Whitney’s Team Pick:
Maurice Sendak, the wonderful (and gay) author of Where the Wild Things Are, is still brilliant, immensely creative, disillusioned, and charmingly curmudgeonly at age 83 — and the Tate Modern’s TateShots mini-documentary spells it out perfectly. The documentary is shot in Sendak’s home in the woods of upstate New York and begins with a shot of the forest’s skinny, leafless, looming trees — it would be a fitting backdrop for Max and his floppy wolf costume. The short film also catches little idiosyncratic details of Sendak’s home: the old Mickey Mouse figurines that sit behind his desk, the large wooden swan that sits in his living room.
The documentary captures Sendak’s many (and varied, but all adamant) opinions about writing, being an artist and childhood:
About possible sequels to Where the Wild Things Are:
People ask me why don’t I write Wild Things 2? ‘It was such a success.’ Go to hell — go to hell.
About art:
Artists have to take a dive. And either you hit your head on a rock and you split your head and die or the blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back up and do the best work you ever did. But you have to take the dive. And you do not know what the result will be.
About childhood:
I didn’t see Michelangelo go to work in the morning — I just lived in Brooklyn, where everything was ordinary and yet enticing and exciting and bewildering. The magic of childhood, the strangeness of childhood, the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don’t see.
Watch the short documentary here:
