Mark Karlin's complex and poetic film explores the abstract paintings of the American artist Cy Twombly. But in radical departure from the dominant British tradition of arts docu­ mentaries, Twombly himself and indeed almost any detail of his biography - is absent. Instead Karlin constructs a meta­ phorical journey for a character "M" which is prompted by his confrontation with, and his feelings of anger towards, one of Twombly's paintings.
"M" is only glimpsed from behind, as an anonymous man in a hat, going about his business in contemporary London, and his tale is recounted in voice-over by a friend who has recently received a letter from him. In the course of the journey, during which M takes on the characters of a lion, then a camel and finally a child, he questions his own no­ tions of the history and function of painting, his under­ standings of images today in the worlds of art and advertis­ ing, and the possibilities of seeing in quite different ways.
Karlin constructs a dense pattern from simple elements - snatched images of M's life, an imaginary museum cram­ med with the master pieces of western art, statements from witnesses such as curator Norman Rosenthal, critic Richard Cork and artist Michael Craig-Martin, and of course Twombly's delicate, mysterious, sometimes child-like paint­ ings which betray a compulsion to make element and time­ less marks.
"There are many films to be made about Cy Twombly's work," Marc Karlin has written, "and this is just one of them. The concern of the film is to make its audience cur­ ious to see Cy Twombly's paintings as opposed to giving them a full and rendered account of Cy Twombly's work, which no one film could ever do." The director's previous films include explorations of historical memory, of utopias, and of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.
Reminiscent at times of the work Chris Marker, the film is uncompromising in its analytical rigour, but it is also im­ mensely engaging, and its screeing in prime-time on a Saturday evening in November 1995 demonstrates how am bitious creative documentary making can still flourish in British television.