Take a cue from your tulips and get into Netherlands mode for the "Distinctively Dutch" component of this year's Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival, starting tonight with a beautiful 60-minute documentary "Girl With Black Balloons."
First-time director Corinne van der Borch is Dutch but the subject and venue are quintessentially American: She was initially drawn to New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel for its architecture and history but, once there, stumbled upon a greater human fascination in the form of Bettina Grossman.
Bettina had locked herself away there for 40 years in an apartment crammed floor-to-ceiling with magnificent photographs, sculptures, mixed-media constructions and other artworks -- all of her own creation. The photos and slides (full of what she calls "the commonalities" of glass distortion, shadows and reflections) are ineffably stunning in themselves. The series of people reading New York Daily News headlines (shot from her window) are better than any ephemera captured by Warhol.
Bettina's work puts the bulk of other "art" photographers to shame. But so does her ability to articulate and theorize about its value. The body is failing but the mind is sharp as a dagger. "Some of the work is not done," she says -- meaning most of it. "I still have to make order."
The lack of order has caused problems. Her unfinished "museum-in-progress" -- and living conditions -- are so chaotic, she was taken to court to get a guardian.
"Do you feel sorry for yourself?" asks the director.
"No, you do," the prickly Bettina shoots back, much annoyed. "One is enough. Go home now."
As her story unfolds, so does a real friendship with Corinne, who has what Zappa would term a "tweezed" Dutch sensibility. "I lay awake thinking, how can someone live like this?" muses the director, wishing "someone would do something about her messy situation."
A sweet man named Sam Bassett eventually does, becoming the curator for a woman who never had the time or know-how to negotiate the New York gallery system. She isolated herself and sacrificed all family and interpersonal relationships for her work. It was about "contribution, retribution, substitution, destitution and restitution," she says.
Ms. van der Borch neglects to give us the Chelsea Hotel background she originally went to get: How that West 23rd Street landmark in Queen Anne Meets Victorian Gothic style was home and inspiration to countless artists. Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road" and Arthur C. Clarke wrote "2001" there. Dylan Thomas died there in 1953, and Sid Vicious' girlfriend Nancy was stabbed there in 1978. Mark Twain, O. Henry, Tennessee Williams and Jean-Paul Sartre were long-term residents. So were Stanley Kubrick, Edie Sedgwick, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
But her portrait of Bettina's art and soul is full of feisty humor. Her "Girl With Black Balloons" releases the song of a brilliant unsung artist.
"Girl With Black Balloons" is screening tonight only, 7:15 at the Harris Theater, co-presented by the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, followed by a Dutch cheese-and-herring reception, a panel discussion with director Corinne van der Borch and a Skype appearance by artist Bettina Grossman herself. The other Dutch festival films will be reviewed Friday.
First Published: March 29, 2012, 8:00 a.m.
