Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters

“When I was working at the gallery, he was breaking up with his second wife.” Could this bit of overheard conversation, on the way out of Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, Ben Shapiro’s film currently playing at Film Forum, be a comment on the subject? Brief Encounters is mostly about a series of 50 photographs taken over 8 years entitled Beneath the Roses. Crewdson uses old mill towns like Lee and Pittsfield Massachusetts that he’s known since childhood as the stage set. They are his Yoknapatawpha County. If a photographer like Rineke Dijkstra seeks to find a moment in the flow of human existence, the involuntary memory that’s at the heart of the Proustian Madeleine, then Crewdson seeks to create the madeleine itself. He stages a woman sitting outside a Hopperesque bar called The Madison, he gauges out the side of a house that will be gauged. He loves opened car doors at twilight (most of his filming is done at dusk since streets can’t be lit during the day and at night the contrast would be too great). All of this image creation is influenced by such predecessors at Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman and all of these fictions are produced with the attention and expense given to an independent film (though the hyper attention to individual details far exceeds the budget of any independent film). The mixture of beauty and sadness that Crewdson says he likes recall the sense of the sublime that Wordsworth created in Tintern Abbey. However, one can’t help wondering if there isn’t a slightly studied quality to all of this, as if Crewdson were one of his own set pieces—the upscale Yale educated New Yorker exploiting his subjects suffering for the sake of his growing international reputation (in the same way that in the course of the film he blames the grotesquery of his earlier work on his failing first marriage). It’s a far cry from Robert Frank's The Americans; there’s something self-congratulatory about the emphasis on style and also dismissive about the way he handles his subjects. He puts make-up on despair. Everything fits a little too neatly together. At the end of the film Crewdson is off to Cinecitta where he is busily making a home for himself shooting artificial mists onto abandoned sets of imperial Rome. “Let Me Take Your Photo,” was a hit song that Crewdson’s rock band the Speedies created back in  l979. Then Crewdson met a girl who turned him on to photography and he was on his way. Brief Encounters, the photo after which the film is named, is the final in the Beneath the Roses series. It’s a dazzling shot, a stark figure under a movie marquee advertising the 7:30 show on a snow covered street. But one wonders what is more effective, the frozen moment or the filming of its creation?

Naked Before the Camera

"Hermaphrodite" (Nadar) from the Met's Naked Before the Camera

“Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist’s chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—where a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media in which more generalized and idealized forms prevail.” This is part of the introduction to Naked Before the Camera, at the Met. To the right of the commentary is a Brassai from l931 of a nude model on a pedestal who is the subject of “L’Academie Julien.” The word “Naked” is spelled out in light bulbs like a peep show and this is one show you want to see for the multivalent nudity. There is a postmortem of a murder victim by the chief of criminal identification of Paris and the naked body of patient suffering from disfiguring sarcomas. Two Eakins photographs of nude males are offered up along with another Brassai, “Introduction to Suzy’s,” showing the nude prostitutes in a famous Paris brothel. There’s a Diane Arbus from l968, of a naked man with his penis hidden between his legs, “A Naked Man Being a Woman,” which is the perfect complement another photo in the exhibit called “Hermaphrodite” depicting a man/woman with a heterodox genitalia. Larry Clark, the director of Kids, is represented by a shot of a teenaged coupled making love which was used as the cover of his book Teenaged Lust. Jim Jager photographed black nude males in self-published magazines with names like Black Thunder, Black Fever, Black Knight and Black Gold and his well-endowed male, “Sharkey” from l980 according to the curator “set the stage for Mapplethorpe and others to push boundaries and rules, gender and sexuality.” Hannah Wilke’s “Snatch Shot With Ray Gun, from the series So Help Me Hannah offer the naked self portrait as a form of performance art.  In Regarding the Pain of Others (2002) Susan Sontag repudiated her earlier On Photography (1977) in which argued that repeated exposure to images dulled consciousness. Naked Before the Camera continues a discussion which began with the museum’s 2006 love letter to Sontag, On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag. Think back to Stieglitz’s unapologetically sensuous nude photographs of Georgia O’Keefe, which had been shown at the museum, in the Stieglitz and his Artists Show last year. They’re the perfect complement to this exhibit.