Elvis replies

I’ve got a huge amount of admiration for Peter Ireland as an art critic. We used to know each other when I began reviewing in Christchurch in the mid-eighties. He used to send me irate letters then and he’s doing it now here – and I’m flattered, for his articles would come close to the top of my list of personal favourites over the last fifteen years of Art New Zealand. I like his erudite and acerbic style (though he has mellowed a little). I like it even when it is me he is roasting, for despite his sneering comments here about the ‘uncritical’ blogosphere he is demonstrating exactly why online dialogue is so good. It’s democratic in a way that hardcopy magazines can never be.

But now he seems to be acting as a spin doctor for the Bieringa film company, or as Leon Narbey’s public relations officer, writing no longer like a critic but as a human interest newspaper reporter, giving us a background story about ‘actual achievers’ instead of looking hard at the film in itself (especially its cinematography) when evaluating my review. Yet he accuses me of not attending to the film as ‘actual subject’.

Ireland, despite his seductive phrasing, entertaining wit and skilled avoidance of using McLeavey's name, is more than a little two-faced. He takes great pleasure in telling me I’m school-masterish (he who started his review with a story about Napoleon before getting round to the ‘critic’s responsibility to the subject’), that I make unsubstantiated assertions (as if his view that ‘the critic’s responsibility is to examine the actual subject’ wasn’t) or unexamined assumptions (unlike say his view that the film subject’s deep privacy compelled his considerable achievements to be kept secondary to his interest potential for the film-maker).

In my article I think I provide more constructive argument than he acknowledges, though his criticism of some of my Popelike pronouncements is correct. However Ireland is too protective of this film crew. My discussion of Narbey’s contribution was insensitively worded perhaps, but he’s not a sacred cow, and even though I could have delicately said ‘Perhaps Leon could have…. etc.’ there was a crudely expressed but valid rationale behind my thoughts. As for the three film references, I set up a scale to get the discussion started. They are not crucial elements in the argument, though I later briefly provide some justification of my negative view of Mita’s Hotere by comparing her with Bieringa in having an agenda, that both these directors are consistently following previous projects, but that his agenda doesn’t dominate over his subject.

Ireland likes to think that only this film-maker can have access to McLeavey’s personality and that the viewer’s knowledge of him is somehow irrelevant, that any personal experience they’ve had with the subject of the film doesn’t count in its evaluation. However it is a documentary we are talking about and it is reasonable to compare points of view, to see if Bieringa’s view and that of a viewer like me coincide or overlap at all. My view is not an imagined one. It is not fantasy. I’ve known McLeavey for many years, not with anything like the depth that Ireland and Bieringa have for sure, but enough to have some clear notions about his personal qualities. My list of questions was not a check list of essential topics but a demonstration of how broad his interests are, and how much richer the film might have been.

That is why Ireland’s repeated view that only the ‘actual subject’ be reviewed is unrealistic. It assumes such a thing is easy to determine, that the filmic experience has clearly definable parameters controlled by the director, and ignores the outside appraisal that any viewer informed about the subject might provide.

I don’t want to get into repeating what I’ve already said in my review about McLeavey’s complexity, his art historical importance or the film’s odd branding, but if Bieringa has the material to make three more films, The Man in The Hat shows he was thinking like a timid Kiwi and not the adventurous Dutchman he could have been. It is true we have a small population base here for such a film’s audience, but the current crowds at the touring Rita Angus exhibition (her second survey) show that audiences do change with skilled marketing, that interest in NZ culture does snowball and people do become educated. It is not a view that this horse ‘was bound to come in second’ that I have argued. It is that track conditions are changing and a better trained nag could have anticipated them.