February appears to be Artist Suicide Month at the Gene Siskel Film Center. C. Scott Willis’s documentary The Woodmans, which screens daily through February 17, profiles Francesca Woodman, the gifted young New York photographer who leaped from a window to her death in 1981. Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, opening at the Film Center on Friday, uses performance and interview clips to create an autobiography of Spalding Gray, the actor and monologuist who was fished out of the East River in 2004 after he presumably jumped from the Staten Island Ferry. And Kenneth Bowser’s documentary Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, which begins a weeklong run next Friday, February 25, tells the story of the 60s protest singer who hanged himself in 1976. Thank God there are only 28 days this month; I shudder to think what the Film Center might have planned for Leap Year.
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I haven’t seen the Francesca Woodman movie (which Albert Williams praised in these pages last week). But the Phil Ochs and the Spalding Gray movies make for an interesting pair, and not only because of how the men died. The similarities between them are arresting. Both Ochs and Gray were driven performers who wrestled with the parameters of their art. Both were essentially writers, using words to articulate their questions and beliefs. Both were manic depressive, and both suffered serious physical injuries that sent them spiraling into prolonged emotional crises they couldn’t escape. At the same time, their work often contrasts powerfully: Gray focused on the minutiae of his own private experience, peering ever more inward, while Ochs was actively engaged in public life, turning his art into a political act. In the end both men are less interesting for having destroyed themselves than for having created themselves so vividly while they were alive.
There But for Fortune ultimately portrays Ochs as a man broken by the death of 60s utopianism, though I couldn’t be sure whether that was really the truth or just a good rationale for breaking out the usual iconic photographs and talking heads (Tom Hayden, Paul Krassner, Peter Yarrow, Joan Baez). There’s no question that the Democratic convention sent Ochs spinning out of control in the late 60s, even as the counterculture shifted from nonviolence to revolutionary rage. He drank heavily and caroused in third-world hot spots; in 1973 he was robbed and strangled during a visit to Tanzania, sustaining serious damage to his vocal cords. His last big triumph was a May 1974 concert he organized at Madison Square Garden to aid Chilean refugees and expose the CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende; one gets the sense that only a great cause could pull him out of his gathering vortex of alcoholism and depression. Commenting in the documentary, folksinger Judy Henske blames Ochs’s mental collapse on his growing self-absorption: “He stopped looking outward.”
