ALLEN GINSBERG AND JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT

The Sundance Film Festival opened with a Howl. A sold-out house applauded the premiere of the film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, which turned the clock back to the 1950s, when Allen Ginsberg published the experimental poem of the same name, and subsequently weathered a trial in San Francisco on charges of obscenity. If there is one theme that stands out at Sundance 2010, it is cultural archaeology. A biography such as Howl, innovative in its blend of live action and animation, celebrates cultural heroes, something Sundance has always done.Other films re-examine cultural figures. Tamra Davish’s documentary The Radiant Child revisits the life of the 1980s graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose career soared and crashed before he died of a drug overdose at the age of 27 in 1988. (The writers who died young in Ginsberg’s crowd survived until at least their forties.)The son of a Haitian accountant, the Brooklyn-born Basquiat gave a film interview in 1982, when he was 22. The conversation became a 21-minute film that has circulated around museums and cinema societies.
At the time, Basquiat was a rising star in the art world, noted for his ascent from street art to the rarefied galleries of Soho in New York. Today’s interest in Basquiat is logical enough. Collectors are vying to acquire his paintings of skulls, dogs and crowns, one of which set an auction record for the artist in 2008 at $14.6 million (Dh54m) – higher than the prices for paintings by his peers such as Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring. Now an ensemble of interviews with Basquiat and those contemporaries has been assembled into a portrait of his life and times.

The National
Jan 29 2009