 |
July 4, 2009 |
  |
Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
|
|
by Maitland McDonagh |
|
No-one ever suggested that photographers are AWOL from movies: It's just that they're mostly confined to the periphery, like the sneaky surveillance shooters we forget the minute they're done moving the plot along. You don't see much of them, but the montage of grainy, high-contrast B&W photos that makes everyone look haunted and deeply suspect is a thriller cliché. Admit it: Can't you see the succession of still frames in your mind's eye, and hear the high-speed whir of the auto-advance and the click, click, click of the shutter? Or consider the paparazzi, who didn't have so much as a name by which to be reviled until Federico Fellini christened them in his darkly glittering La Dolce Vita (1961). Fellini invented Paparazzo (Walter Santesso) and made him part of a roving swarm of photographers on scooters who descend on bored jet setters, international film stars and stunned crime victims, flashbulbs popping like fireworks. The rest is tabloid history, though it took more than 40 years for Paparazzo's children to get their name in the title, and the thriller Paparazzi (2004) is hardly flattering. Produced by Mel Gibson, it's dedicated to poor, victimized boldface names who find themselves relentlessly persecuted by camera-wielding terrorists who tarnish their flawless personas by catching them naked, drunk, out of shape, disorderly, unkempt, making faces, doing something ill-considered or, better still, illegal, is. Boo hoo hoo: If spoiled, spin-controlling Hollywood stars hate the paparazzi that much, the paparazzi must be doing something right. While fiction films in which photographers take center stage are relatively rare, they run the gamut from thrillers to comedies and even musicals.
Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock could never resist a smutty image, and macho newsmagazine "camera bum" L.B. Jeffries' (James Stewart) long, long lens fairly begs the question "how big is it?" Laid up after an accident while trying to get that unique, middle-of-the-action shot of a road race, the wheelchair-bound Jeffries takes to peeping innocently from his two-room apartment on West 9th Street at his eccentric Greenwich Village neighbors. But Jeffries' through-the-lens window shopping makes him privy to a disquieting mystery: What became of the invalid wife of the henpecked salesman across the courtyard (Raymond Burr)? The voyeurism that for which Hitchcock's films are famous reaches a glorious apotheosis in this adaptation of noir novelist Cornell Woolrich's 1942 novelette It Had to Be Murder, and the climax hinges on the blinding power of vintage flashbulbs. Some 20 years later, Rear Window's climax found an echo in the eerie made-for-TV chiller Don't be Afraid of the Dark (1973), about a high-strung young wife (Kim Darby) terrorized by malicious supernatural creatures who run riot in the blackness, When they finally come for her during a blackout, her only defense is the flashcube on her Kodak Instamatic.  Super-chic fashion photographer Laura Mars (Fay Dunaway), whose divinely decadent shots of bruised beauties in slutty skirts and sky-high heels are the toast of '80s New York, has a problem. Actually, two: Someone who's deeply offended by her work is murdering her friends, and she's started having premonitory visions of the vicious killings. If Laura's provocative pictures look familiar, it's because they're modeled closely on work by the notorious Helmut Newton (1920-2004), who elevated fetish images to the level of high commercial art. Directed with sleekly stylish aplomb by Irvin Kershner and co-written by John Carpenter, the film features Newton's own photos in the chi-chi art gallery sequence; commercial photographer/filmmaker Rebecca Blake shot the original images, many of which later appeared in her 1984 book Forbidden Dreams.  John Waters' gentle fable revolves around a sweet Baltimore shutterbug named Pecker (Edward Furlong) – mind out of the gutter: His granny gave his nickname because he used to peck at his food like a little bird. And he doesn't mean to epater le bourgeois with his pictures: He just points his battered little camera at the people and things he sees everyday, from rude lesbian bar owners and strip-tease boys to copulating rats and cockroaches in french fries. Next stop: Trendy downtown New York, where jaded scene makers embrace Pecker as Diane Arbus with a heart. And speaking of Arbus, Nicole Kidman plays her in Steven Shainberg's upcoming biopic Fur, which opens in November 2006.  Famous for its steamy photo-session scene featuring '60s style icon Veruschka in a barely-there beaded dress, Michaelangelo Antonioni's stylish existential thriller revolves around a photographer (David Hemmings) who divides his time between glossy magazine spreads and gritty reportage. He gets lost in a mystery without a solution, sparked by series of innocent-seeming snapshots of a woman and her boyfriend in a park -- enlarged until grain pushes the image to near-abstraction, the background seems to include a half-hidden body and a man with a gun. Though the screenplay was adapted from a short story by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, Hemmings' character was modeled on David Bailey, who defined Swinging London with his shots of rock stars, first-generation supermodels like Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree, movie stars and glam East End gangsters Reg and Ronnie Kray. Dive into 1999's David Bailey: Birth of the Cool for a look at his trend-setting pictures.  A single vintage image of a nude young woman reclining on a wicker chaise lounge, made by enigmatic photographer E.J. Bellocq (1873-1949), inspired Francois Truffaut's lush, controversial story about prostitutes in early 20th-century New Orleans. It made a star of pouty, 12-year-old Brooke Shields -- the "pretty baby" born in a brothel and raised in the red-light district of Storeyville -- and featured Keith Carradine as a highly-fictionalized version of Bellocq. A commercial photographer, Bellocq also shot a series of haunting formal portraits of Big Easy brothel workers – at least, they're as formal as portraits of naked and half-dressed sex workers can be. Most of Belloq's work was destroyed after his death, but the glass plate negatives of his Storyville portraits survived and were bought by two local antique dealers. In 1966, noted photographer Lee Friedlander bought the negatives and made a series of prints that reopened Bellocq's window into Storyville's velvet underground.  