BERT STERN: ORIGINAL MADMAN (A-minus) - Ah, that thin pink line: womanizer or merely a lover of women? I identified with Bert Stern, an advertising photographer from the golden era, and if you think he's a creep, I'm not offended.
Stern, a self-taught photographer back in the 1950s, broke through with iconic imagery for vodka ads before training his lens more and more on women. He is famous for having taken the final photographs of Marilyn Monroe for Vogue. His recounting of those two sessions are lovely and heartbreaking; you ache for the teenage boy locked inside a charming man's body. He often talks, quaintly, about "making out" with women -- or more often, wanting to make out with various women. He married a ballerina and saw her (still sees her) as more of a trophy than a woman; after he ran through his share of women and drugs (Dr. Feelgood again) during the wild '60s, she took the kids and left him.
The filmmaker here is one of Stern's
current companions, Shannah Laumeister (he also hangs out every week with a
pair of ditzy twins). Laumeister is much younger than he is; they first met when
she was well under-age, but she returned to him around age 18, and they fell in
together. Stern is now about 80, and their domestic situation seems quite tame.
While much of the reaction to this film will revolve around Stern's affection
for and exploitation of his subjects, you have to wonder what Laumeister's game
is. She injects herself into the proceedings, making the personal public; in
fact, she gladly splashes Stern's nude shots of herself. Who's zooming whom
here?
Stern is a fascinating, if
laid-back, subject. Many of the interviews feature him in a reclining
position, tossing off recollections or witticisms with a lazy, resigned
northern drawl, nearly catatonic at times. He looks to be clinically depressed,
perhaps beaten down by the idea that he had the world at his command and is as
weighed down by the memory of happiness as he is by his vast archives of
negatives. (In fact, he admits that he wishes he had saved some of that
frivolity for later in life -- spread the joy to make his twilight years more worth living.) It doesn't make him any less smug; just ... preternaturally
practical and clinically wistful.
There's a lot going on here, much
more than a home movie about a glum, elderly hedonist. I was rooting for him to
crack a big grin, raise his eyebrows and bust out a big laugh recalling some crazy
time, perhaps with Twiggy or Liz Taylor.
In the end, Stern was a hunter and
the models were his prey. That's old-fashioned biology at work. It's refreshing
to hear Stern essentially own up to that. He sums it up this way: "I'm
obsessive. That's why I take pictures, I guess. I get obsessive about the
things I'm looking at. I want them. And I put them in the camera, and they're
mine."
Did he say "things" when
he was talking about, mostly, women? Yep.
FAR OUT ISN"T FAR ENOUGH: THE
TOMI UNGERER STORY (B) - And then there's ol' Tomi
Boy. This documentary is a touching valentine to an unheralded artist, Tomi
Ungerer, a trailblazer in children's books who challenged perceptions by daring
to produce both kid lit and erotica.
Born in France and raised in
Nazi-occupied Alsace, Ungerer is more German than French. He came to New York
as a young man and quickly made his mark, cranking out quirky children's books
that influenced luminaries like Maurice Sendak and Jules Feiffer, both seen
here as admiring talking heads. One day Ungerer met a woman who liked to play a
little rough, and the experience helped unleash Ungerer's naughty side. He
explored that world and expressed himself naturally through his art on a
separate track from the children's market.
In a long-ago world of naive media,
it wasn't a big deal for an artist to live such a double life; he apparently
was discreet about his dual existence. Eventually, though, the industry grew
uncomfortable with that set-up; he was cast as somewhat of a pervert, his
children's books disappeared from print and he was generally shunned. He
retreated into seclusion and eventually to Ireland, where he finally found a
welcoming community.
Ungerer, now in his 80s, is still an
unabashed admirer of the female form, especially the backside. He's got a
twinkle in his deep blue eyes, and he smokes like a fiend. He offers a few
pearls of wisdom, including his explanation of the phrase used as a title of
the film.
The documentary itself lags in spots. It spends a bit too much time on his early years and it suffers from
a lack of archival footage; thus, it leans on his artwork as a major crutch. Many of his
drawings are powerful; he was especially vocal and blunt about his opposition
to America's imperialist war in Vietnam during the 1960s. Informed by his World War II experience that left him virulently opposed to imperialism, his work from that era is among his
sharpest and most profound. Director Brad Bernstein also relies on almost exclusively men as
talking heads; they're rather dry, and they don't give us a good sense of
Ungerer's primal connection with women and sex.
Like Stern, Ungerer has a magnetism
that draws you in and makes you wonder: What's his secret?
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