Daily Archives: Tuesday, August 11, 2015

  • Finding Vivian Maier

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Maloof and Charlie Siskel (2013)

    She ended her life a ‘dumpster diver’ in the Chicago suburb where she lived but Vivian Maier has become, posthumously, an internationally renowned photographer.  I knew that her work had been discovered only recently; and that these recent events and Maier’s life story were thought interesting enough for John Maloof and Charlie Siskel to make this documentary.  I didn’t know how big a name she’d become in the photography world – and I think Maloof and Siskel’s film was a stronger experience for me as a result of this ignorance.   Finding Vivian Maier is fascinating, the first half entirely and especially so.  In 2007, Maloof, aged only twenty-six but a veteran of auctions (since childhood), bought a collection of prints and negatives at an auction house sale, hoping they might include something useful for a book about Portage Park in Chicago on which he was working.   The lot included some 30,000 pictures, in print or negative form.  When Maloof googled the name of the photographer, Vivian Maier, he drew a blank – and continued to do so until he discovered an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune shortly after her death, at the age of eighty-three, in April 2009.  Maloof is an agreeable scene-setter and narrative companion; his growing obsession with Maier is absorbing too but not nearly so absorbing as the statistics of what he eventually acquired.  The lot originally bought proved to be the tip of an iceberg.  Maloof’s eventual haul[1] comprised close to 150,000 negatives, more than 3,000 prints, hundreds of rolls of film, home movies, and audio tape interviews that Vivian conducted, asking supermarket shoppers what they thought of big political issues of the day, and so on.

    Vivian Maier, who spent most of her working life as a nanny and housekeeper, was an inveterate and seemingly indiscriminate hoarder.  Inside the suitcases and trunk she left behind were, along with her prodigious photographic input, numerous travel tickets (for journeys both local and international – she visited many countries in her youth), multifarious receipts, all sorts of bric-à-brac.  And newspapers:  one of her ex-employers, interviewed by Maloof and Siskel, describes how the mountains of these not only occupied every inch of space in Maier’s living quarters but also encroached on other parts of the family home.   The film-makers’ selection of newspaper headlines suggests that Vivian had a particular interest in sensational and violent crimes.   But, from the start, the drop-in-the-ocean examples of her street photography tell a different, larger story.   The talking heads in Finding Vivian Maier also include two eminent photographers, Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark, who commend Maier’s eye for eccentricity and tragedy, and the compassionate quality present in much of her work.  Meyerowitz helpfully explains that the Rolleiflex camera Maier favoured was ideal for covert photography on the streets of Chicago (and, earlier in her life, New York):  the Rolleiflex user shoots ‘upwards’ rather than at the level of what’s being photographed.   While a good many of her subjects were therefore caught on camera unawares, it’s clear from the startled or hostile expressions of some that they realised just too late what Maier was doing.  Two middle-aged women, one of her former charges and the latter’s girlhood friend, describe how embarrassed they were by Maier’s inevitable camera, how they sometimes wanted to ‘hit her over the head with it’.  And Meyerowitz himself, in one of his later comments, talks admiringly of Maier’s intuitive understanding of how much she could encroach on the space of the person she was photographing – of what she captures on camera representing an intersection between the subject’s vitality and her own.

    Vivian Maier was a highly secretive person.  She used many (it seems mostly unimaginative) pseudonyms.  Yet she didn’t hide herself entirely:  she’s present in a good number of her photographs; she appears in some of the home movie footage; her voice is heard in audio recordings.  Although it’s no surprise that she didn’t show her photographs to anyone, she didn’t either, unless I missed it, actually refuse to do so.  If that’s right, it suggests that those among her employers who knew about Maier’s camera were not interested enough to ask to see the nanny’s snaps.   Those in the cinema audience will be more curious:  you naturally want, like John Maloof, to know more about her personal history and, especially, her earlier life.   There’s disagreement among the contributors as to whether her ‘French accent’ was genuine or an affectation or part of a carefully constructed identity, although the cadence of her English-speaking voice, as well as her name, sounded more German than French to me.  It transpires that Vivian’s father was Austrian but that she, a native New Yorker, spent time during childhood and adult life in the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur, her French mother’s family home, and took some remarkable photographs of the people there, including relatives.  An archivist in the New York records department tells of the evidence he’s found that Vivian, who never married, was far from the only member of her family who came to lead a solitary existence.  There are also anecdotes that suggest that she had a pathological aversion from men and inferences are drawn that she may have suffered sexual abuse in her younger life.  One of the girls in her charge (the same one who wanted to hit her over the head with the camera) claims she was physically abused by the nanny.  (This may be true although, if so, it prompts the question of how the girl’s parents didn’t notice the bruises that must have resulted from the treatment that’s described.)  Others nannied by Vivian were evidently and lastingly grateful to her.  It was the sons of a family she’d worked for in the early 1960s who, in her impoverished old age four decades later, set her up in an apartment in the Rogers Park area of Chicago and paid the bills.

