JOAN MITCHELL: Portrait of an Abstract Painter 1992, 58:00 minutes written, directed, and co-produced by Marion Cajori a Christian Blackwood Co-Production cinematography: KEN KOBLAND editing: GRACE TANKERSLEY interviews by ELIZABETH HESS and MARION CAJORI with: BRICE MARDEN ELIZABETH MURRAY YVES MICHAUD JEAN FOURNIER MARCIA TUCKER among others READ PRESS CLIPS
"The best thing about Marion Cajori's study of Joan Mitchell, the Abstract Expressionist painter who died in October at the age of 66, is the way it makes a complete emotional portrait of the toweringly acerbic artist by interweaving her conversation with shots of works that reveal her vulnerable inner life... The gorgeous shots of Mitchell's canvases, intercut with scenes of Paris and of Vetheuil and its environs, offer eloquent visual testimony to Mitchell's appetite for being in the moment. The canvases have grand chaotic romanticism. While celebrating the physical universe with an ecstatic love of color, they don't shy away from expressing a harsh, feral apprehension of nature and its violence." Steven Holden New York Times, April 14, 1993			"She was one of the first women to provide, as artist, as a painter, a role model. Through the fact that she sustained herself in this brilliant way she made it possible for other people to do that, men and women, who wanted to paint against the grain." Marcia Tucker, Founder, New Museum, NYC "In France I'm an American gestural painter and lyric on top of it, very perjorative, and here I'm Frenchy because I have color and I'm decorative, so you can't win, honey. And on top of it I'm a girl, woman, female...They call me "sauvage" in Europe because I'm direct and I say what I think and you're supposed to be diplomatic and...what I call lying, really." Joan Mitchell
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