Film Festival 09 - The Man In The Hat
The Man in the Hat
New Zealand 2009, 73m
Director: Luit Bieringa
There's an airy spirit of existential enquiry floating through Luit
Bieringa's lovely portrait of Wellington art-dealer Peter McLeavey.
A fundamental biographer's question - what makes this guy tick? -
is quietly turned back on us by a subject who seems to live out a
highly ordered daily existence in a state of perpetual curiosity
about what makes any of us tick, himself included, in this corner
of the world. Starting out as a dealer from his bedroom flat in
1966, McLeavey was already championing Toss Woollaston, Colin
McCahon and Gordon Walters as purveyors of vision informed by New
Zealand experience. He opened his two-room dealer gallery at 147
Cuba Street in 1968. Forty years and 500 or so exhibitions later
he's still there. Cinematographer Leon Narbey follows the dapper
man in a hat from his home in Hill Street on the circuitous scenic
route he takes each morning to work. Bieringa intersperses this
lyrical picture of McLeavey's Wellington with readings from his
correspondence and frank, revealing conversations with the man
himself.
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