FIFA 26 dispatch. 1.

Once again, the International Festival of Film on Art (FIFA) in Montreal, which ended on March 16, proved to be one of the best annual events showcasing films you won't see anywhere else - a retrospective of documentaries on architecture made under the umbrella of the Pompidou Center in Paris, new profiles of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the architect/designer Eileen Gray, a meditation on the future of the skyscraper, and an inquiry into the collections of erotic art hidden away in the world's greatest museums.

Most of the films on view were one-hour productions destined for television, yet the number of short films has grown, as has the presence of feature-length documentaries. And the field of films on art has gotten more eclectic than ever. Along with a wide range of films on music, dance, literature and design, including works on Walkman and the Concorde, some of the most prominent films this year at FIFA were documentaries on photography.

Helmut by June opens with a declaration by June Newton, the late photographer's wife, who says her husband was not a promiscuous man, but then acknowledges that "photography was his mistress, and I was his wife." Helmut Newton (1920 - 2004) has been condemned as an exploiter of women (although the women in the film certainly don't seem to mind) and was paid handsomely over decades for his fashion pictures. He has also been praised for breaking down boundaries between art pictures and commercial shots. Who wants to be remembered as a mere fashion shooter? Richard Avedon felt the same way. While Newton was making "anything but fashion photographs," he was cashing huge checks from the couturiers and the magazines that showed his work, shuttling from Miami to Paris, Beverly Hills and the French Riviera. June Newton picked up one of his movie cameras and became a voyeur of her husband's life. "Helmut," one model says, "that's not me." Newton answered: "My dear, I'm not interested in you. You're getting paid to be what I want."

Interestingly, Hollywood director Brett Ratner (X-Men: The Last Stand, etc) has reworked June Newton's original cut. The final product has plenty of slick pictures of women who aren't wearing much, but it would have been a better portrait of the photographer if we had learned more about his childhood as a Jew in Berlin (Helmut Neustaedtler), which he fled in the late 1930s, and his reasons for creating a museum in his name in the city that his family abandoned.

(Note that Helmut by June was not the only film at FIFA made by or in collaboration with a director from commercial cinema. Antony Gormley: Making Space, a BBC documentary about the sculptor and installation artist known for making casts of his own body with an Everyman iconic quality, is the work of Beeban Kidron (Antonia and Jane, Bridget Jones 2). The documentary is competently made, with wide shots of Gormley's beachside sculptures, Another Place, which placed Gormley auto-casts on Waterloo Beach.)

The unintentional humor in Helmut by June comes in scenes in which Newton tries to draw drama out of models who can't act. You can see the results in the stagy pictures that Newton made for six decades. Yet Newton himself was a born performer, a photographer who knew how to attract so much attention to himself that his models were no longer self-conscious. In one scene, the mostly male gawkers gather for a shoot in which Cindy Crawford bounds down a staircase in a skirt that opens to the waist, revealing legs without end - no small achievement in very high heels. One of the voyeurs says he'd love a picture of it all, at which point Newton asks the cocky young man how much money he has in his pocket. For 1000 francs, the young man gets a Polaroid from Newton. Soon a friend takes up the same offer at the same price.

You leave the film wondering why Newton didn't do something more challenging, like taking a picture of someone who is neither famous nor beautiful.

It's the same feeling you have after seeing Robert Wilson: Video Portraits, in which Wilson takes on the well-worn medium of portraiture in a film produced by Gallery HD, a cable channel that is under the umbrella of Rainbow Media, which is part of the Cablevision conglomerate. Once a polymath dabbling in everything from theater to set design at the edge of the art scene, Wilson has come closer to the mainstream over the last decade or so, and the portraits reflect that evolution from maverick to comfortable mandarin. The subjects are famous - Princess Caroline, Macauley Culkin, the Nobel Prize-winning Chinese writer Gao Xingjian. Wilson makes his subjects up like Annie Leibovitz models, then captures them in likenesses that you would expect to see on magazine covers. Revolutionary? You end up thinking Andy Warhol, who revived his career (and his income) with portraits commissioned by the rich and famous, including international villains like the Shah of Iran and Imelda Marcos. Warhol flattened everything out of these celebrities; Wilson doesn't show us anything more about his subjects than what we know already, although we do see that high-definition technology brings a precision to the image that we're not yet used to.

We see a different attitude toward beauty in Eloquent Nude: The Love and Legacy Edward Weston & Charis Wilson, by Ian McCluskey, which traces Weston's relationship with a much younger woman from San Francisco who became his lover, his model, his muse and his scribe. Charis Wilson, now approaching the age of 94, was denied the chance to study at Sarah Lawrence by her parents in California, and got into some serious carousing, drinking and sex before she hit 20, all of which she freely admits to. Weston gave her some higher goals. She prepared his grant proposals for shooting trips, and you can see her in portraits of a beautiful confident youth. She and the photographer who redefined the nude bought a house together, but Weston balked when Charis presented her own ideas about where they should travel, how long they should stay, and how to make their journeys something more than campaigns for Weston's career. It was Charis who kept the journals of it all. Eventually the lovers split, never to reunite again.

McCluskey's film includes re-enactments of Weston and Wilson's cross-country travels, including their trips to Yosemite to take pictures with the younger Ansel Adams. The dramatizations are so convincing that you think they're the real thing, and the actress that McCluskey chose for the young Charis seems to come right out of Weston's prints. McCluskey also has a feel for lighting bodies and faces. You wish more filmmakers could learn as much from still photographs. Perhaps some might need to be looking at something besides other movies and contemporary art.

More to come on another post-FIFA report.

Posted by dwhudson at March 25, 2008 12:14 PM