Parky at the Pictures (DVD 27/9/2018)

An opening caption reveals that a `staggering' number of black women were raped by white men in the United States. However, they were often too afraid to report the assaults and only the African-American press and the makers of race films like Spencer Williams's The Blood of Jesus (1941) tackled the issue. As we see footage of a religious service filmed in the 1940s by Zora Neale Hurston, Recy Taylor's siblings, Alma Daniels and Robert Corbitt, recall how she used to love going to church and was returning from praying with her friend Fannie Daniel when she was abducted. Alma dismisses the idea that her sister was a prostitute (as was claimed in the aftermath of the attack), as she was a devoted wife to Willie Guy Taylor and a doting mother to their daughter, Joyce.

In the first, but not the last incidence of emotional manipulation, Buirski backs Dinah Washington's rendition of `This Bitter Earth' with Max Richter's `On the Nature of Daylight', as Robert describes how seven white men had piled into a car and followed Recy, Fannie and the latter's son, Wes, after they had left the church. As the streets were poorly lit and there had been some rabid foxes around, Wes was carrying a stick. But, after Sam Jurdin had chased the teenagers away from pestering his daughters, they pounced on Recy. Private Herbert Lovett pulled a gun on her and ordered her to stop running and get into the back of the car. In voiceover, Recy takes up the story, as she was blindfolded and forced to listen to the boys debating what to do with her. Someone mentioned killing her, but they decided instead to drive to a remote spot and rape her on the ground. 

Having lost his mother when he was 18 months old, Robert had virtually been brought up by Recy and Alma reveals that their home life wasn't always easy with their father, Benny. But he was a decent man and, when Fannie came to tell him what had happened, he took down his rifle and went looking for his daughter and embraced her when she came home, after being dropped off on the outskirts of town. Although she had promised her assailants that she would keep her mouth shut if they spared her life, Recy told sheriff Lewey Corbitt that she had been bundled into a green Chevrolet belonging to Hugo Wilson. Yet, even though he lived a few hundred yards from the Corbitt house, Wilson denied having ever seen Recy before. 

Alma and Robert explain that the boys probably felt they could get away with their crime, as they had been brought up to believe that a black woman's body didn't belong to her. Over a dramatic scene depicting a white man forcing himself on a black woman, Recy's nephew, James Johnson II, suggests that attitudes had changed little since the plantation era and that the notion of white supremacy meant that youths were brought up to believe that black people were little better than animals. He claims that sex was used to demonstrate the control whites had over the black population in the southern states. But white Alabama historian Larry Smith reckons that some slave owners felt they had a right to sleep with black women because they belonged to them. Astonishingly, he labels this a `consensual type of affair' before smiling at recalling the old saying that every white man had a woman at the next crossroads. 

According to Robert, Recy had been subjected to a four- to five-hour ordeal and he claims that had told her to behave as if she was in bed with her husband. Although four of the attackers were strangers, she knew Hugo Wilson, Billy Howerton and Luther Lee and everyone knew the group used to hang out on the bank steps in town. But Wilson was the only one questioned by the police that night and the Taylors were offered no protection when they returned to their home a few days later. Consequently, they were defenceless when the property was fire-bombed. Fortunately, Willie Guy was able to douse the flames, but Robert says this was so typical of the intimidation that the family faced that Benny used to sleep with his rifle in a chinaberry tree behind the house to keep his offspring safe.

Over home movies of Benny with his brood, Robert confides that his father had wanted to go out and shoot the culprits. But he knew such vengeance would be counter-productive and he kept his powder dry. There was no love lost with Sheriff Corbitt, however, whose family had owned Benny's ancestors. So, with the police doing little to pursue the case, the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent Rosa Parks to take Recy's statement. As the NAACP's official rape investigator, Parks was well known to the sheriff and, as Yale professor Crystal Feimster reveals, he arrived on the scene within 15 minutes of her knocking on Recy's door. He ordered her to leave and used physical force to eject her when she returned a fortnight later. Feimster notes that such resistance anticipates Parks's refusal to give up her seat to a white woman on a Montgomery bus. She had family in Abbeville and, as an extract from a letter written in 1981 reveals, she had endured sexual harassment herself, as an 18 year-old in 1931. 

In October 1944, a grand jury hearing was held at Henry County Courthouse. But no blacks were allowed to attend and Recy was kept in a separate room from the accused. Unsurprisingly, the all-white male jury acquitted the indicted and the case was closed. Robert explains that such injustice was designed to bring about subservience, although Alma recalls being taken to the town jail after she slapped the off-duty cop who had struck her for not backing away from a shop door he wished to pass through. She smiles as she remembers her father coming to collect her and barring her from going out until she learned how to behave. 

