“C. Scott Willis’s probing, nonjudgmental documentary…
reveals grief supplanted by fierce competition with a ghost.”
– Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice
“Delicately constructed, marvelous to look at and poignantly elegiac. A portrait of the late photographer via her images – which are marvelous. Willis gives wide and beautifully composed exposure to the work of all the Woodmans, a family whose guiding ethos was art, all the time. (Francesca) was ahead of her time, creating dreamy, multilayered, confessional photographic art in which she stripped herself, physically and psychologically with no small amount to nerve. (Her parents) are also at time brutally frank, admitting to a kind of competitive relationship with their late daughter… a figure of romantic tragedy and commercial viability.”
– John Anderson, Variety
“Francesca Woodman, the astonishing photographer best known for taking spooky, often nude self-portraits and then her own life at the age of 22 in 1981. This seductive narrative lays out Woodman’s epigrammatic journals, photographs and videos as clues in a self-murder mystery. Wrenching.”
– Logan Hill, New York magazine
“Captivating. Methodical and bewitching. The story of an artist come undone and a family’s coolly examined complicity in it. For photography neophytes, Woodman’s pictures will be a revelation.”
– Hilary Elkins, GQ
“Oddly gripping. Honors her brief career in innovative fashion, and captures how this unusual family coped with extraordinary tragedy.”
– Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com
“Woodman’s haunting photographs and experimental videos of nudes – often herself – draped in wallpaper or birch bark or on a bed of scorched earth, are remarkably contemporary, so much so that 30 years after her suicide, the art world remains transfixed at the notion of her.”
– Joy Dietrich, New York Times Style magazine online
Francesca Woodman’s haunting B&W images, many of them nude self-portraits, now reside in the pantheon of great photography from the late 20th century. The daughter of artists Betty and George Woodman (she a ceramicist and he a painter/ photographer), Francesca was a precocious RISD graduate, who came to New York with the intention of setting the art world on fire. But in 1981, as a despondent 22-year-old, she committed suicide. THE WOODMANS beautifully interweaves the young artist’s work (including experimental videos and diary passages) with interviews with the parents who have nurtured her professional reputation these past 30 years, while continuing to make art of their own in the face of tragedy. The film grapples with disturbing issues, among them: parent-child competition and the toxic level of ambition that fuels the New York art scene. Says Betty Woodman succinctly: “She’s the famous artist and we’re the famous artist’s family.”
http://www.filmforum.org/films/woodmans.html
Wednesday, January 19 – Tuesday, February 1
Tickets available online beginning January 12
Previous posts featuring Francesca’s work
Much more via Ingleby Gallery
Wikipedia bio
r3ckon 
