A double feature of documentaries in this year's Telecom NZ International Film Festivals explore the range and diversity of what is 'art' today. Questions for Mr Reynolds - a profile of NZ artist John Reynolds - and The Comics Show are both directed by Shirley Horrocks, whose previous films include profiles of Marti Friedlander and Albert Wendt.

Image: Artist John ReynoldsA double feature of documentaries in this year's Telecom NZ International Film Festivals explore the range and diversity of what is 'art' today. Questions for Mr Reynolds - a profile of NZ artist John Reynolds - and The Comics Show are both directed by Shirley Horrocks, whose previous films include profiles of Marti Friedlander and Albert Wendt.

Image: Artist John ReynoldsReynolds a 'painter without a brush'

Questions for Mr Reynolds is a profile of John Reynolds, one of the most important New Zealanders in the arts today. Reynolds represented our country at the last Sydney Biennale and was recently made a Laureate by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.

Says producer/director Horrocks: "John is an artist who constantly surprises as he brings his imagination to bear on such a wide range of materials - from paint to fabric to architecture to native trees. He is involved in re-inventing the nature of painting. As he puts it: 'I'm a painter who uses every tool except a paint brush."

Horrocks's documentary tracks Reynolds through an extraordinary year, during which he creates a huge painted work in Sydney called Cloud, makes drawings for the iconic NZ Swanndri range, collaborates with architects to design a hotel in Auckland, tattoos a friend, appears as a character in a popular cartoon series, does Samuel-Beckett-style performances in a bizarre camouflage suit, and makes extraordinary large-scale landscape works in Otago and the Kaipara.

With total access behind the scenes, the documentary shows us how Reynolds conceives and develops his adventurous projects, and how he manages to combine all this with a busy family life. There is also a fascinating personal history, including the story of 'John's Diner', the legendary Auckland cafe that he ran in the early '80s, and an account of how he supported himself in the early years as a photographer for local magazines.

Commissioned by TVNZ for the Artsville series, Questions for Mr Reynolds is the latest of Horrocks's memorable profiles of New Zealand writers and artists. Her films have included Marti (about Marti Friedlander), Early Days Yet (Allen Curnow), and The New Oceania (Albert Wendt).

Highly creative subculture revealed in The Comics Show

The other film in Horrocks's double feature is The Comics Show. The writing and drawing of comic books has remained a little-known and under-rated area of New Zealand culture, and Horrocks reveals it to us as a highly creative subculture with a rich local history.

Despite a moral panic about comics in the '40s and '50s (recalled here by Eric Resetar, the grand old man of local comics), later decades brought us the exciting counter-culture work of Barry Linton and the other artists of Strips magazine (such as Dick Frizzell and Grant Major), the new directions taken by women artists such as Coco and Pritika, and the publication of long-form 'graphic novels' such as Ant Sang's Dharma Punks (to happen soon) and Dylan Horrocks's Hicksville.

There are now comics for all ages and interests. Comics have links with animation and with music (as Chris Knox demonstrates). This highly entertaining and visually inventive film (also a TVNZ commission for the Artsville series) takes us from Auckland street culture, to Wellington's 'Eric Awards', to a do-it-yourself comic collective. This is an unexpected, eye-opening arts documentary with broad appeal.

"Public interest in the announcement by Peter Jackson that he will be filming some of the Tintin comic books by Belgian artist Herge provides a great opportunity to draw attention to the existence of New Zealand's own talented comic book artists and writers," says Horrocks.

"Not surprisingly, there's a Tintin connection in my documentary as Tim Bollinger relates the story of how he once made a pilgrimage to Herge's studio, where he was welcomed but also told that New Zealanders needed to make their own local comics, to try to match what Belgium had achieved in this field. Since then New Zealand comic artists have made a lot of progress towards meeting that challenge."

For screenings times, visit the Telcom NZ International Film Festivals website.