The early career of legendary photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004), who alternated between high-gloss fashion work and boldly intimate portraits inspired Stanley Donen's classic musical, with songs by Roger Edens, Leonard Gershe and Ira Gershwin, Fred Astaire as Avedon stand-in "Dick Avery" and Audrey Hepburn playing the beatnik chick he transforms into an haute couture mannequin. Avedon supplied many of the film's photos, including the famous, artfully over-exposed image that reduces Hepburn's to its glorious essentials: luminous eyes, pert nose, tantalizing mouth. The bonus: Kay Thompson (co-creator of poor little rich brat Eloise, terror of the venerable Plaza Hotel) as uber-editrix Maggie Prescott (shades of Vogue's imperious Diana Vreeland) and her show-stopping delivery on "Think Pink" – if there's another musical number about editorial planning, I've never seen it, and there could be no better. Art for Teachers of Children (1995):  Jennifer Montgomery's indie feature revolves around a 14-year-old high school student who first models nude for her much-older photography teacher and then enters into a lengthy affair with him. Montgomery, a photographer who teaches at Cooper Union School of Art in New York, modeled as a teenager for Jock Sturges, whose nudes of children and adolescents (like those of Sally Mann), has provoked heated debate about the distinction between art and child pornography. Sturges' studio was raided by the FBI in 1990 (the case was eventually dismissed by a grand jury) and though Montgomery declined to participate in the subsequent investigation, this film poses thorny ethical questions with a disconcertingly cool detatchment. The 1999 film Guinevere explores some of the same territory in a less provocative way, but features fine performances by Canadian actress Sarah Polley, as a Harvard-bound teenager, and Stephen Rea as the hard-drinking, down-on-his-luck art photographer who christens her his new "Guinevere" – the name he bestows on all his young muses.  Richard Franklin's period drama draws on the stranger-than-fiction life and career of Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), better known as Weegee, and spins a noir tale about tabloid photographer Leon "The Great Bernzini" Bernstein (pugnacious Joe Pesci, who bears a striking resemblance to Fellig), chronicler of low life and high times in WWII-era New York. Weegee established his reputation with you-are-there shots of dead gangsters, disorderly tramps and urban disasters; his nickname, the most-repeated story goes, is a phonetic spelling of "ouija," because he seemed to have a preternatural ability to be where the action was. Weegee later went Hollywood, shot for Vogue and Life and ever starred as himself in The Imp-probable Mr. Wee Gee (1966), a nudie-cutie/pseudo documentary that beggars description. Pesci's Barzini, a thwarted artist, falls for a duplicitous society dame (Barbara Hershy) and gets entangled in a Mafia turf war: the self-mythologizing Weegee would have loved it. Salvador (1986) and Under Fire (1983):   These two films pose the same moral question: It's a journalist's job to shoot war, starvation and misery, but how much can a decent person watch before being compelled to intervene? Real-life journalist and photographer Richard Boyle wrote the screenplay for Stone's Salvador, based on his own globe-trotting experiences; it begins as the unemployed Boyle (James Woods, in a stunning performance) is persuaded he can make some fast cash covering a "little guerilla war" in El Salvador – it's just a few short steps to "the horror, the horror." Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire takes place in the Republic of Nicaragua at the tail end of Anastasio Somoza's regime; war photographer Russell Price (Nick Nolte) stars out declaring, "I don’t take sides, I take pictures," and winds up the unwitting pawn of a charismatic rebel leader. Salvador is the marginally better film, but both ask hard questions and avoid easy answers about the ethics of journalism during war time and the scathing power of images.
This largely forgotten musical stars rubber-limbed song-and-dance man Donald O'Connor (famed for his acrobatic antics in Singing in the Rain's bravura "Make 'em Laugh" sequence) as an aspiring photographer/gofer at LOOK magazine, where he answers to hard-drinking, two-fisted lensman Mr. Mergo (Jim Backus, of Gilligan's Island fame), who thinks nothing of snatching a bone from a caged lion to ensure a dramatic shot. The complications begin when the smitten Melvin rashly promises aspiring actress Debbie Reynolds a cover story. From the 1930s until the 1970s, Life and LOOK magazines ruled the American photojournalism roost: The film's songs are undistinguished and the story is trifling, but LOOK never looked lovelier.  Veteran English director Michael Powell's thriller about scopophilia and murder ruined his career, but found a second life after Martin Scorsese championed it. Disturbed photographer and filmmaker Mark Lewis (Karl Boehm) works as a focus puller by day and takes nudie pictures on the side, but his real obsession is murdering women and capturing their terror on film. Though more about film than still photography, Peeping Tom's pin-up photography sequences are marvelously evocative of a time and place in erotic photography. The studio, with its elaborate flats, is in a small apartment above a cigar store whose proprietor sells naughty "views" under the counter -- and they feature Pamela Green, a real-life '50s pin-up model who still commands a formidable legion of fans. Maitland McDonagh is the senior movies editor of TVGuide.com (as well as the site's resident FlickChick and the author of the newly published Movie Lust: Recommended Viewing for Every Mood, Moment and Reason a collection of essays in the Top 12 Photographers in Film vein.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© 2002 - 2009 Take Great Pictures |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