Activist Esther Cooper Jackson remembers visiting Recy and noticing how traumatised she was. So, Parks arranged for her to move into a safe house on Johnson Street in Montgomery. Feimster points out that Parks might not have been a member of the NAACP by this time, but she had been taught to fight for her rights by her grandfather and we hear an interview clip in which Parks describes how she was appointed secretary of her local branch on the day she joined because they needed someone to take the minutes of a meeting. She proved instrumental in the formation of the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs Recy Taylor, which used letters, petitions and stories in the black press to shame the white establishment and coax other black women into coming forward with their own experiences. 

Author Danielle L. McGuire shows how Recy's cause was taken up as far away at Harlem, where there was a rally calling for a fair hearing at the famous Hotel Theresa. She explains how vital the black press was in reporting crimes that were ignored by white publications, as their records prevented lawyers from dismissing accusations as hearsay. We see a clip from Oscar Micheaux's Birthright (1938 - not 1939, as Buirski claims), as Feimster reveals that race films like Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1919) and The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920) also depicted the bigotry and brutality that mainstream cinema ignored. This insistence on presenting reality gave audience the courage to speak out and, eventually, Alabama governor Chauncey Sparks agreed to send private investigators to go to Abbeville and uncover the truth. 

In extracts from the report submitted to Sparks by Assistant District Attorney John O. Harris, we learn that Sherif Corbitt had retracted lies about Recy being a prostitute. However, Dillard York, Robert Gamble and Luther Lee (who were all 17 at the time of the rape) insist that Recy had readily gone with them and accepted money for her services after she had safe sex with them, as well as Lovett, Wilson and Willie Joe Culpepper. According to 14 year-old Billy Howerton, he declined to have intercourse, as he knew Recy and wanted nothing to do with her. But 16 year-old Wilson also swore to have abstained, even though 15 year-old Culpepper had made no bones of the fact that they had forced themselves on Recy and had thrust some banknotes into her hand while she was with Lovett. However, the 18 year-old soldier denied having set eyes on Recy before and she admits that she would find it difficult to identify her assailants in a line-up.

As a result of the inquiry, a second grand jury hearing was held on 14 February 1945 and Chris Money, a criminal defence attorney based in Abbeville, declares that the failure to secure a conviction had more to do with race than the validity of the facts. Siblings Leamon Lee and James York insist that the accused were good boys, but concede that they often got into scrapes. Lee remembers his father giving Luther a whooping over this incident and reveals that Sheriff Corbitt was married to their mother's sister. He joined the navy soon after and saw action in the Second World War, as well as in Korea and Vietnam. York also went to sea and received a Purple Heart after being wounded before acting as the chief recorder at the Korean peace talks. He married a Japanese woman and his brother smiles knowingly, as he declares that `that went over great'.

Culpepper returned home a hero after being captured in the Korean War, but Robert Corbitt reveals that the sheriff had informed Benny that one of the boys had perished in a car crash, while another had been killed after being caught with another man's wife. However, this information was false and they all lived lengthy lives without being punished in the slightest for their crime. By contrast, Recy slipped down the NAACP agenda and struggled to make ends meet after her marriage ended. She worked as a sharecropper for a spell before moving to Flordia to pick oranges after her daughter lost her life in a traffic accident. 

While researching her book, McGuire got to interview Recy, who lived until she was 97 and only died in December last year. But Larry Smith tells Buirski he feels uncomfortable discussing the situation in too much depth, as some of those involved are still alive. He contents himself with stating that McGuire's book ruffled feathers and that the state legislature sought to calm things down by making an official apology to Recy Taylor in 2011. Feimster is more outspoken, however, as she regrets that the focus on Martin Luther King has distracted historians from the role that women played in the Civil Rights movement. She describes the indignities that black women faced when travelling on trains and buses and McGuire insists that it was the transport boycott imposed by these women that taught the leadership the potency of peaceful resistance. 

As we see Fannie Lou Hamer singing `Go Tell It on the Mountain', McGuire and Feimster sum up that the Civil Rights movement emerged from the determination of impotent black men to protect their womenfolk from white males who felt entitled to do whatever they wanted with their bodies. Alma (who died in 2016) is pleased that some of the Abbeville Seven died in tragic circumstances and is even more delighted that Recy got to outlive them and expose their pitiless lack of humanity. The closing images show Recy being helped out of a wheelchair by Robert in what looks like a hospice room. She admits that she could easily have been killed if the Lord hadn't been beside her during her ordeal and this knowledge has given her the strength to tell the truth about what happened to her. 

