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Last week -- Friday, February 18, to be exact -- I trekked down to Boston for the New England premiere of Fred Barney Taylor's film The Polymath, or, The Life & Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. I'd seen it a few years ago at its premiere at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and more recently on DVD, but Fred and Chip were both going to be at the Boston event, and I was curious to see the Q&A, since Chip hadn't been able to be at the TFF premiere, and I was interested to see what sorts of things the audience would want to discuss.

The DVD version, which is what was shown in Boston, is different from the TFF version, and, I'm told, from the version that won the Best Documentary Feature award at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The editing is, to my eyes, smoother; there are fewer title cards; there's some new footage; and the whole film has been through additional post-production color correction, which I found most noticeable (in a good way) during the lyrical/abstract composite shots. I hadn't particularly liked those shots in the TFF cut, finding them muddy and, frankly, kitschy -- but then when I saw the DVD version, I thought, "Oh, that's what they were going for!" The effect is beautiful. Fred said that aside from the need for color correction, there had also been an additional problem at TFF -- the festival had insisted on everything being projected in high def, and the vast majority of The Polymath was shot on a standard def camera (a Sony PD-150 -- the same camera, in fact, that David Lynch used to film Inland Empire) and hadn't been converted to HD. An SD source projected as HD is ... less than ideal.

So I am happy to say that the version of The Polymath available for sale, and shown in Boston, is a significant improvement over the first cut I saw, both in terms of content and video quality. The pieces hold together more coherently, and flow into each other more clearly. It's not a standard documentary, and that requires some adjustment for anybody who goes in expecting something like A&E's Biography, but that's a strength, because what the film gives us, rather than a linear, then-he-did-this-then-he-did-that portrait, is a sense of Delany's many interests and knowledges, the turns of his mind. The title is brilliantly apt, both in finding some of the few labels that can, I think, adhere without too much torture to the man (polymath, gentleman), and in hinting at what the film offers (the life & opinions of).

It's a film that, I find, gains a lot from at least a second viewing -- partly because of my interest in Delany, and my knowledge of his life and works, viewing it the first time was just a way to see what's included, and it was especially difficult to assess the film then. Repeated viewings have made it clear to me that this probably isn't just a result of my own peculiarities; it's a densely-packed film, artfully constructed.

The bonus disc of the DVD offers even more -- not just the full version of Delany's own film, The Orchid in an excellent transfer, but also over two hours of extra intervie

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