Document Type
Essay
Language
English (en)
Publication Date
2026
Special Collections
Film & Media Archive
Description
The documentary collective Kartemquin Films was founded in 1966 in Chicago and dedicated itself to bringing critical social issues onto the big screen. Early movies such as Now We Live on Clifton (1974), which dealt with inequality and displacement in Chicago neighborhoods, The Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976), calling out the forced closure of an important women's healthcare unit, and The Last Pullman Car (1983), which followed the conflict between labor unions and corporations at the Pullman railroad car factory, show Kartemquin's commitment to portraying pressing issues. Their movies often focus on a single protagonist and follow them over sometimes even years, allowing the audience to witness the protagonist's development and experiences, in the tradition of cinéma vérité.
Thus, it may have seemed peculiar when founders Jerry Temaner and Gordon Quinn, and core member Jerry Blumenthal, wanted to make a film about Leon Golub, a Chicago-born painter, political activist, and figurative expressionist born in 1922. The film Golub shadows Golub's artistic process from 1985 to 1987, emphasizing his engagement with power, violence, and social injustice. Known for his large-scale canvases, Golub often used photographs of warfare, political events, sports figures, or even sadomasochistic pornography as compositional references, transforming them into paintings that confront viewers with the raw mechanisms of domination and aggression. Golub saw his work as "reportage painting," a form of visual testimony. His art was deeply influenced by his commitment to social justice and his belief that painting could serve as a moral and political act, much as Kartemquin thought about the influence of their cinematic work. It seemed like a good fit since both Kartemquin and Leon Golub denounce social injustices. The documentary situates Golub as both artist and political commentator, emphasizing the ethical and moral stakes of representing violence in art. Kartemquin Films describes its approach as a combination of "straightforward cinéma-vérité and analytical narrative." In Golub, this approach manifests in extended sequences of the painter at work, intercut with documentary material on war and torture, and interviews and reflections that reveal both Golub's technique and his intellectual framework.
Recommended Citation
Thielecke, Frauke, "Between Brushstroke and Cut: Editing Leon Golub's Persona in Kartemquin's Golub (1988)" (2026). Mendel Sato Research Award Projects. 12.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/msrae/12
Comments
Mendel Sato Research Award 2026, Graduate student