William Kurelek's The Maze

This article is about the documentary film. For the painting, see The Maze.

William Kurelek's The Maze
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Robert M. Young David Grubin
Produced by	Stanley Plotnick Irwin Young (executive producers) Nick Young Zack Young
Starring	William Kurelek
Cinematography	Robert M. Young
Edited by	David Grubin Zack Young Nick Young Roger Cohen
Music by	Nick Young Zack Young
Production company	MACHINEYES
Release date	October 12, 2011 (2011-10-12) (Mill Valley)
Running time	65 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

William Kurelek's The Maze is a documentary film about the life of celebrated Canadian artist William Kurelek, dramatically told through his paintings and his on-camera revelations. The film takes an intimate look into the artist's struggles with attempted suicide and a self-professed “spiritual crisis.” Kurelek describes his work The Maze as “a painting of the inside of [his] skull which [he] painted while in England as a patient in Maudsley and Netherne psychiatric hospitals.” Kurelek’s surrealistic painting, featured in the film, depicts a man’s unraveled head lying in a wheat field. A curled up laboratory rat, representing his spirit, is trapped inside a maze of unhappy thoughts and memories.

Story

William Kurelek (1927-1977) was the son of Ukrainian immigrants who brought their old-world views to their new home in Canada. Although clearly a budding artist as a child, William’s ability was ridiculed by his father, who did not see the worth of his interests. The self-doubt his father instilled in William led to suicidal despair and institutionalization. William spent a year in a British mental hospital and didn’t overcome his spiritual and emotional crisis until he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957. Ultimately, Kurelek made a name for himself as a landscape painter and a highly regarded illustrator of children’s books.

Kurelek reflects on his artistic development under the disapproving eyes of his tyrannical father. Many paintings besides The Maze are featured in the film, and the camera draws sharp focus on the minutiae of detail in his works. The sometimes disturbing images are made all the more evocative by the insights shared by Kurelek and others, including three psychiatrists and a priest. Members of Kurelek’s family are also interviewed, including his wife, sister, mother, and father, who begrudgingly admits pride in his son’s success, though he would still have preferred a more masculine and lucrative occupation for William.

Production

Primary Version

In 1969, director Robert M. Young was asked to make a film about psychotic art by Cornell University professor James Maas. When Young saw Kurelek's painting The Maze in Maas' slide collection, he knew he had to make a film about the man who painted it. “What was so remarkable about this painting to me,” says Young, “was that I felt I was looking into someone's mind. It had in it his sexuality, his fears, his questions about whether he was really even human... a self awareness and understanding that he was being observed by doctors and [a curiosity] as to whether or not he was mental... It’s a painting that really encompasses very much in a person’s life.”

Partnered with filmmaker David Grubin, Robert M. Young traveled to London to document the hospitals where Kurelek had stayed, and the doctors who treated him. Eventually he made his way to Canada, to interview Kurelek himself, and his family. A short version of the film, titled The Maze: The Story of William Kurelek, was finished in 1969 for educational classes, to help demonstrate the strong relationship between art and psychology. In 1972, the American Film Festival named this version outstanding educational documentary of the year, and it went on to be studied and used in classrooms.

A longer and more complex version of the film was worked on in the editing room but was never completed and became lost.

Resurrection

Over 40 years later, the longer version was recovered and brought to life by Robert M. Young’s sons, Nick Young and Zack Young, through their company MACHINEYES. They have expanded the film by editing in the lost footage (much of it following Kurelek's father, Dmytro), adding an original score, and using modern visual effects to animate the characters and figures of the painting. “We feel that the longer version of the film that the public has yet to see gives a much deeper insight into Kurelek’s story,” says Nick. “We’ve been able to track down just about all of the paintings in the original film as well as others and have rephotographed them with equipment that was not available to our father when he made the original film. There is so much detail and hidden meaning in these paintings and WIlliam Kurelek’s story becomes all the more compelling when one experiences in High Definition what a masterful artist he was.”

Composing a Score

Brothers Nick and Zack Young also comprise the Los Angeles-based rock band A.i. (once signed to Dreamworks and now independent – aimusic.com). Nick and Zack researched what music Kurelek listened to while painting to help develop the right musical themes and tonalities that were authentic to his art. “We explored traditional Ukrainian folk music and Ukrainian instruments, as well as Beethoven,” says Zack Young, “This music organically melded with Kurelek’s aesthetic and helped blur the lines between the old interview footage and the new high res paintings… between reality and what Kurelek called 'unreality.' We also wrote an A.i. song for the end credits titled "Someone With Me," which is named after Kurelek’s autobiography.”