This an important film and it's deeply frustrating that it's not a better one. It's a huge shame that Buirski wasn't in a position to embark upon the project earlier, as it would have been nice to hear more from Recy Taylor herself. However, her siblings speak with eloquence and passion on her behalf, as do Crystal Feimster and Danielle McGuire. However, by opting to remain a silent presence during the interviews, Buirski misses the opportunity to press the mealy-mouthed Larry Smith about the case and the way in which the white community continues to close ranks around its own. She may well have been prevented from interjecting by the agreed terms of the interview, but this failure to confront Smith, Leamon Lee or James York feels like an abnegation of the documentarist's duty. 

The assembly of the audiovisual material also has its problematic moments, as so much of Rex Miller's cinematography is so stylised. The juxtaposition of top shots down on to illuminated trees in dark woodland with low-level views of the underground feels self-conscious, as does editor Anthony Rispoli's superimposition over these images of clips from pictures like Roy Calnek's Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926), Frank Peregini's The Scar of Shame (1927) and Micheaux's Veiled Aristocrats and The Girl From Chicago (1932). The use of music over the extracts also has a melodramatising effect, which detracts from the gravity of the themes Buirski is seeking to highlight. So, while one can only be grateful to her for bringing this harrowing case to a wider audience at a time when racial and gender rights are very much hot topics, one can only wish she had shown more editorial trenchancy and stylistic restraint in presenting it.

There have been several documentaries about Orson Welles since Leslie Megahey's wonderful two-part Arena profile, The Orson Welles Story (1982) became the gold standard. Among them are Vassili Silovic's Orson Welles: The One-Man Band (1995), Dominik and Jakov Sedlar's Searching for Orson (2006), Chuck Workman's Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014), Clara and Julia Kuperberg's This Is Orson Welles, Elisabeth Kapnist's Orson Welles: Shadow & Light (both 2015) and Morgan Neville's They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018). The latest to join the list is Mark Cousins's The Eyes of Orson Welles, a globe-trotting odyssey that often feels like a companion piece to the prolific Ulsterman's 2017 tome, The Story of Looking. Made with the assistance of Welles's youngest daughter, Beatrice, this epistolary essay draws on unseen sketches, drawings and paintings to explore and analyse the visual sense of one of American cinema's few visionaries.

Opening with an aerial shot of Manhattan, Cousins begins a letter to Welles, in which he brings him up to speed with the world since his death in 1985. In fact, he limits himself to lamenting that a man who thinks he's Charles Foster Kane has become president and that Welles never got to play with the Internet. He mentions that a waitress he had spoken to about his project thought that Welles was creepy and Cousins agrees with her assessment because he enjoyed playing larger than life bullies like Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). But he surmises that Welles would not have enjoyed the fact that the very kind of bloated blowhards that he used to lampoon are now in the ascendancy. 

In the first chapter, `What's in the Box?', Cousins collects a cache of drawings and this launches him on his trek, as he visits Chicago, where Welles studied at the Art Institute. Cousins wonders whether the Windy City's skyscrapers influenced Welles's habit of shooting upwards and from below. Similarly, he speculates whether the design of the galleries and the Thorne Miniature Room inspired the interiors in Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Trial (1962). But, always the restless type, Cousins is soon off to Ann Arbor, where the Welles archive is kept at the University of Michigan. He looks at a letter from Vivien Leigh and the jacket Welles wore in Robert Stevenson's Jane Eyre (1943) before asking whether these youthful experiences shaped his looking life. 

Following a clip from the BBC's six-part series, Orson Welles' Sketch Book (1955), Cousins calls on Beatrice, who shows him some of her father's paintings, as well as letters from his juvenile travels and a treasured Christmas card. He realises that Welles drew compulsively and muses on the possibility of understanding his psyche through his art. But he recognises that much of his political personality was inherited from his Unitarian mother, Beatrice, who had been the first woman elected to public office in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She had died when he was nine, but Cousins likes to think that the tree she had planted to ensure every child in the town received a festive gift prompted a lifelong fascination with Christmas trees.

Drifting into `Pawn', Cousins glimpses some of the faces the 16 year-old Welles sketched aboard the RMS Baltic and then captures some of his own, as he lands in the Galway that had taken Welles's breath away. He found something equally noble in the landscape of the Aran Islands that he visited around the time Robert Flaherty was filming Man of Aran (1934). But Welles eventually ventured to Dublin, where he convinced the company at the Gate Theatre that he was a well-known actor and promptly became one. Yet, before he returned to conquer radio through such plays as Archibald MacLeish's The Fall of the City (1937), Welles visited Morocco and the Gypsy quarter of Seville. Cousins coos at his hero's readiness to associate with workers and outsiders, Muslims and Catholics and concludes that he was a natural born enemy of Fascism. 

