For
Gregory Crewdson’s career-defining Under
the Roses project, each
individual photo had a production budget comparable to most independent
films. The money was not going to big
name models. The dollars are in the
details of the photographer’s elaborately constructed photo tableaux. Ben Shapiro documents the photographer at
work in Gregory Crewdson: Brief
Encounters (trailer
here), which
opens this Wednesday in New York at Film Forum.
Inspired
by artists like Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Edward Hopper, David Lynch, and
Alfred Hitchcock, Crewdson’s photographs capture the surface of hardscrabble
western Massachusetts towns, while hinting at dark secrets lurking below. Each photo suggests an unfolding narrative,
but only provides viewers an isolated moment in time.
Frankly,
Crewdson truly is best likened to a movie director. At least for the Roses project, he was not technically the man behind the camera. That would be his “director of photography”
Richard Sands, an expert in all matters related to light, who had held the same
title on film shoots. Instead, Crewdson
coaches his models (almost entirely local residents) in much the same manner as
a film director and determines every detail of what will be captured in the
camera’s field of vision. Clearly, it is
still very much his work, though he is the first to credit Sands’ importance as
a collaborator.
Meant
to be seen large, Crewdson’s images hold up well on a big screen. While not as upbeat as Bel Borba, the
Brazilian artist recently seen in his own documentary at Film Forum, Crewdson
is rather open and engaging when discussing his work. He never comes across as a dry academic or a
self-serious hipster. He might be
slightly neurotic maybe, but by New York standards, it is hard to tell.
Ten
years in the making, Brief takes the
tried and true approach to art docs, capturing the making-of process for many
of the Roses pictures, while
periodically cutting away for on-camera interview segments. Crewdson really is his own best spokesman,
whereas his novelist friends Russell Banks and Rick Moody are conspicuously
eager to read socio-economic meaning into his shots of Massachusetts’s
obviously depressed rustbelt. Yet, that
is the sort of superficial analysis Crewdson is challenging viewers to go
beyond. By setting such mysterious scenes,
Crewdson suggests there is more to his modest homes, bars, and motels than
meets the initially eye.
