My first takeaway after watching this 41-year-old documentary is that Robert Wilson is a terribly bland screen personality. That may be a surprise to anyone familiar with his wildly out-there work as an avant-garde theatre artist. For anyone not familiar with his work, Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars spends half its runtime tracking Wilson’s life and career up to his overly ambitious Civil Wars project. The latter half would seem to be the focus of the film, given its title, and it’s the more interesting material because — spoiler alert — the project was never fully performed as intended as an accompaniment to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
That makes it similar to the handful of behind-the-scenes “unmaking-of” documentaries out there about incomplete films, such as Lost in La Mancha and Jodorowsky’s Dune. I wish it had gone even deeper into the topic of its financing, considering this was a time when it seemed money was abundant for all kinds of modern art. Perhaps this experimental opera was just that much more expensive an undertaking. We don’t get the context of the art world of that moment. What we get is some documentation of a project that could have been (and honestly wouldn’t seem that strange next to many of the opening ceremonies lately), for posterity.
The last few minutes of Robert Wilson and the Civil War are when it starts to get good, with Wilson having a warranted meltdown at a staging in France. Then, the documentary concludes with a compelling point from the artist about his work. The performances of his operas are only done by him and then exist in the memory of those who saw them. All that’s left are archives, and that’s the same for this piece, which was never performed in its entirety at all. The film represents that archive. He may as well be talking about the documentary with his final line: “This is what remains of the work. And so through these records, one has some idea of what happened.”
The sentiment is all the more meaningful with the legacy of the documentary, which was one of only three films by Brookner before he died of AIDS in 1989. Part of the original material for the documentary was lost during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Yet the filmmaker’s nephew, Aaron Brookner, toiling for more than a decade, was able to create a 4K restoration from a 16mm print and some VHS copies that looks almost as good as new. Even if I don’t love the whole thing, I have to appreciate that the film and what it captures have been preserved.