Charles Atlas
The dancer and choreographer Michael Clark in Charles Atlas’s film “Hail the New Puritan” (1986).
Artists usually don’t enjoy watching movies about other artists. They tend to find them too melodramatic or too didactic to capture the reality of life in the studio, the endurance required for an artistic breakthrough or the thrill that comes from finding creative kin. “Most artist films are a joke,” says Marilyn Minter, noting that the 1965 critical hit “The Agony and the Ecstasy” stars the 6-foot-3 Charlton Heston as the 5-foot-2 Michelangelo. But there are exceptions. To compile an eclectic list of good and emotionally true examples, we asked eight artists and two dealers to share the films about artists they not only like but return to again and again.
“Hail the New Puritan,” Charles Atlas, 1986 P. Staff, 38, artist
When I was a teenager, after midnight, Channel 4 would show experimental films. I’m pretty sure that’s how I first saw “Hail the New Puritan” by Charles Atlas, this [partly fictionalized] story about Michael Clark, who was the hot bad-boy twink of postmodern dance in London. The film shows a day in the life as Clark and his company prepare for a new show. It’s an incredible snapshot of that period of British history and such an amazing pseudo-documentary, with everyone playing themselves at a remove in this way that’s a real hallmark of films about artists. Watching people in their twenties with their asses out, living in a warehouse in East London, doing ballet to [the post-punk band] the Fall — if you’re a teenager, I can’t imagine anything better.
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