    While these biographical facts are of real interest, they somehow detract from the mystery of Vivian Maier that’s created through the story of how John Maloof came by her work, the fact that the people she worked for knew so little about her, and the work itself.  The implication that keeping material evidence of everything that her life contained was a compensation for its emotional isolation and the meagreness of her personal relationships is a familiar one (albeit that the assemblage of material is visually expressive and emotionally powerful).  You sense too that Siskel and Maloof had, by the time they came to make this film, moved beyond the latter’s intense curiosity about the facts of Maier’s life.  (For example, although you’re told the circumstances in which she parted company with a couple of the families for whom she worked, there’s not enough information to discern a consistent pattern.)  The film-makers’ understandable instinct is to return repeatedly to the photographs; whenever they do, your fascination with both the creator of these images and her camera subjects is immediately renewed.

    Vivian Maier has, within the first few minutes of the film, come to epitomise an unsuspected life and talent.  She may well have had, as is claimed, a particular affinity with people who were poor, or otherwise marginalised, but her subjects are varied in terms of age, ethnicity and social standing.  As John Maloof has said, ‘Elderly folk congregating in Chicago’s Old Polish Downtown, garishly dressed dowagers, and the urban African-American experience were all fair game for Maier’s lens’.  But none of those she photographed was well known and, without Maier, they would have disappeared without trace except from the memories of those who knew them (many of whom will now be dead).  The photographer and the people in her photographs together form a kind of community of secret lives; yet the fact that plenty of them didn’t know they were being photographed creates a fine tension.  One interviewee recalls an occasion when Maier, explaining to him her reluctance to use her real name, described herself as ‘a kind of spy’.   He goes on to say that he thought the last person to use such a pretext would be a real spy but Maier’s self-description seems right to me.  She’s elusive in another way too:  her face, which I don’t think I’d seen before, always looked oddly familiar but if I tried to work out who exactly she reminded me of, I never could (although several names came to mind: Frances de la Tour, Allison Janney, Virginia Woolf …)

    A now elderly shopkeeper, who describes what a pain Vivian was as a customer (ordering bits and bobs but refusing to supply contact details so she could never be informed when her order had arrived), expresses frustration that Maier’s photographs don’t tell you more about her.  This woman is a vivid interviewee but I disagree with what she says.  In a snatch of audio recording, Vivian, asked why she won’t say who she is, replies, ‘I’m the mystery woman’, and a child’s giggle is then heard.  The combination of those words and that giggle provides a perfect summary of how Vivian Maier lived her life.  From among those who knew her, there’s plenty of speculation and considerable difference of opinion as to what she would have thought about being discovered.  On the evidence of Finding Vivian Maier, I think I’m with one of her former charges who reckons she’d have been both gratified that her work has been seen by so many and relieved that this didn’t happen during her lifetime – that she didn’t have to cope with the emotional strain of public exposure.

    19 June 2014

    [1] According to Wikipedia, the Maloof Collection isn’t the whole story either:  ‘In the spring of 2010, Chicago art collector Jeffrey Goldstein acquired a portion of the Maier collection from one of the original buyers. Since Goldstein’s original purchase, his collection has grown to include 17,500 negatives, 2,000 prints, 30 homemade movies, and numerous slides.’

  • Last Tango in Paris

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bernardo Bertolucci (1972)

    Pauline Kael’s famous review begins as follows:

    ‘Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history.’

    David Thomson recognised the enduring importance of what Kael wrote in an interview with Greil Marcus in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012:

    ‘I don’t know whether if [Pauline Kael] were alive she would say the same thing now, but the passion in her writing, and the quality in the prose …, it forgives anything that you might be embarrassed by in the piece. Perhaps it’s mistaken, doesn’t matter …’

    Thomson’s praise came, though, on the back of his judgment that time had ‘not been kind’ to Last Tango in Paris and few people are likely to argue with that.  If you google ‘Last Tango’ today, ‘in Halifax’ comes up ahead of ‘in Paris’.  The place of Pauline Kael’s review in movie history is arguably more secure than that of Bertolucci’s film.  (It is a wonderful piece of writing even though, rereading it after seeing Last Tango at BFI this week, I was struck by how much of the piece is actually about Norman Mailer.)

    This was the third time I’d seen the film.   The first was at the Odeon in York exactly thirteen months after the NYFF screening, on Wednesday 14 November 1973 – a public holiday, thanks to Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips that morning.  This was less than a month before my eighteenth birthday but I think I still have a daft feeling of pride at having seen this notoriously X-rated picture before I was technically old enough to do so.   I saw it a second time at BFI in the summer of 2007.  I have to admit I can’t remember what I thought of the film even on the second viewing, let alone the first:  I knew I wanted to see it again now not because of either great enthusiasm or strong antipathy but because I felt I hadn’t got my head round it before.  I’m not sure I have now but Last Tango in Paris third time around made me sadder if not wiser.

