Anyone who has ever spent time with Mary Heilmann in her Bridgehampton or Tribeca studio, or anywhere she might be, has likely been entranced by at least one of her tales of life in the art world. Although her paintings are abstract, her stories are rich with detail, witty rejoinders, and persons and places of interest.
To make "Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads, and Hallucinations," a documentary about her life and career being shown at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Matt Creed relied on her gifts as a raconteur as well as her previous effort to tell that story in the form of an artist's book, "The All Night Movie," which she made in 1999.
The director said the book, a kind of stream-of-consciousness collage of art, photo images, text, lyrics, and other elements, was his first real introduction to the artist, despite some familiarity with who she was and her work. "When I read the text, I was just immediately hooked into who Mary was as an artist. And I related to her struggles navigating the art world and her approach to making art."
The artist and filmmaker met through a friend of his who worked at Lisa Spellman's 303 Gallery, which has represented Ms. Heilmann for many years. Ms. Heilmann saw his first feature film, "Lily," which was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013, and told him she really enjoyed it.
In their early discussions, she said she wanted to make her book into a movie. "And I said, 'Well, I don't know if there's a way to make this into a narrative, but I think I could take this book and bring it to life.' So it kind of just started with that," Mr. Creed said. That was back in 2014. He used the book as an outline for the film and started shooting right away.
But he didn't spend all of that time on the film; for two years, beginning in 2017, he had to step away. He said he didn't know if he could do it. "I had to reset and . . . make sure that I could do Mary justice. And then when the pandemic hit, I said, 'All right. Let me dive into this.' "
Some nine years later, the book's effect on the movie is palpable. There are no talking heads in this documentary. Ms. Heilmann -- her voice and her artwork -- is not only the subject, but the star. Incorporating archival footage and illustrative images, it presents a meandering biography, nonlinear and not chronological. The story rolls in and out as it needs to, like the perfect wave captured while she is walking on the beach near her house at low tide. The blustery late-day sun and winter light in the background clearly infuse her work, as illustrated by a painting she works on in a subsequent scene.
Footage of her speaking in her studios, at the installation of her exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin, and in Kathan Brown's Crown Point Press print shop in San Francisco is interspersed with grainy shots of the sea, cars, roads, or other things expressed summarily in her artwork. Relevant paintings are shown with the footage, along with voice-overs the filmmaker captured from recordings of early conversations.
No one is there to tell you how great she is, but "there could have been a lot, absolutely. I could have interviewed some pretty incredible artists that are huge fans of Mary's that have been around her from the beginning," Mr. Creed said. "But she didn't want to do that and neither did I. I don't really like those kinds of documentaries."
With an opening sequence that shows one of Ms. Heilmann's paintings selling for close to $1 million, a record high for the artist at auction, and discussions of her representation by 303 and Hauser & Wirth, a gallery behemoth with locations all around the world, including Southampton (where a few of her paintings are in a group show through Saturday), the film takes her pre-eminence as understood.
Such an auction opening has become common enough in art documentaries to be a trope, typically serving as an imprimatur of the artist/subject's inherent value as measured in dollars, euros, and yen. Yet here, it takes an immediate left turn. In that same sequence, Ms. Heilmann dismisses the hype and vacuity of the art market, addressing art's commodification in recent decades and how it affects her as she's working.
"It always comes into your brain about selling the art. Especially now in this art world," she said. Understanding that your creations are a "marketable commodity . . . is something we just were grossed out by" back in the 1960s.
She was in art school then, where "a very pure attitude toward making art" reigned. "You never heard about the value of art. Even when you were looking at medieval masterpieces in art history class, the value never came up. Cultural value, beauty, purity, aesthetics, yes. But economics? No."
The auction footage was added late in the production and was the subject of some debate. It was put in because "she immediately follows it up by distancing herself from it, but also says that success enters into your train of thought and has an effect on how you make work," Mr. Creed noted.
Throughout the film, "she says a lot of things that artists think but don't say out loud," he said. "Young artists have watched this film and that's kind of the takeaway," and it's important for them to hear, he added.
"The experience that I wanted to create with the film was very much something very singular," he said. Its approach "is just Mary being Mary . . . and just keeping everything about her, and on her. The idea was to make it like you're just sitting there with her in her studio, listening to her tell her stories for the duration of the film."
For all of its artistry, the film is an important document of an artist who came to maturity in the art world when it was still a boy's club, and how she found her own path through abstract painting, as well as her relationships along the way.
"She's very savvy and very amused by it all. . . . She's never really compromised who she is," Mr. Creed said. It allows her to approach the art world as part of it and also apart from it. "I think she's kind of a punk at the end of the day. . . . She's very sarcastic, but in a very playful kind of way."
"Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads, and Hallucinations" will be shown Monday at the East Hampton Cinema at 11:45 a.m.
