There's an attempt here to play
up the idea of eccentricity: if a woman is single and doesn’t appear to want
to marry, if she travels alone to far off places, if she travels down back
alleys and to stockyards, if she wants a lock for her door, if she collects
newspapers, if she takes photos of an injured person instead of standing around
gawking like everyone else, if she isn’t freely open about her past, if she
opts not to tell a shop-owner her name, she is deemed an oddity. And yet, I
wonder, were a man to behave in the way she did, would he be called such an
eccentric? Are any of those actions really so extremely erratic
and bizarre?
While John Maloof claims in his
film to want to make known to the world Vivian Maier’s photography, there is a
queasy quality, a sort of TV tabloid element, permeating the whole endeavor,
and the result is as similarly shallow as any episode of Hard Copy. Maier,
as a subject, is an object to be poked and prodded and dissected; every small
action or life detail that can be discovered is taken and exploded into
suggestive significance. And people who clearly didn’t know her – who, for the
most part, seem to think of her as a bizarre object themselves, and who seem to
be quite pleased to be at the center of some attention – are paraded forth
for comment.
And as pleased as the
interviewees are to be on film, Maloof, himself, so constantly references his
own purportedly solitary efforts to champion Maier, it is difficult to see much
story here beyond his own self-interest (and as this
NYT piece indicates, Maloof’s proprietary claim on Maier is dubious
at best).
It is in spite of the film
itself that we get glimpses of the complex human being that Maier must have
been, and in those glimpses and hints, we must affirm that the irreducible
complexity of Maier cannot be violated by the prods of petty filmmaking. She
will not be reduced to “odd,” “eccentric,” “reclusive”; she cannot be contained
by words like “spinster” or “nanny.” Her person remains hers and hers alone,
locked, whole, dignified.
What
remains, what transcends the film’s leering attempts at story-telling, is her
photography. The images she captured invite us to engage in looking at the
world in fresh ways – at beauty, tragedy, comedy, ugliness in unexpected
places. And in this new looking, we turn with her, at her side, as fellow human
beings, to look at the world she saw. I know nothing about her - and that is as
it should be – but I am so grateful to be enriched by her eyes.
NOTE:
It would be hypocritical of me not to acknowledge that I owe gratitude to John
Maloof for bringing Maier to my attention in the first place: had he not made
this film, I am not at all sure I would have heard of her at all. And it is on
the website he curates - http://www.vivianmaier.com/ - where her photography is
most extensively accessible online. I am torn: I must be grateful for the film
and yet its sensibilities are galling in the extreme.