As if to prove the point, Cousins reflects on Welles's `Voodoo' Macbeth at the now-demolished Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, as well as his seminal productions of The Cradle Will Rock and Julius Caesar, which were immortalised in Tim Robbins's The Cradle Will Rock (1999) and Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (2008). Welles was still in his early twenties when he devised these landmark productions and their connection with ordinary people continued into Citizen Kane, when the person the press baron forges a bond with working girl, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore). 

Cousins suggests Welles would have lauded William Castle for depicting Dean Jagger and Kim Hunter in a Harlem bar in When Strangers Marry (1941) and marries Welles's speech in the radio broadcast Hello Americans with the starkly beautiful footage he filmed in South America for the unfinished, It's All True (1942). He also cites the speech he made about teachers having a civic duty to warn students about iniquity, as he notes that Welles was tagged by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover for denouncing Red-baiting senator, Joseph McCarthy. But Welles was anything but intimidated and, in 1946, used his ABC radio show, Orson Welles Commentaries to call out, Officer X, the policeman from Batesburg, South Carolina who had blinded black war veteran Isaac Woodard with the savagery of the beating he had meted out after a bus driver had taken exception to him. 

Cousins uses a clip from Sketch Book to show Welles revisiting the issue a decade later before detouring to Paris, where he had filmed his adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial. But he feels he has said enough about the political Welles and, in `Knight', he turns his attention to his great loves. The first was a love of places like the Sheffield Hotel in Grand Detour, Illinois. His father had owned this place and built a ballroom in which the young Welles would dance in the moonlight. He compared this backwater to Eden and spent his life searching for pre-industrial boltholes. Cousins wonders whether the hotel inspired the boarding house in Citizen Kane, where the young Charles played with Rosebud in the unspoilt snow. There's more snow in The Magnificent Ambersons and Cousins reveals that the place where it was filmed is long gone and now forms part of one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Los Angeles. 

If paradise was often lost in Welles's life, he could always find consolation in love. He married Virginia Nicholson, Rita Hayworth and Paola Mori and we see how his camera adored the latter pair in The Lady From Shanghai (1947) and Mr Arkadin (1955). Yet Beatrice believes that the love of his life was Dolores Del Rio, with whom he became besotted after seeing her swimming in King Vidor's Bird of Paradise (1932). Welles was also obsessed with the characters of Don Quixote and Sir John Falstaff, who embodied the chivalry that he valued so highly at the very moment when society was readying to discard it. In an interview with Bernard Levin, he admits to being a man out of time and there's a reverence to the way he described Merrie England, as he made himself up as Falstaff in a remarkable snippet from The Dean Martin Show. 

Sadly, Welles never completed his version of Don Quixote, with Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff. But Cousins uses an extract from Chimes at Midnight (1965) to compare his compositional sense to that of Tintoretto. Following an unconvincing aside on Welles's bromances with Joseph Cotten, John Houseman and Jack Carter (the lead in his all-black Macbeth), Cousins examines the part that guilt played in Welles's relationships, as he was not always faithful and often revealed his conflicted emotions in his drawings. We are shown the murder of Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) in Othello (1951) and her covered face resembles the facelessness that characterised Welles's later drawings. Cousins explains how Welles had a circular ceiling built to match the one in a Mantegna painting and contrasts the way in which Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir) poisoned the Moor's mind with the way Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) disowns Falstaff at his coronation. Yet, while Welles might have liked to see himself as the wronged knight, Cousins accuses him of often treating people like Hal and breaking their hearts with a hint of cruelty. 

Maybe this is because Welles felt regal and chapter four, `King', seeks to show how he could be guilty of monstrous pomposity in his private life. Having ticked off Welles for walking out of a screening of Luchino Visconti's Le terra trema (1948), Cousins contrasts Piranesi `Prisons' prints with a colourful painting that Welles did to express his frustration at being denied the opportunity to edit Touch of Evil (1957). In many ways, Hank Quinlan and Charles Foster Kane behaved like men who considered themselves above the law and Cousins adds Charles Clay from The Immortal Story (1968) to this rogues' gallery, over a clip of him coercing Paul the sailor (Norman Eshley) into fathering a child with his wife. 

Harry Lime and Cesare Borgia in Henry King's Prince of Foxes (1949) are cut from the same cloth, as was Macbeth, who cast aside the freedom to make his own decisions by allowing himself to be railroaded by the predictions of the witches. His lust for power is adeptly contrasted with the abdicating monarch's relinquishing of responsibility in Andrew McCullough's television version of King Lear (1953) and Kurz's similar drift into insanity in the Mercury Theatre's radio adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1938).

