The fine art of survival

When artist Julian Schnabel made his film directing debut in 1996 with “Basquiat,” there was reason to be skeptical. Two of his peers, David Salle and Robert Longo, had turned from painting to filmmaking the previous year with features (“Search and Destroy” and “Johnny Mnemonic”) that could kindly be called unpromising. (Neither has directed since.)

The notoriously blustery Schnabel, who came to symbolize the cultural and economic inflation of the 1980s art world, had all the makings of a dilettante director, the kind prone to ego trips and vanity projects. But a dozen years and three movies into his career, with a best director prize from the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for directing, he is beloved by critics and respected by the industry.

Even more surprising, Schnabel has made a specialty of the biopic, a form that depends on empathy, the very opposite of self-absorption.

Schnabel’s films -- “Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls” (2000), and last year’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” out on DVD from Miramax this week -- are stories of cruelly curtailed lives. Not only is Schnabel respectful of his artist-heroes -- and these are all unmistakably heroic films -- he seems willing to absorb their aesthetic strategies.

“Basquiat” (Miramax) recounts the meteoric rise and flameout of Schnabel’s friend and rival, the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and it owes a little to its subject’s jazzy neo-Expressionist style. Jeffrey Wright, excellent in his first major film role, plays Basquiat as something of a lamb to the slaughter, seduced by careerist predators.

Refusing to analyze the artist or even his art, Schnabel offers instead a wry insider’s perspective. Gary Oldman shows up as a pajama-wearing Schnabel surrogate, and the director populates his movie as if compiling a party guest list. Dennis Hopper and Parker Posey play gallery wheeler-dealers, Christopher Walken’s journalist contributes the most vivid scene (a telling interview with the artist), and David Bowie attempts a wholly unconvincing Andy Warhol impersonation.

An ethereal portrait of the late gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, “Before Night Falls” (New Line), like “Basquiat,” laments the tragedy of a singular talent beaten down by an inhospitable environment -- in this case the homophobic Castro regime. Approximating the lyrical quality of Arenas’ writing, the film has the slightly disembodied feel of a reverie, a touch incongruous given the harsh details of his life, from his incarceration to his battle with AIDS. Schnabel again indulges in his weakness for flashy cameos (Sean Penn, Johnny Depp in a dual role), but it’s basically a one-man show, rooted in Javier Bardem’s tender, expansive performance as Arenas.

The heroes of “Basquiat” and “Before Night Falls” are trapped both by circumstance and by matters of identity (race, sexuality). The imprisonment faced by the French writer Jean-Dominique Bauby in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is more literal and almost unfathomably complete.

After suffering a stroke that left his entire body paralyzed save for his left eye, Bauby wrote a memoir -- or, more precisely, dictated it by blinking in code, one letter at a time. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski compel the viewer to identify with their subject by imagining what he sees; much of the film unfolds from his point of view.

This device produces the intended claustrophobia. It’s a shamelessly aestheticized film -- Bauby’s field of vision is notable for its impeccable art direction and steady stream of beautiful women (wife, lover, speech therapist) -- but also often a moving one.

An auteur in the traditional sense, Schnabel has developed a set of recurring themes in his small but coherent body of work. Most striking among them, perhaps, is the romantic notion of art as a tool of self-preservation. It is the process of creating that, at least for a time, keeps these men alive.