    This BFI screening was part of the National Film and Television School’s ‘Passport to Cinema’ programme and as such was introduced by a cognoscente – Richard Combs.  It’s reasonable of course for the NFTS introductions to have a film studies flavour but what I’ve heard or read previously by Combs has always seemed not only academic but hermetically sealed:  he sees films entirely in relation to other films.  Although I found this latest offering from him dull, it may have influenced the way I watched Last Tango more than I intended or would have liked.   This wasn’t a matter of spotting movie references, other than the most obvious ones; rather, that I saw the film as more schematic than I’d previously realised, in spite of that scheme being obvious enough.  The apartment in which the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider characters have sex – in the present tense, without reference to who they are, have been or will be – is interposed between the flophouse where Rosa, Paul (Brando)’s wife, has recently committed suicide (the past) and the sequences describing Jeanne (Schneider)’s wedding plans (the future).  At the same time, the aftermath of Rosa’s death presents Paul with a grimly real present from which his relationship with Jeanne is an attempted escape.  Jeanne’s fiancé Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is filming her life as a kind of cinéma vérité wedding diary, which amounts to an artificial present, also miles away from the one occurring in the apartment.

    The sequences between Paul and Jeanne there are still startling:  at least two people – I’d guess older than me but not by much – walked out of NFT2.  Some of these scenes upset me too but I would guess for different reasons – reasons which have more to do with Marlon Brando and, especially, Maria Schneider.  What the pair do on screen is fearless (and now resonates with that quality in Pauline Kael’s review) but the different kinds of self-exposure that this entails make me uncomfortable.   Brando in this role may have been purging what he saw as the accumulated impurities and frustrations of his movie career to date – that’s saddening in itself, in view of the great things he’d achieved during the previous twenty or more years (things which had obviously made Bertolucci want to make this film with him).  The exposure of Maria Schneider is primarily physical – the audience sees much more of her naked flesh than of Brando’s.   This is, to some extent, inevitable:  it’s a reflection of Paul’s attitude towards and sometimes sexually violent treatment of Jeanne (in word and deed).   But when, for example, Jeanne is wrapped in a towel arranged so as to present her pubic hair to the camera, she does so not because Paul insists on it or – as far as you can tell from Maria Schneider’s acting – because Jeanne wants it.  It looks to be the director’s choice and, once I decided that it was, this made me suspicious that Bertolucci was exploiting Schneider more generally.  Even if this twenty-year-old was happy to do what she was asked to do (and she said, at least in retrospect, that she wasn’t), her inexperience gives her presence a rawness – a nakedness – that a more mature actress wouldn’t have had.  While this supplies a spontaneity that might also have eluded an experienced performer, it makes you feel too that you’re watching Schneider as much as Jeanne.  This feeling is intensified by the fact that Schneider (whose father was Daniel Gélin) didn’t go on to great success after Last Tango: although her filmography isn’t short, I don’t think I saw her after Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975).   (She died in 2011.)    To be fair to Bertolucci, the role of Jeanne was, according to Pauline Kael, intended for Dominique Sanda, who had to drop out when she found she was pregnant.  Even so, it seems to me that he used Maria Schneider in a way that he didn’t use Marlon Brando.

    Brando does some brilliant things – like Paul’s barnyard noises (Schneider can join in fully with these, which helps) and his making fun of Jeanne/Schneider’s English.  (In the dance hall where the tango dancers are performing, he puts on an amusing posh English accent himself.)   Much of the dialogue is dynamic and imaginative:  the screenplay was written by Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli (with French dialogue by Agnès Varda) and there’s a good deal of improvised material too.   Some of this, as Pauline Kael says, comes across as unusually sophisticated improvisation.  Yet there are dim contrivances too:  Paul’s famous speech about pigs and fucking and vomiting sounds like a response to a say-the-dirtiest-thing-that-comes-into-your-head direction.   Brando’s much admired monologue over his wife’s corpse, although it’s compelling, moves a bit quickly from foul-mouthed abuse to profound apology:  it’s as if Brando knew another character was going to ring the bell on the front door of the hotel and had to sprint to the end of his speech.   The parts of Last Tango featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud have always seemed to me relatively weak:  casting this icon of the French New Wave as a callow film-maker is a bit lame and it doesn’t help that Léaud was never the same after Antoine Doinel grew up.  In contrast, the scene between Paul and his wife’s lover Marcel is effective almost entirely because Bertolucci has cast Massimo Girotti as the lover.  A quiet, melancholy conversation between him and Brando is eloquent because of the associations the two actors bring with them to the screen.  Gato Barbieri’s music is remarkable; so are the movement and the colouring of the film (Vittorio Storaro was the cinematographer and co-writer Franco Arcalli was also co-editor, with Robert Perpignani).  But earlier Bertolucci movies – as well as the Kael review of this one – have worn better than Last Tango in Paris.

    6 January 2014

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