WRESTLING THE ANGEL
An Artist's Passage – A Poetic Documentary
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Director's Statement
In this film, a fine artist seeks and gains wisdom as she is transformed by a life-threatening crisis. She allows us to be up-close to her emotions and point of view – through her stories and animations from Aesop’s fables, her artwork, and her insights about life. The first few minutes of the film establishes her resumé – some life history, beautiful paintings, tilework and book illustrations – but quickly you realize there is an ocean of thought and emotion beneath the surface. Before she goes deep, she hints at underlying meanings in her craft – how colors painted on ceramic tiles transform into other colors when fired – like our own emotional transformations when we go through the fire of life, how she layers oil paint to achieve depth and bring everyday objects to become luminous and almost spiritual, awakening our desire to be close to an underlying beauty and truth.
There’s a deep ocean beneath the surface of life. It sustains Ann when she is diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. Her reaction is unexpected, shocking even. She determines not to fight cancer but to be courteous as though it were a houseguest who has worn out its welcome and will ask it simply to move on. Ultimately her doctors do fight the disease with chemotherapy but Ann’s attitude, going in, is remarkable and positive and so different from the panic or pessimism many of us might feel if we suddenly had such a diagnosis. Ann’s emotions sometimes can be troubled, like the surface of the ocean but also like the ocean, her attitude and sensibility are deep and self-sustaining,
And throughout, her artwork is as charming as it is beautiful – warm, sometimes whimsical, always deeply welcoming, like a good friend!
Discovering and being who you really are is an important theme of her stories, including the Aesop fable about the grasshopper who prefers to create art and play the violin all summer in contrast to the ants who spend their lives gathering food to prepare for winter. Ann favors grasshoppers even though they die early. Transformation through struggle is another theme. One story is Jacob wrestling the angel which helped spark the idea for this film. In the story – as Ann tells it – Jacob wrestles a mysterious assailant all night until dawn. Jacob won’t let the assailant leave until he gives a blessing to Jacob. The assailant is a divine being and its blessing is to give Jacob a crippling blow, and then give Jacob a new name, ‘Israel’ which means ‘struggles with god’, both which cause Jacob to start on a different and eventually meaningful new path in life.
“We concentrate on the wrestling part," recounts Ann, “but the fact that we are granted meaning tells me that whatever we encounter in our lives that is a struggle, or don’t even feel you can face it, at the end of it when dawn comes, that meaning, that blessing, is waiting for you. And knowing that really helped me get through my treatment.”
A seashell swirling in the ocean both starts and ends the film, emblematic of the mystery and transient nature of life. It travels from the waters to Ann’s desk where she paints it from different angles into a single painting. She then sends it back into the ocean, acknowledging its impermanence, knowing there’s no control over what fate has in store, except to face fate with as positive and creative approach as possible... “One brushstroke at a time, one conversation, one seashell at a time” as the film reviewer Farwa Ali wrote, in Eat Drink Films.
Jonathan Villet