by Jeffrey Plank (1)
Eduardo recently shared with me a nearly-complete version of The Piccirilli Factor. It is extraordinary. Anyone who has followed Eduardo’s social media posts over the past two years will appreciate the challenge of selecting from the very extensive material about the Piccirilli brothers—family records, commissions and locations, archival photographs, newspaper articles, and audio recordings—he has managed to unearth the fraction that best tell his story in an hour-long film.
That selectivity, that compression, is what gives The Piccirilli Factor its power. If you have followed the posts you can confirm the selectivity, the compression, and the power; but even if you have not, if you come to the film cold, your experience will be the same. The technique works on its own terms, regardless of what the viewer knows about Eduardo’s research, because each episode in the film registers a different aspect of the artist’s life and work at two particular historical moments, the moment of creation and now. What Eduardo selects are episodes that begin to map nodes in an intricate network of relationships: between the artist and his traditions, between the immigrant artist and his adoptive country, between the artist and his collaborators, all set between the historical moment and the present. The progress of the film may be chronological, but it is not quite linear. Because each episode adds a new narrative thread, rather than repeat the same kind of information, the viewer’s expectations are continuously disturbed, or surprised, and that process alters viewer attention: the surprise leads the viewer to suspend expectations and surrender to each episode with heightened attention. Eduardo’s selectivity draws you in.
Another technique that Eduardo uses to draw you in, to close the distance between the viewer and the film, is that of the unscripted interview. On-screen talent is a ubiquitous convention in the documentary film genre, so when you encounter on-screen talent in The Piccirilli Factor, you feel like you know where you are: you anticipate the authoritative authority. But the unscripted interview subverts this comfort and, like the apparently linear sequence of episodes, heightens viewer attention. When Eduardo interviews his on-screen talent neither he nor the speaker is quite sure where the words are going: the camera captures that thinking-while-talking, of using the conversation to achieve a point, in real time; the viewer cannot predict what will follow and so comes closer, metaphorically, to the speaker and to the subject. It perhaps goes without saying—but I will say it anyway—that the unscripted interview is an art form in itself, an improvisation on the part of the director and the on-screen talent and, perhaps, a welcome collaboration on the part of the talent, because it affords a rare opportunity for the spontaneous expression of knowledge and passion.
One more point about technique in The Piccirilli Factor: the juxtaposition of black and white and color. This juxtaposition is subtle, and it is not rigid. Eduardo uses the black and white photographs to fix the Piccirilli sculptures in their own time, to stimulate us to see them as historical objects, as part of our social history. With the color photographs and cinematography we see the Piccirilli sculptures in our time. Indeed, in color, the sculptures come alive; they insist that they stand ready to enrich our lives, if only we make the effort to engage. By connecting the Piccirilli sculptures that we think we know, such as the seated Lincoln, the New York Public Library lions, or the seal at the Met, with those that we may not, such as “The Outcast,” Eduardo makes it possible to reframe the public monument issue from the perspective of the artist, and so start new conservations about what we share rather than what divides us.
(1) Jeffrey Plank was Associate Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Virginia. For more than twenty years, he collaborated with former Institute of Design director Crombie Taylor on a wide range of architectural history projects, including the restoration of Louis Sullivan's Van Allen Department Store Building in Clinton, Iowa. Aaron Siskind and Louis Sullivan is the second in a three-part series on architectural photography, building restoration, and architectural history that also includes The Early Louis Sullivan Building Photographs (with Crombie Taylor), published in 2001 by William Stout, and Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration, and the Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan (forthcoming).
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