The wheels rather come off in the ensuing segment, `Jester', as Cousins affords Welles a right of reply and Jack Klaff responds with a poor imitation. He feigns surprise that the world kept turning after his death and suggests that the best way to approach life is to view it as a circus, such as the one depicted in such Laurel and Hardy two-reelers as Edgar Kennedy's You're Darn Tootin' (1929), whose pants ripping finale the bogus Welles claims inspired Akim Tamiroff's state of undress in Mr Arkadin. An animated montage shows how Santa became more inebriated over the years in Welles's Christmas cards, as the good cheer began to seep out of his existence. Yet, he claims never to have lost his love of life and art and regrets not being able to take advantage of the new technologies of the 21st century.

In concluding in `Bees Make Honey', Cousins has a eureka moment, as he realises that Welles's films were sketchbooks and that he was more interested in lines and space than the text. He claims this is why those who admire Laurence Olivier's Shakespeare plays dislike those of Welles and quotes Leni Riefenstahl's observation that Welles made abrasive drawings in the Bard's margins. Welles also sought to break with the conventions of studio movie-making and Cousins credits him with anticipating a time when small films could be made cheaply and appreciated by exclusive audiences without the need to pander to the masses in order to ensure profitability. He wonders if the recent recession will spawn a new Welles, as the Wall Street Crash had tempered the original. But he is glad that he has been able to uncover a fresh way of looking at Welles's legacy and thanks him for leaving us such riches to savour.

There's no escaping the fact that Mark Cousins can be an infuriatingly egotistical film-maker, with this essay often being as much about his own perceptiveness as both a looker and a critic as it is about Welles and his art. But Cousins is also fearless in his readiness to approach topics from new angles and express his opinions in his own distinctive style. Thus, while this profile of a master maverick often provokes gasps of exasperation, it's also stuffed with inspired observations that leave one to conclude that Beatrice Welles was fully justified in entrusting his father's previously hidden treasures (in oils, watercolours, pencil, charcoal, crayon, ink and felt pen) to someone with such a keen appreciation of their graphic intrigue and interpretive value. 

Considering the teenage Welles contributed illustrations to the 1934 Everybody's Shakespeare volumes that he edited with teacher Roger Hill, it's somewhat surprising that nobody has taken this route before. But Cousins seizes his opportunity to prompt viewers into taking another look at the design and direction of Welles's films and notice the recurring motifs, the influence of diverse artistic styles and the ceaseless experimentation that left him adrift somewhere between the commercial Hollywood and continental arthouse traditions. 

The picture would be none the worse for the removal of the scratching nib sounds that accompany the animated sketching sequences, while the Klaff interlude is calamitously self-indulgent. But, even though it leaves filmographical gaps and fails to address Welles's habit of abandoning projects like The Other Side of the Wind and The Deep, this is an invaluable addition to the Welles docu-canon that will prompt many to revisit his output and send obsessives scurrying in search of the archival gems that Cousins has unearthed.

Film-makers have been fascinated by iconoclastic artist Jean-Michel Basquiat since he burst on to the New York art scene in the late 1970s. Edo Bertoglio charted his rise in Downtown 81 (which was released after much delay in 2001), while Julian Schnabel's biopic, Basquiat (1996), and Tamra Davis's documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010). have since sought to examine his personality and sources of inspiration. Now, Sara Driver returns to the Lower East Side for Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a documentary of deliberately limited scope that draws on her own memories of the period when she and longtime partner Jim Jarmusch were also feeding off the energy generated by punk to make their own mark.

Over shots of rundown streets, President Gerald Ford gives his reasons for not bailing out the New York authorities facing bankruptcy in 1975. Cultural critic Carlo McCormick, writer Luc Sante, performance artist Jennifer Jazz artist James Nares and collector Mary-Ann Monforton recall what a surreal place the Big Apple was in this period and credit the emergence of punk with giving the cultural scene a kick start. However, curator Diego Cortez also notes the contribution made by the city's various ethnic enclaves in declaring that the dominance of the white male ended during this period and one of those to fill the void was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Film artist Coleen Fitzgibbon remembers him being a ubiquitous presence at gallery openings and clubs like CBGB and the Mudd Club, while Jim Jarmusch suggests he was shy and skittish in reminding the off-screen Driver about the time when Basquiat presented her with a stolen flower in the street. Graffiti partner Al Diaz remembers them coining the `SAMO' tag to criticise the `same old' problems facing the city and cultural critic Raymond Foye avers that it stood out from the other wall writing being produced at the time. Indeed, as Fred Brathwaite (aka tagger-cum-rapper Fab Five Freddy) mentions, it was the subject of a Village Voice article and artist Kenny Scharf regrets that Basquiat decided to take sole ownership of the handle and Diaz fell by the wayside. 

