I Am Woman; See Me Paint

 I had originally planned for the next two films in our series to be a "Blonde Bombshell" double-bill (after all, blonde bombshells can be Ordinary Ladies too). 


That will have to wait, however, because next week's film is going to be a last-minute addition to the line-up, and is included because Margaret Keane died this past Sunday at the age of 94.


Anyone who has had any contact with mid-Century American popular culture will inevitably have encountered Keane's shockingly sentimental, unashamedly cloying paintings. 

All those heart-rending waifs with their enormous eyes became emblematic of kitsch style (and weaponised consumerism) of the 60s and 70s; but anyone living through that period would have known the artist as Walter Keane, not Margaret.


The frankly bizarre (and vaguely pathological) story of Margaret and her husband, who took credit for her paintings and presented them to the world as his own work, became the subject for Tim Burton's 2014 film Big Eyes, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz.


Tim Burton is a long-term admirer (and collector) of Keane's work, and the film he produced is a surprisingly personal and sympathetic telling of her story.  As he later said in an interview:

“In some ways, she’s the quietest feminist: ‘I am woman, you can barely hear me speak.’ But underneath, there was a spark. This person who could easily be thought of a victim, but she wasn’t a victim.”


This is exactly the idea I have been exploring with our current series of Ordinary Ladies: women who are not super-heroes or Saints or femmes fatale, but are (you should pardon the expression) ordinary ladies who are dismissed or underestimated by everyone around them, because they are the people society is designed not to notice.

You may not like Margaret Keane's paintings very much (I confess I don't) but her story is one that fits perfectly into this film series, and showing it now seems a fitting tribute to a woman who had to fight for the spot in 20th Century American culture that should rightly have been hers from the beginning.

We will screen Big Eyes at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 7th of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. 



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