Jack Wise: Language of the Brush
1998 · 43m · Canada
Directed by David Rimmer
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Artist Jack Wise and filmmaker David Rimmer finally make their long-planned film together a year before Wise's death, as Wise discusses calligraphy, mandalas and his spiritual journey while working in his studio.
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A deathbed documentary that could've been maudlin hagiography becomes something stranger—Rimmer treats Wise's spiritual cosmology with the same formal distance he'd use on any subject, which somehow makes the mandala obsession and calligraphy philosophy more unsettling, not less.
Rimmer's restraint here is a masterclass in the essay film tradition: letting studio footage breathe, trusting Wise's own words to carry the spiritual weight, refusing the obvious emotional beats that would flatten this into biography-as-eulogy—this is cinema as elegy done with real craft.
The decision to let long stretches of brush work happen in real time, unmarked by conventional documentary scoring or narrative push, transforms what could've been a talking-head portrait into something hypnotic—Rimmer understood that watching Wise's hands move was the actual film.