Dir. Michael Almereyda, 2005, USA, 86 mins
When photographer William Eggleston’s work was first exhibited in New York in 1976, it was met with an overwhelming response of apprehension and derision from disenchanted critics who felt his output amounted to little more than snapshots of the average and the mundane. Thirty years on, and some 450,000 photographs later, Eggleston is rightly hailed as a pioneer in the art of modern colour photography, with a body of work celebrating the beauty found in the everyday scenes of diners, petrol stations or neon signs. His pictures continue to offer a new perspective on the seemingly ordinary, injecting a sense of exuberance and cinematic mystery into the common worlds they depict.
Michael Almereyda’s documentary follows the enigmatic Eggleston on photography excursions to Kentucky, Los Angeles and New York, as well as capturing more intimate moments with family and friends in his hometown of Memphis. Forgoing the conventional documentary structure, Almereyda’s film spends most of its time silently pursuing Eggleston as he works, employing minimal narration and little interview footage. Instead of attempting to offer a portrait of the man behind the camera, the film focuses largely on his photographs and method. The sparse narration, performed by Almereyda himself, lovingly muses over Eggleston’s compositions, but rarely discusses his personal life. When Eggleston does speak, with a mumbling vocal output that demands the use of subtitles to decipher, he seems passionate yet apprehensive in the verbal conceptualisation of his work, appearing far more contented to let his pictures speak for themselves. Almereyda deftly sums it up during the film’s opening moments when he declares, “Photography tends to show much more than it can explain”, and the purposefully laidback relationship built with his subject wisely respects the complexities of Eggleston’s work, never attempting to define its appeal, and invoking a gratifying air of ambiguity around the artist.
When tackling on-screen portrayals of artists, filmmakers have often attempted to mirror the look of the film with that of the artists work. John Maybury’s striking biopic of Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil (1998), for example, cleverly conjured up reminiscences of Bacon’s work in its skewed visual devices, while Julie Taymor’s less successful Frida (1998) did manage to recreate a sense of the vivid colours and textures synonymous with Kahlo’s work. Almereyda’s film employs a similar method in creating an effectively Eggleston-esque view of the world. Using largely handheld camerawork, lingering shots of Eggleston at work seem as if the artist is appearing in his own compositions, and the occasionally lyrical shots of light reflections or landscapes feel like still photographs themselves. Meanwhile there has always been a hint of the cinematic evident in Eggleston’s work, with Almereyda referencing the debts owed to Eggleston in the films of David Lynch (who incidentally financed Almereyda’s earlier film Nadja in 1994), with their recurring uncanny blend of the commonplace and the extraordinary, such qualities also apparent in works by Gus Van Sant or Harmony Korine.
It is clear the admiration Almereyda has for Eggleston, and his film blissfully celebrates his work, while respecting the privacy of the artist. But while the effectively loose structure may complement the subject matter, the film is perhaps too vague for newcomers to Eggleston’s hypnotic work, or viewers wanting a more thorough exploration of his life. But for those already familiar, the film offers a rich and rewarding insight into the passions of a fascinating artist.
Michael Blyth
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