The 16 year-old Basquiat was living rough in places like the Earle and Albert Hotels, yet kept popping up at events across SoHo, as he strove to get noticed and be taken seriously. Unfortunately, despite the artistry of taggers like Lee Quiñones (who specialised in decorating subway carriages), many felt graffiti was a blight and it wasn't regarded as a legitimate artform. Together with Brathwaite, Quiñones created an hommage to Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans that they considered to be a moving work of art, despite the fact that they were being accused of being vandals whose daubs were linked to the crime wave sweeping New York by a mainstream media that also regarded break dancing and the emerging DJ culture with equal scorn. 

Diaz and artist Sur Rodney state that Basquiat wasn't really part of the graffiti scene, as he was a homeless artist who had nowhere else to express himself. Monforton let him crash on her floor in the largely Puerto Rican neighbourhood where Jorge Brandon pioneered Nuyorican poetry. She had a huge crush on the charismatic teenager and musician Felice Rosser and embryologist Alexis Adler reminisce about him intervening when they were challenged by some Italian thugs outside a club. However, while he often crashed at Rosser's place with Jazz, they were competing for the same sofa and tensions arising from clashing personalities and Basquiat's habit of playing loud industrial music on his boom box led to a temporary split, which was only healed when he decorated Adler's gold lamé coat. 

Eventually, Basquiat moved into Adler's apartment and began creating art on the walls and floors. Among his best-known creations from this period was the `grape jelly' refrigerator door and Sante recalls him developing into a promising writer whose style was like a poetic variation on crime pulp and the chopped-up prose of William Burroughs. Cortez is perhaps less convinced of Basquiat's authorial genius, but accepts it had an immediacy born out of the need to make an immediate impression with a tag on a wall or the side of a train. Often working late at night and in fear of being arrested, Quiñones agrees that they were marginalised until the likes of Keith Haring came to be feted and he scored his own triumph with the 1978 Howard the Duck wall that bore the immortal message, `Graffiti is a art and if art is a crime, let god forgive all.'

Inspired by this DIY approach, Fitzgibbon co-founded Collaborative Projects Incorporated (CoLab) to draw attention to the young artists who were being ignored by the traditional galleries. Basquiat tapped into this in his determination to become famous and performance artist Michael Hoffman remembers him crashing a Canal Street party celebrating the graffiti work of the Fabulous Five and outing himself as SAMO to steal everyone's thunder. He was interviewed at this event, but Driver opts not to use his voice at any time during the film, as she seeks to present Basquiat as a spectral presence haunting different aspects of cultural life and taking what he needed to fashion his own style. 

As a result of the Canal Zone meeting, Hoffman and Basquiat formed a band called Test Pattern, which later took the name, Gray. Despite doing much to introduce white punk kids to hip hop with the Beyond Words exhibition at the Mudd Club, Brathwaite also taught Basquiat about be-bop through his connection with legendary jazz drummer, Max Roach. Cable TV host Glenn O'Brien recalls seeing them play and Hoffman tells a story that sums up Basquiat's genius for stealing the limelight, as he saw the Constructivist set that Hoffman and the other band members had devised and produced a painted packing case that allowed him to appear in the centre of the stage and become the focus of the display. 

The two hippest venues for upcoming bands were Club 57 and the Mudd Club. Scharf suggests that Basquiat looked down his nose at their antics at Club 57 and felt more at home at the Mudd Club, where everyone set out to be achingly hip. However, as McCormick points out, while people took mushrooms at Club 57, they used heroin at the Mudd Club and the scene became synonymous with the drug trade. Various voices admit to using and suggest substances were the only way to cope with the hectic lifestyle. Others claim they were part of an artistic rite of passage in order to acquire a Burroughsesque cool. But Quiñones remains baffled why his contemporaries needed to escape when they should have remained clear-headed in order to experience the amazing things happening around them. 

Seeking outlets for his creativity, Basquiat persuaded fashion designer Patricia Field to let him paint on the sweat shirts she was selling at her store and these became cult `Man Made' items, even though Scharf concedes he found them a little tacky. Field hosted Basquiat's first exhibition of found objects, only for most of them to be thrown away when a friend who was looking after them was evicted from his flat. He also sold postcards at Rocks in Your Head, as did Haring and Scarf, who were experimenting with colour xerography to create collages. This chimed in with the vogue for posters, flyers and fanzines and there was great excitement when Basquiat sold a postcard to Andy Warhol. 

Having featured in an O'Brien article in High Times, Basquiat told an excited Brathwaite that this would be the first of many and he was struck by his confidence in his star. But Quiñones wonders if he knew his time would be limited and, consequently, seemed more driven and worked more quickly than anyone else. He would allow his graffiti work to drip because the spontaneity mattered more than the perfection and he didn't seem to care if people questioned the quality of his often naive drawings because it was the act of creation that counted not the end result. 

