Somewhere Over The Rainbow (Arena )
1981-82 50’
An unusual 50’ BBC Arena documentary about art and psychoanalysis, featuring the US colour field painter Robert Natkin and the UK writer and art critic Peter Fuller.
“Somewhere over The Rainbow” was essentially constructed from two interweaving long conversations. The first featured the engaging American ‘colour field’ painter Robert Natkin, talking openly (to MD behind the camera) about his life and work in and around his studio and beautiful home in Connecticut USA, as well as at the opening of an exhibition of his paintings in New York. The second was filmed in the UK with the art critic Peter Fuller, author of a major study of “Art and Psychoanalysis” who was just completing a book about Natkin’s work, about which he talked with great insight from his home in Hackney, East London. During the film, sequences from these two related but separately filmed encounters were woven together with help from the sound track of “The Wizard of Oz”, one of Natkin’s favourite films.
…Alternatives to television’s dominant presentation of the visual arts have also been achieved by programme-makers working within common forms, but inflecting them with (for television) unexpected critical approaches. Mike Dibb’s profile with Peter Fuller of US painter Robert Natkin (Somewhere Over The Rainbow -1980) remains one of the best examples. Shifting frames of reference (psychoanalysis, fantasy, the painter’s relationship with the market…) were employed to present a stimulating study of Natkin quite different from what would almost certainly have resulted had he been the subject of The South Bank Show.
John Wyver, Broadcast