[GREGORY CREWDSON: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
screens on Thursday January 3rd at 7:00 pm at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Cleveland.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
As we see in the documentary GREGORY
CREWDSON: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS,
when fine art photographer Greg Crewdson sets out to get a
picture, it's not just a case of pointing a camera and shooting. Not
by a long shot. His productions are about as elaborate as a low
budget film shoot, with set builders, art directors, lighting
technicians, “actors”, and fog machines. If he's not working on a
sound stage and instead shooting on a real life location, most likely
the street will have to be shut down, and artistic modifications to
reality are not uncommon. In many ways Crewdson is more like a
director than a photographer, and his work has one foot planted in
surreal dark fantasy while the other is firmly set in stark
documentary realism.
The film was shot over about a decade
during which Crewdson was working on his “Beneath the Roses”
project, and it does an excellent job of showing how Crewdson's
artistic process works from frustration to conception to realization.
It also delves into what the meaning of these works might be without
coming across as pretentious. Even though Crewdson himself denies any
intentional political subtext, various outside observers make a
compelling case that a definite message is nonetheless present
throughout the body of Crewdson's work.
As an individual, Crewdson doesn't have
the same kind of compelling eccentricity of a Wayne White (subject of
BEAUTY IS EMBARASSING), nor
does his life involve the kind of political struggle just to create
of an Ai Wei Wei (subject of AI WEI WEI: NEVER SURRENDER).
In fact, Crewdson comes across as maybe a little arrogant, but
overall not that interesting on the surface. It's what surely must be
going on beneath the surface that makes his art, and by extension
this film about it, worthy of notice. 3 out of 4 stars.
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