Writer Bud Kliment recalls how Basquiat abandoned the collage style quite quickly and began combining figurative sketches with texts. Jarmusch and Adler describe how he was a magpie, who would take images and ideas and incorporate them into his art and, in the process, make them his own and give them new meaning. Cortez was among the first to recognise the potential of these pieces and introduced Basquiat to curator Henry Geldzahler, who was a driving force in the new art wave that culminated in the Times Square Show, which opened in a disused massage parlour on 1 June 1980. During its run, Charlie Ahearn starred Quiñones in his film, Wild Style (1983), while Basquiat caught the eye of the critic from Art in America with a painting he produced in a hurry on one of the walls. 

Keen to build on this success, Cortez curated New York/New Wave at PS1 the following year and Basquait's reputation seemed sealed when Geldzahler bought his first full-size painting for $500 and hung it on the wall of his apartment and declared him to be the best American artist since Robert Rauschenberg. As a closing caption reveals, he would only live for another seven years before succumbing to heroin at the age of 27. Rosser reckons Basquiat merits his place among the masters and claims him as an African-American role model for showing what could be done with a little determination and belief. Jarmusch is simply glad to have known him, as the film ends with a corny image of a rocket blasting off into the stratosphere. 

Yet, at no point does Driver or any of her contributors provide any critical assessment of Basquiat's work. Furthermore, despite Hoffman labelling him `an investigator', nobody considers the theoretical side to his work or the sources of his inspiration. Indeed, by avowedly ignoring Basquiat's childhood and adulthood, Driver presents him as a sort of mythical figure whose talent materialised from nowhere like a form of immaculate conception. Her decision to silence his voice reaffirms this hagiographised ethereality, as she prefers to let his work speak for itself - when it can get a word in edgeways between the swooning chorus of approval that editor Adam Kurnitz slots in between the evocative archive stills and home-movie clips. 

Shortly after Basquiat's death, critic Robert Hughes dubbed him the Thomas Chatterton of Neo-Expressionism in a New Republic article entitled `Requiem for a Featherweight' that dismissed him as `a small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of artworld promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and, no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics'. Driver does little to contradict that contention and it's noticeable that no independent critics appear in the picture. 

In this regard, this makes her study the perfect companion piece to James Crump's Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex, Fashion & Disco, which also spent as much time wallowing in its subject's milieu as it did providing an objective analysis of his talent and the appealing mix of solemnity and irreverence that underpinned it. Given her personal connection to Basquiat, it's understandable that Driver would want to celebrate the multidisciplinary achievement of a friend who was taken far too soon. But, by preaching to the choir, she does too little to accommodate newcomers or convert those yet to be convinced by Basquiat's genius.

Finally, this week, Stephen Nomura Schible's Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is a classic example of the maker and subject of a documentary being on such different wavelengths that the resulting portrait is both distorted and wasteful. Made over five of the most traumatic years in Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto's life, this should have been a moving and revealing dissertation on how art emerges from existence. But, unlike Joe Stephenson in McKellen: Playing the Part, Schible can't resist stage-managing episodes that seem entirely at odds with Sakamoto's approach to both his music and his beliefs. 

In the pre-title sequence, Sakamoto visits a school in Miyagi to play the corpse of a `drowned' piano that had survived the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. He also dons a hazmat suit to examine the after effects of the disaster at the Fukushima power plant before speaking at a rally in Tokyo opposing the resumption of Japan's nuclear programme and joining a cellist and violinist at Rikuzentakata Daiichi Junior High School to perform the theme from Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983). 

With his round tortoiseshell glasses ad mop of silver grey hair, Sakamoto confides to the camera that he was badly shaken by the 2014 of Stage 3 throat cancer and he admits that it was difficult to stop working in order to concentrate on his treatment. However, when Alejandro González Iñárritu invited him to compose the score for The Revenant (2015), he was unable to resist and concedes that he drove himself to his limits in order to meet the deadline. A scene from the film shows how worthwhile the effort had been, as Sakamoto explains that he needs to keep his mouth scrupulously clean because his immune system has been weakened and he takes several tablets after finishing a simple supper of meticulously cut fruit. 

This brush with mortality made Sakamoto aware of the need to make every minute count and he hopes to continue making meaningful music. Inspired by the use of Bach's organ chorales in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), he returned to work on async, the album he had set aside in order to battle his illness. Eager to incorporate the sounds of nature in the mix, Sakamoto ventures into the woods with his phone and records birdsong, his footsteps in the dry leaves and the noises he makes with the objects he finds beside an abandoned dwelling. Back in his studio, he blends them into his soundscape and is pleased with the results. 

