Famed photo-journalist at LOOK and LIFE magazines, celebrated celebrity portrait photog Douglas Kirkland, who died recently at 88, gets a career bio as busy & surfacey as his work. Tall & dashing, he ingratiated his way into early opportunities with photographer Irving Penn and in emotionally open shoots with stars like Liz Taylor & (most famously) Marilyn Monroe, using the photographic equivalents of a reporter’s softball questions. For Kirkland, exuding positivity from every pore on assignment, he’s Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment/ Celebrity Edition. He’s tops at this stuff, but halfway thru, the film either runs out of things to say or (more likely) the subjects lack the mythic qualities of yore. Instead of Marilyn, it’s Michelle Williams who played Marilyn. Instead of Audrey Hepburn & Peter O’Toole in Paris with William Wyler on a trifle like HOW TO STEAL A MILLION, Nicole Kidman & Hugh Jackson make Baz Luhrmann’s soporific AUSTRALIA. A nice technical touch has director Luca Severi using the entire frame on old home movie clips, so the left hand side of the image, usually cropped to remove sprocket holes, is shown, gaining about 20% extra image. It’s a bit like those museum worthy prints that show the emulsion at the edge of the print. Ironic in a film that mostly avoids interesting technical details on cameras, illumination strategies and lens choices which might have shed light on Kirkland’s forthright, unfussy work habits. At the end, you wonder how much interest his work would hold if the subjects weren’t already famous. Not unlike that other Canadian icon of portrait iconography, Yousuf Karsh.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: There should be more films on photographers. Till then, see Fred Astaire play a Richard Avedon-inspired shutterbug with Audrey Hepburn as reluctant model in Stanley Donen’s Gershwin musical FUNNY FACE (with Avedon as technical consultant).
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