Love Bite: Laurie Lipton and Her Disturbing Black & White Drawings
2016 · 35m
Directed by James Scott
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark, darkly comic
A short documentary portrait of artist Laurie Lipton, whose macabre, hyper-detailed black-and-white drawings blend the sinister, the sardonic and the taboo.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A documentary about an artist making disturbing drawings could've been a snooze—instead Scott treats the form itself as complicit, letting Lipton's obsessive process become the real subject, which is genuinely unsettling in ways the subject matter alone isn't.
Scott situates this portrait within the lineage of artist documentaries that foreground the work itself as philosophical text, using measured pacing and the grammar of black-and-white imagery to mirror Lipton's own aesthetic—it's formally aware in the best sense.
The decision to let the camera linger on Lipton's hands during the drawing process—that tremor, that precision—does more to communicate her psychology than any interview could; it's the kind of subtle directorial restraint that transforms a 35-minute doc into something tactile and haunting.
Reviews
The 34-minute film, named a Vimeo Staff Pick, is free of charge on the platform. The film, which first caught my eye at the SXSW Film Festival in 2016, is one of my favorite short documentaries of recent years - which says something about my own taste in art, but also the skill of the filmmaker.