Belly of the Beast and Aggie
“Without empathy, there can be no justice,” says one of the art world luminaries interviewed in the documentary Aggie, about arts patron and social activist Agnes Gund. Wise words for these times, and the crux of both Aggie and another new documentary, Belly of the Beast, about the legal battle to stop forced sterilizations of incarcerated women.
The two films are set worlds apart — in New York society circles and in the California state prison system — but they intersect at a vital point of empathy. In each, a white woman, moved by compassion, puts her privilege to work to help people in prison. Gund, 81, the former president of the world-class Museum of Modern Art, sold a precious masterpiece by Roy Lichtenstein for $165 million in 2017 to set up a fund to support criminal justice reform, while Cynthia Chandler, a young lawyer, co-founded Justice Now to give imprisoned women legal recourse to improve their lives.
Aggie begins and ends with Gund’s prison bequest, but in between it’s a whirlwind tour of the contemporary art world, where Gund used her considerable inherited wealth to support both living artists and MoMA. Along the way, she also became an early AIDS activist and funded an ongoing art-in-schools program, among many causes to which she contributed. The film is directed by Gund’s daughter, Catherine Gund, and is slim on the details of their family’s personal life. Since Gund herself is a reluctant and colorless interview subject, her daughter set her up with more than 20 art world figures — from obscure painters to director John Waters — to try to draw out her philosophy and recollections, an effort that’s only partially successful but provides a parade of eccentric personalities.
As the movie shifts from topic to topic, it offers glimpses of hundreds of (mostly) modern artworks, largely unidentified. For contemporary art scholars and dabblers, it will be a thrilling clip show. For the rest of us, it’s an intriguing tease. (Ditto the photos and video clips of unnamed artists and socialites.) Mostly, it’s a remarkable portrait of a humble, determined woman whose entire life has demonstrated the endless good that can be harvested from a rich father’s millions.
In contrast, the central figure in Belly of the Beast is Kelli Dillon, a young woman of color incarcerated for killing her abusive husband, then sterilized against her will during a medical procedure. It’s an awful story sympathetically told, followed by her long quest for justice, which leads her to Chandler. Director Erika Cohn is an adept filmmaker who adheres to traditional doc structure, gradually bringing in other women with similar stories, and even the physicians who operated on them. The film is both horrifying and uplifting — an appropriate combination for the cultural moment.
Each documentary is relatively short, making for a good evening’s double feature of social ills redressed, and the arc of history bending toward justice.
Both films: B-plus. Unrated but parental guidance recommended. Both available through Grail Moviehouse’s Virtual Sofa Cinema streaming service. Belly of the Beast also available through Fine Arts Theatre’s Virtual Cinema streaming service.
