And what shall I say?! She has directed a very subtle documentary, that at once manages to enlight several layers of one story. The most important one is one man's, Lloyd Sullivan's, battle to establish the "scientific" proof that a portrait, known as the Sanders portrait, that he had inherited, was in fact representing Shakespeare. Yet there is much more to be learned here and this is how art nowadays has become a commercial product like any other and that by those objective scientific proofs a lot of money can be gained and lost, depending on the outcome. Furthermore on yet another level national resentiment and pride gets involved when Sanders portrait challenges by its existence the authenticity of the National Portrait Gallery's own Chandos portrait, for Lloyd Sullivan's family had moved to Canada. Revealing how the representatives of the British institution save themselves by repeating tautologies like a mantra, without giving any substantial reason, they are merely saying that the Sanders portrait cannot be Shakespeare because it cannot be :-). First when I had watched only the first 16 minutes of the movie I was reminded of another battle I had been reading about, one of ideologies, between Martin Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro. In this case Jacques Derrida stated that the actual issue of their feud, The Pair of Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh and also Van Gogh himself had become a revenant, a spectre, a ghost in the process...
At this point I would suggest for anybody, having become interested by this post and the mysterious smile of the man in the Sanders portrait, represented on the scan accompanying this uttering, to use the following link http://www.informactionfilms.com/en/productions/battle-of-wills.php and order a copy. It "stars" also people like Joseph Fiennes, Simon Callow, Gregory Doran and Michael Pennington.
Bonne chance to Lloyd Sullivan and Anne Henderson, and this about tells where my personal sympathies lie...
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