Grandma Moses

"Grandma Moses" is an interesting and charming portrait of American painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known by her nom de plume of Grandma Moses. She is shown painting by her bed on her specially prepared wood cement boards, providing refreshment to her grandson as he works the farm, chatting with a neighbor. She invites a group of children to look at ancient portraits from her own family album and we briefly hear her voice as she describes the people in the photographs. The main voice we hear is that of Archibald MacLeish, describing the importance of Grandma Moses as an American artist in terms that would make the average American artist blush with pride. Ultimately his voice is no longer heard and carefully chosen details from Grandma Moses' paintings -- underscored with Hugh Martin's music -- take over in a flight of fancy.

Alec Wilder arranged the music attractively, and in a way it is a shame that he did not compose it too; in keeping the music innocent and brightly cheery, Martin plays it a little innocuous and sweet, and this dates the film somewhat. On the plus side, both filmmaker Jerome Hill and cinematographer Erica Anderson have really good eyes for capturing features in Grandma Moses' paintings that seem almost to move, and cleverly paced camera-work and editing amplifies that effect. This film was nominated for an Academy Award, but lost out to Disney's "Beaver Valley," which would have been hard to defeat as it was the first Disney nature film, enormously popular and itself introduced a new kind of spin on the documentary. "Grandma Moses" has its roots in the American documentary school of the 1930s and thus may have seemed a bit more old-fashioned in 1951 than the slickly commercial Disney film, but there was nothing "new-fashioned" about the subject of Grandma Moses. The filmmakers labored hard to remain true to the basic values of Grandma Moses and her work, and it is of great value to us that Hill and Anderson filmed her in her natural surroundings, at her own farm -- something we cannot experience from her fragmentary television interview with Edward R. Murrow; the only other film we have of Grandma Moses.

GRANDMA MOSES is a 22 minute color film from 1950 on the legendary primitive artist who became an American phenomenon in the 1940's in her eighties and was amazingly famous for the rest of her life with the general public (she made it past 100 and lived into the early 1960's). Obviously shot on silent 16mm film, the movie has a quite appropriately charming original score by the famed composer Hugh Martin (Meet Me in St. Louis) heard throughout the film. Most of the film is narrated but we only hear Grandma's voice in a fairly brief scene in a voice-over as family photos are shown on screen in a segment in which she is showing the family picture album to a endearing trio of preschoolers who are right out of a vintage children's book. The film opens with several scenes of a ninetyish Grandma shown in her every day routines, doing chores on the farm, visiting with friends (at a "gossip fence" no less!), and the like, then some wonderful panoramic shots of rural New York where Grandma was born and raised. The segment with Grandma and the children follows and leads into the lengthiest segment of the film, scanning views of Grandma's art.

There isn't that much footage out there of Grandma (she was on television a few times in the 1950's) so this film is to be cherished, particularly for it being in color. One may regret so much footage is devoted to showing her artwork but one must remember back in 1950 there were no lavish, full color books of her art and probably the general public saw it, if anywhere, on the greeting cards and other ephemera that reproduced her work or the occasional magazine article with often B&W photographs. Still, there must be plenty of unused footage of Grandma taken for this film (there is quite a variety of different footage, even in different seasons here), one hopes it is preserved somewhere. It is curious though why Grandma's voice is used so sparingly here, she was quite a capable and interesting interviewee as can be heard on the excellent 1956 radio program BIOGRAPHIES IN SOUND available at archive.org.

You can currently view this film on youtube and the Folkstreams website.