Gregory Crewdson carefully composes his next photograph in BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)
GREGORY CREWDSON: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (Ben Shapiro, 2012)
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
November 16-22
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com
From 2002 to 2008, Gregory Crewdson created a sensational body of work he called “Beneath the Roses,” consisting of intricately arranged large-scale photographs that capture the mysterious underside of small-town, middle-class America. Filmed primarily in the Western Massachusetts community where his family spent their summers while he was growing up, the photographs, all taken at twilight, are powerful, emotional still shots that look like they’re from a movie, usually involving solitary figures on the street or in a tense room, staring out, often with a car nearby, its door or trunk flung open, compelling viewers to come up with their own narrative of what they’re seeing. For ten years, Ben Shapiro followed Crewdson around as he worked on that series and others, and he details the Park Slope-born photographer’s unique creative process in the vastly entertaining and informative documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. Crewdson, who shoots only at twilight, is obsessive about the shot he gets, agonizing first over the setting itself, then going over every little detail, from the turn of a character’s head to the proper amount of leg to reveal, with a crew that includes a director of photography, a production designer, a casting director, and other jobs usually more associated with film. “My pictures are about a search for a moment — a perfect moment,” he explains. “To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense.”
Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled (The Madison),” from “Beneath the Roses,” archival pigment print, 2007 (© Gregory Crewdson)
Crewdson also talks about his past as he drives around Pittsfield searching out locations or looks through a photo album, discussing how he was influenced by his psychologist father and a trip they made to see a Diane Arbus exhibition at MoMA in 1972, when Crewdson was ten. Among those who share their thoughts about Crewdson are writers Russell Banks and Rick Moody, photographer Laurie Simmons, Aperture editor in chief Melissa Harris, and Crewdson’s director of photography, Richard Sands. Shapiro also travels to Rome with Crewdson for his 2010 “Sanctuary” series, taken at the abandoned Cinecittà studio in Rome, furthering his interest in film. Just as it’s fascinating to spend time exploring Crewdson’s photographs, it’s equally fascinating spending time with the man himself, a complex, bigger-than-life character with an intriguing outlook on his medium as well as the world at large. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters just finished an abbreviated run at Film Forum because of Hurricane Sandy, but the Film Society of Lincoln Center has picked it up and will screen it at the Francesca Beale Theater from November 16 to 22, with Crewdson participating in a Q&A with writer-director Noah Baumbach following the 7:15 show on Friday night.
Seán Ó Cualáín puts one of the most iconic photographs ever of New York City under the microscope in the interesting yet too often slipshod documentary Men at Lunch. In 1932, a photographer snapped a picture of eleven construction workers having lunch while sitting atop a girder on what would become the sixty-ninth floor of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. The men are casually talking, having a smoke, and holding white cardboard lunchboxes while dangling their feet some 850 feet in the air, a bustling city below them, Central Park sprawled out behind them. Narrated by Fionnula Flanagan (Ulysses, Waking Ned Devine), the film delves into who the men might be, attempts to figure out whether it was indeed Charles C. Ebbets who took the photo, and seeks to put the picture into the social and cultural context of the depression and the wave of immigration, focusing on the Irish (the film is an Irish production), many of whom went into the construction industry. “This is a photograph in which every element of photography and of New York City kind of come together with spectacular panache,” filmmaker Ric Burns says. But while Ó Cualáín employs captivating archival footage as he tries to solve the photograph’s many mysteries, he extends the focus too far, biting off more than he can chew in a mere seventy minutes, as a handful of talking heads and Niall Murphy’s text make grand statements about the human condition in the twentieth century that are too often a reach, then spends too much time with a pair of Irish characters who believe they are related to two of the men in the picture. Still, the part of the film that zeroes in on the taking of the photograph is absolutely fascinating. Men at Lunch is making its U.S. premiere at the DOC NYC festival November 10 at the SVA Theatre and November 14 at the IFC Center, with Ó Cualáín on hand at the first screening to talk about the film.
New York Doll is an unforgettable documentary about Arthur “Killer” Kane, a man who went to the heights of ecstasy as a member of the New York Dolls in the early 1970s, hit the depths of depression in the late 1980s, and rediscovered himself in the 1990s as a Mormon librarian. As bassist for the New York Dolls, Kane, dressed wildly in heavy makeup and women’s clothes, anchored the glam rock idols, which also included David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain, Johnny Thunders, and Jerry Nolan. The band dissolved after only two studio albums, and while the rest of the band remained in the music business (Thunders and Nolan died in the early ’90s), Kane’s drug- and alcohol-addled life spiraled downward. As Johansen started showing up in mediocre Hollywood movies (Married to the Mob, Scrooged, Car 54, Where Are You?) and his alter ego, Buster Poindexter, could be heard singing “Hot, Hot, Hot” at every bar mitzvah and wedding in town, Kane languished in obscurity until, in 1989, after a ridiculous suicide attempt, he became a Mormon. Fellow Mormon Greg Whiteley follows Kane around with a handheld camera as the former underground rock star goes about his daily life, working in a Mormon Family History Center library in California, taking the bus to work, hanging out with old ladies, paying “rent” on his pawned basses, and living a simple existence — until he gets a call from British pop star Morrissey, who wants the Dolls to reunite for the 2004 Meltdown festival in London. Kane is a soft-spoken, earnest, gentle man who seems a little bit off yet genuine, but this is what he’s been waiting for — although he is also afraid of failure yet again. Whiteley intersperses classic Dolls songs (“Looking for a Kiss,” “Lonely Planet Boy,” “Private World,” “Puss ‘n’ Boots,” “Trash,” and Johnny Thunders’s “You Can’t Put Your Arms Round a Memory”) with talking heads who share their love of the band (including Sir Bob Geldof, Chrissie Hynde, Mick Jones from the Clash, Blondie’s Clem Burke, and especially Morrissey, who is always seen in extreme close-up and is oh-so-serious), although we wish the film included more music, of a higher quality. Yet the remarkable story and ridiculously bizarre ending, which has a This Is Spinal Tap quality to it throughout — except it’s very real — rises above it all to create one of the best rockumentaries we’ve ever seen.