AN ARTIST’S ELEGY TO A FAMILY

CLEOPHAS AND HIS OWN
Directed by Michael Maglaras; written by Marsden Hartley; cinematography and editing by Geoffrey Leighton; make-up by Jimmy Soltis
With: Michael Maglaras, Michael Roberge, Scott Fleurent, Dan Harris, Deb Paley, Terri Templeton, and Erin Cole. Unrated. Running time: 147 minutes



Reviewed by Joel Johnson

This film by Michael Maglaras is a very personal project. This is, in part, because he clearly has great affinity and affection for the life and work of his inadvertent screenwriter—Marsden Hartley, a world-renowned artist from Maine during the first half of the twentieth century. But it is also because Maglaras’s fingerprints are on this film at every step of its creation—except for the original source material. Maglaras discovered it—Hartley’s poetic personal reminiscence of his life with a family of Nova Scotia fishermen and that family’s horrific tragedy that was found in his personal effects following his death in 1943—and was determined to take it to a wider audience. The poem was called “Cleophas and His Own,” and, after encountering it, Maglaras made an audio recording of his own recitation. He then began to conceive of it as a movie and that he would make it. Since he had never made a movie before, this was a rather audacious undertaking. He was a first-time filmmaker acting as producer, director, and star. Maglaras himself would play Marsden Hartley narrating the film by reciting “Cleophas and His Own.”

Maglaras is pleased to announce to Maine audiences that the film was made entirely in Maine and that most of the cast and crew are Mainers. This had not been his initial intention. Since the action that is told in the story was set in Nova Scotia, he expected to film there. Background work in Maine to capture personal recollections from those who had known Hartley during the last years of his life brought the filmmaker to Maine. (Hartley spent his last summers in the small town of Corea and died in Ellsworth.) Maglaras evidently found what he needed from the local film community as well as making an observation that has sometimes worked against Maine as a film location: Nova Scotia and Maine look a lot alike.

This film is quite unusual. Maglaras is seated before the camera and simply tells the story of how he came to Nova Scotia and met the Mason family of East Point Island. In the final summer of his life, he faces us just like we were Sunday afternoon visitors with whom he had chosen to share the extraordinary experience of how he spent the summers of 1935 and 1936. There’s an intimacy that Maglaras manages to achieve in his portrayal of Hartley that draws the audience into the film’s story. This is a notable achievement because this technique is “telling” the audience what happened, which most filmgoers fail to find compelling because the film medium usually “shows” them what happened. It would be as if someone tried to make The Iliad and The Odyssey into films, focusing on Homer reciting these tales directly to the audience. Fortunately, the film benefits from the artist’s legacy of colorfully striking paintings. These include many from his last several years of life when he sought obsessively to portray various members of this family. The challenge for the casting director was to match actors to the portraits of the family members. The paintings serve as illustrations, and the filmmaker uses techniques of slowly zooming in and out as well as panning across that were so successfully used by Ken Burns in his work with still photography in The Civil War miniseries. The actors provide short black and white vignettes devoid of intelligible dialogue for the events Hartley recalls.

One senses that Cleophas and His Own may tell us more about the painter than it does about the Masons. It is clear that Hartley—a cosmopolitan who traveled widely for artistic inspiration, who had a wide circle of famous friends, and who was gay—had felt embraced to the bosom of this fisherfolk family with two adult sons and two adult daughters. Despite his intimacy with them, he off-handedly mentions a banished third daughter whose name is not spoken by the parents and fails to reveal anything about two sons that have already been lost. (This was provided by the director in his opening comments.) We learn nothing of these tragedies. Although one might not ordinarily think of Mason as a French name, Hartley decides to provide French pseudonyms for each family member to heighten this ethnic background and romanticize the family. That is how the patriarch Francis Mason becomes Cleophas. One assumes that Hartley, an effete man of late middle age who has spent his entire career observing the world and then putting those observations onto canvas, was enthralled to be included in the active lives of men who faced danger everyday in making a living from the sea. He was very attracted to the elder of the two sons to whom he gave the name Adelard. There is clearly an erotic component to their relationship—at least for Hartley. Adelard was a handsome, big, strapping man with a taste for risk and the dramatic.

The tragic accident that takes this loved one’s life and devastates the family is death at sea during a hurricane that has blown all along the eastern seaboard from Florida to the Maritimes. Adelard, his brother Etienne, and their cousin perished in an “utterly foolhardy” attempt to travel from the mainland to the island during the storm in an eight-foot round-bottomed punt. Despite their years of seamanship, they had underestimated the danger and ignored the pleas of friends to either not go that evening or to choose a more substantial boat for the trip. Their own collusion in the tragedy of their deaths does not change the reality of profound personal loss for family and friends.

The film’s website (www.two17films.com) provides useful background information on the work. Hartley reluctantly stayed on with the Masons through the fall in the aftermath of the tragedy at the urging of one of the daughters, but Hartley resolved not to return. The artist, however, soon began writing the piece that became “Cleophas and His Own.” It is clearly a work of profound admiration and pain as he works through his grief. Considering how fixated Hartley seemed to be on this family as a primary focus for his painting, one wonders if it would have been healthier if he had shared his grief directly with the family to whom he had become so attached.

Because the filmmaking style is unique and the pacing is unhurried in this 147-minute production, this is clearly not a film for everyone. However, it does deal with profound universal issues. It is a must-see for those already interested in the life and work of Marsden Hartley. It will interest those who are familiar with life on the sea as a fisherman and with those who appreciate history—particularly the times through which our parents and grandparents lived. It was not terribly surprising that the audience included a disproportionate number of senior citizens. If you are interested in this film, it is currently on the festival circuit. Maglaras expects it to be released on DVD next spring. 

 

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