also Billy. And we are also waiting.
In Billy Pappas's story is contained the archetypal story of the very era in which we now live, a time when our generation and the one coming up next hardly know how to fathom what a meaningful life might consist of. In that kind of milieu - with no road map - sometimes the easiest route is to abandon reason and follow fantasy. Fame - it could redeem us.
Abandoned, we dream of being found. Alone, we dream of being bonded together with not just one other person but a host of others who will, perhaps, forever keep us company; an audience of watchers. Silent, we dream of having a voice, singing loudly and being cheered. That's the American Idol culture we have come to live in. Billy Pappas isn't auditioning for "American Idol" and he is in no way a crass or simple thinker, but he is a man of our time. He is us. |
He wants what so many of us want, achingly: to be lifted out of our quotidian existence into something grand. To labor quietly until someone comes along and taps us on the shoulder, saying, "I've been watching you. I've been watching you for a long time, and I can see - even if others can't - that you are a person of substance." We want our piece of art to be seen. We want our film to be seen. We want our souls to be seen. And that desire is so unreal and unobtainable, unsustainable: to go from invisible to visible in zero to sixty. As if there were really a way for that to happen.
Images: (top) Billy Pappas, (middle) neck, (bottom) Director Julie Checkoway; courtesy of the filmmaker.
Waiting for Hockney screens at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival (click for times and ticket information). Festival runs April 23-May 4. |
|
|
