Barry Avrich

  • The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret (2018)

    The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Surely, I can’t be the only one who’s uneasy watching ripped-from-the-headlines crime documentaries? Oh, I’m fine with seeing powerful Hollywood figures finally facing justice for their crimes and terrible actions. And I’m fine with victims telling us their stories—truth will out, and truth cleanses. What I’m not too enthusiastic about is the idea of a documentary produced so soon after the events—before the verdicts, before the dust falling down, before being able to take a look at all of it and extract lessons and conclusions from it all. Veteran documentarian Barry Avrich takes on a topic that’s both touchy and obvious in The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret—starting with Harvey Weinstein in exploring a culture of sexual abuse within Hollywood. I say “obvious” because it’s been impossible to take in entertainment news since 2017’s #MeToo hashtag and ignore that several high-profile actors, directors, comedians and producers have been accused of sexual harassment and worse. Barely a few months later, The Reckoning is jockeying for relevance, with newspaper headlines still revealing details about the many accusations and ongoing investigations. At the same time, it’s a live wire of a topic—it illustrates not only the criminal actions of the accused, but also the bad behaviour of those around them that enabled, tolerated or ignored the sordid actions of the aggressors. But what we get is a sketch of what will eventually become the final story: As of this writing, Weinstein has just been convicted in New York state, and awaits another trial in California—meanwhile, other investigations are still pending on other accused abusers. As to what this means in general, we don’t know: the optimists believe this will help purge Hollywood of its offenders, while cynics state that the rot will always be there. Whoever’s right will only be determined much later, possibly in a documentary with more facts and conclusions at its disposal. Until then, The Reckoning, even as good as it is, feels like a newspaper—vital upon publication, but increasingly obsolete every following day.

  • Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World (2017)

    Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2020) I don’t know a lot about art, but I have vivid memories of reading Don Thompson’s The 12 Million Dollars Stuffed Shark and look at that—he’s one of the several experts interviewed by director Barry Avrich in Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World. It’s a documentary that gives us a snappy but fascinating 94-minute overview of the modern art world, with a heavy emphasis on the eye-watering prices that some of the best-known artists fetch. You can draw a fairly clear line between the money people and the art people throughout the film as it studies various components of that universe. The money people shrug and consider art as possession (although they acknowledge that regulating the market is practically impossible when every piece has its own distinctive history), while the artistic people are a bit embarrassed by the amount of attention that the money brings to the field. Still, there are tons of great shots here, an overview of many major players in the field and a timeline of significant events in the past few years. Blurred Lines doesn’t package everything in a transcendent story (Avrich’s subsequent Made You Look is better as a visual arts documentary) but it’s a rather good overview of the subject—frankly, I was disappointed that it had to end, because I probably could have enjoyed 15–30 minutes of it.

  • Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (2020)

    Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2020) My knowledge of visual art is pitiful, but I’m always enthralled with books, articles and documentaries about the modern art world. While Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art focuses on the Art fraud scandal that led to the closure of New York City’s venerable Knoedler art gallery, it’s also a lens through which we can gauge the dynamics and the insanity of the contemporary art world, where fakes may be so rampant that people choose not to ask too many questions. Meticulously, director Barry Avrich introduces what we need to know in order to understand this incredible story, then carefully allows talking heads to explain and comment on the multi-year fraud, all the way from a talented Chinese forger to unethical middlemen to celebrated dealer Ann Freedman, who convinced herself that what was too good to be true… was, in fact, not true. It’s quite a feat to describe all of this in scarcely more than 90 minutes, but Made you Look also wants to explain what happened, bringing in an expert on confidence games to explain how these outlandish schemes work from a psychological viewpoint. There’s even some fun to be had, as two heavyweight art figures start contradicting themselves in separate interviews, edited rapid-fire. I strongly suspect that much of my fascination with art forgeries is pure schadenfreude at seeing so-called smart and rich (never forget the rich) people being fooled like rubes—greed is not specific to lower classes, explicitly says the film. It also doesn’t help that art investment is, frankly, a status symbol that is almost entirely incomprehensible to IKEA-is-good-enough rubes like me. Experts being fooled, institutions being brought down, people fired—if you’re looking for a happy ending here, there’s little to be found: nearly everyone who was forging and misrepresenting has fled the United States, were indicted, or had lawsuits brought against them. Stepping away from the story a bit, it’s striking that it is, again, is an indictment of untruth in the information age—as with so many other things, people lying and getting rewarded for it at a time where we expect much better. As for the conclusion of Made You Look—of course the guilty rich go free and unpunished.