Another piece sounds very 1980s and Schible flashes back to show Sakamoto playing `Tong Poo' live with Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1979 and (wearing some Bowiesque eye make-up) discussing his attitudes to technology in a TV slot from 1984. Back in the present, he wishes to conduct an experiment by composing music for a film that doesn't exist and seeks inspiration in Tarkovsky's book of Polaroids, Instant Light. He also revisits Solaris to assess the way in which the sound of water is used and attempts to recreate it during a downpour. But the effect proves elusive, even when putting a bucket on his head. 

Over the scene from Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence in which Sakamoto's soldier is kissed on the cheeks by Bowie's POW, he explains how brash he had been to ask Oshima to let him write the score. But the experience stood him in good stead when producer Jeremy Thomas asked him to compose a short piece on location in China for a scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987). Despite nailing the assignment, Sakamoto was taken aback when Thomas called him to write the score and he looks back with amazement that he produced much of the Oscar-winning material in a week. 

Schible includes footage of Sakamoto conducting the orchestra in Number Two Studio at Abbey Road to cross-cut between the famous staircase up to the control room in which George Martin had overseen The Beatles's recording sessions and Sakamoto descending the stairs to his home studio to play a cymbal with a bow. Seated at his piano, he muses about sounds that could reverberate forever and explains that the idea hails from Paul Bowles's cameo in Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990), in which he talks about the limited nature of time. He hopes to combine the music with recordings of the speech in different languages and smiles into the camera, as he does while relating an anecdote about Bertolucci using the efficiency of Ennio Morricone to goad Sakamoto into rewriting a passage of music he was about to record with a full orchestra. 

As Bach used to compose chorales to reflect his dismay at the state of the world, Sakamoto began to feel the need to explore his concerns about environmental issues in 1992. Rather pompously, he suggests that artists and musicians are like canaries in a coal mine, as they sense danger before mere mortals. But there's undeniable power in `Oppenheimer's Aria' from LIFE (1999) and Schible lingers on archive footage of a multi-screen performance to contextualise Sakamoto's admission that he admires the way in which Nature has re-tuned the `drowned' piano that humanity had taken such pains to fashion using the industrial know-how that had taken generations to refine. It dismays him that our species has devised the means of its own destruction, but he holds out hope that it won't be used. 

Sakamoto had been in New York on 9/11 and had noticed in the photographs he had taken of the atrocity how birds were flying away from the Twin Towers. After a few days, he heard a busker playing `Yesterday' and realised that no one had played any music in the city since the attack. A need to reflect the distances creating tensions between peoples prompted him to compose `Chasm' (2004) in reaction to the US-led invasion of Iraq. While contemplating humankind's tendency towards violence, Sakamoto felt compelled to trace our evolution from the earliest known settlements around Lake Turkana in Kenya. His experience led to him incorporating sounds recorded in a humble settlement into `Only Love Can Conquer Hate' (2004) and he wishes he could hear the speech and rhythmic patterns of the first humans in order appreciated how various musical styles had developed. 

In 2008, Sakamoto headed to the Arctic Circle and recorded pre-industrial ice melting and declares it to be the purest sound he has ever heard. This found its way into `Glacier' (2009). Six years on, he wanders along the beach beside the contaminated zone in Fukushima and returns to work on his chorale, `Solari' (2017). Back in his studio, Sakamoto plays Bach on his Steinway. But it's too cold to get his fingers moving. But he smiles as he informs Schible that he intends playing every day from now on, as he feels healthy once more. 

This optimistic note ends proceedings on an upswing. But this is a patchy profile that says as much about what Sakamoto doesn't want to discuss as much as it does about his music and his methodology. The absence of any biographical information will frustrate those who haven't slavishly followed Sakamoto's career, but it's the lack of a coherent structure that makes this such a frustrating exercise. Given the precision of Sakamoto's output and the access that Schible appears to have had, this scattershot assemblage feels capricious in the extreme and more than a little pretentious. Indeed, it resembles Lorna Tucker's struggle to master her material in Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist - although the 65 year-old Sakamoto appears to be a much more genial, accommodating and candid subject than the prickly Vivienne Westwood. 

Editor Hisayo Kushida makes a tidy job of interweaving images of Sakamoto working with clips from his live performances and the films he has scored. Yet, there's an artificiality to the intimacy that Schible seeks to create, with the moment in which Sakamoto feigns surprise on the camera crew sneaking up on him while he is playing feeling particularly bogus. Indeed, he forever seems to be performing, even though there's no doubting the sincerity of his political views or his artistic intentions. The problem lies in Schible's lacklustre technique and his shortcomings (and seeming lack of curiosity) as an investigative documentarist.