SFF NOTES: Winter at Westbeth (2016, Dir. Rohan Spong)

It's probably a marker of how in-tune I was with Rohan Spong's latest documentary feature, Winter at Westbeth, that I started tearing up as soon as the concept at its heart dawned on me. Westbeth, a rent-controlled artist community at the industrial edge of NYC's Greenwich Village, is a place where art is currency and lifeblood. It is a remnant of a time when art and the artistic process was celebrated and supported by the wider community. It is a message in a bottle from a more enlightened time and its inhabitants continue to enrich the world around them, inside and out.

Spong stumbled on this world via his friend (and subject of his previous documentary, All the Way through Evening), Mimi Stern-Wolfe. He visited Westbeth with Mimi, whose partner, poet Ilsa Gilbert, lives and works there. Amazed, he sought out artists to help him capture the community’s living, breathing impact. Ilsa herself provides the voice of Westbeth, not only the film’s illuminating voiceover but the expository voice of the building itself. Pronounced from the community’s rooftop, megaphoned to the slumbering city, the building proclaims her art-embracing raison d'être and celebrates the creative sanctuary her walls are barely able to contain.

Unsurprisingly, this is a Utopian world and nobody wants to leave. There’s a waiting list. A long one. So, many of Westbeth’s poets, painters, sculptors and dancers are well-established, approaching a time of life where creativity tends towards reflection, remembrance and, to their credit, later life reinvention. Along with Ilsa, who is only now hearing her poems set to music thanks to Mimi, Winter at Westbeth explores the life works and legacies of green-eyeshadowed dancer-turned-documentarian Edith Stephen and celebrated dancer Dudley Williams, whose immense reputation has stalked the building’s halls since his self-imposed isolation.

Spong has found a satisfying balance to his multi-faceted portrait of this artistic ecosystem. The three artists provide multiple pivots for the film’s structure. Edith’s gregarious nature pumps life throughout, where Dudley and Ilsa’s quieter conversations bring a more understated humour. The blossoming of Ilsa’s poems into new forms of expression through collaboration with Mimi finds parallels with Dudley’s return to performance working with choreographer Fredrick Earl Mosley (who, like Dudley, trained at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and worked with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater) and Edith’s branching out into documentary film making, reworking her own “happenings” from the ‘60s into experimental video works. Ilsa and Dudley’s queer identities bring a sense of hope and loss, where Edith’s reminiscences keep the past well and truly alive.

But it is in the trios artistic expression where Winter at Westbeth comes to life, both in performance and in creation. Eyes light up. Limbs limber. Words flow. It is a marvel to watch these three working through their passions. Dudley especially is sublime. His movement is sublime and through this and through the deference of the young kid brought in to ease him back into performance we see the wonder that he was and is. The same is true of Edith, who seems to expand into the colour of Westbeth’s surroundings as she stages one of her community-famed “happenings” in the building’s gardens.

All this is made possible because Winter at Westbeth speaks the language of the community it celebrates. Through its intimate conversations it we are reminded once more of power of art to express joy and pain, to celebrate those no longer with us, to encompass a life and to consolidate the impact of the intangible. And like the best films of its kind, the film leaves behind its own mark. Spong’s artistic process has opened up lives that were by their own admission falling into obscurity. This finds its purest expression in Dudley’s final address to camera. His emotional thanks to the filmmaker for inciting his personal revival is a powerful confirmation that Spong himself is doing the work that he has long admired in others.

All of us are richer for it.

★★★★

Trailer:

Winter at Westbeth screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.