William Eggleston in the Real World. 2005. USA. Directed by Michael Almereyda. An intimate portrait of William Eggleston, who revolutionized color photography in the mid-1970s and who continues to conjure spellbinding images from the ordinariness of everyday life. "Peter Schjeldahl has written that Edward Hopper was ‘excited by the unguarded moment, the exposed innocence, of a person, a building, a place.' If you equate ‘innocence' with ‘mystery,' I think you can apply this to Eggleston, and to this movie about him" (Almereyda). 87 min.
at MOMA - Monday, January 17, 7:30. T2; Wednesday, January 19, 6:00. T1 (both introduced by Faggioni and Almereyda)
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MA: I hate to say that San Francisco is provincial but that would be one conclusion. In a recent interview Sam said he’s had enough of the provinces. I think it was an unexpected backfire.
Anyhow, to get back to your question, what did I get out of this, I learned that documentaries can be endless and I’d rather do fiction films. [Laughs] But, for all that, I’m now doing another documentary, on a photographer named William Eggleston. He lives in Memphis and does color work that has been hugely influential to many people. People often compare him to David Lynch. He came onto the scene in the 70’s and had the first one-man show of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’ll be a more mysterious documentary than the Shepard one.
DRE: Will it be very in-depth into who Eggleston is?
MA: Almost definitely not. It will be a bit unusual as a portrait of an artist, because it’s kind of opaque. It just shows this guy taking pictures. On the surface you might think its nothing, but everyone I’ve shown it to says it’s fascinating and haunting. You see him walking around in mundane reality and then you see what he distills from it in his pictures. It’s like those movies of Jackson Pollock painting where you just watch him, and that’s enough. There aren’t many movies like that. We’re in a culture where everything has to be explained, which I’m part of because here I am trying to explain myself to you, but often its more revealing to get right up close to somebody and watch what they do. To value things that are silent and wordless. Within photography circles Eggleston is famously unable to explain himself. His pictures are hugely respected, people write about them, sometimes very cleverly, but the photos tend to defy that. I’m hoping to present the mystery without framing it with words.
DRE: Was he an influence on you?
MA: Sure. Early on a lot of people compared my movies to David Lynch [who produced Nadja]. That was flattering, but the connection always felt relatively incidental to me. Two sharper influences happen to be Shepard and Eggleston. In a weird way Lynch is kind of a fusion of those two but he probably has never read Shepard’s work. It’s just a shared sensibility, recognizing that mundane reality is pretty weird. If you respect it then it can be more shocking and disturbing than any kind of horror movie.
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at MOMA - Monday, January 17, 7:30. T2; Wednesday, January 19, 6:00. T1 (both introduced by Faggioni and Almereyda)
- bill 1-17-2005 9:02 pm
...
MA: I hate to say that San Francisco is provincial but that would be one conclusion. In a recent interview Sam said he’s had enough of the provinces. I think it was an unexpected backfire.
Anyhow, to get back to your question, what did I get out of this, I learned that documentaries can be endless and I’d rather do fiction films. [Laughs] But, for all that, I’m now doing another documentary, on a photographer named William Eggleston. He lives in Memphis and does color work that has been hugely influential to many people. People often compare him to David Lynch. He came onto the scene in the 70’s and had the first one-man show of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’ll be a more mysterious documentary than the Shepard one.
DRE: Will it be very in-depth into who Eggleston is?
MA: Almost definitely not. It will be a bit unusual as a portrait of an artist, because it’s kind of opaque. It just shows this guy taking pictures. On the surface you might think its nothing, but everyone I’ve shown it to says it’s fascinating and haunting. You see him walking around in mundane reality and then you see what he distills from it in his pictures. It’s like those movies of Jackson Pollock painting where you just watch him, and that’s enough. There aren’t many movies like that. We’re in a culture where everything has to be explained, which I’m part of because here I am trying to explain myself to you, but often its more revealing to get right up close to somebody and watch what they do. To value things that are silent and wordless. Within photography circles Eggleston is famously unable to explain himself. His pictures are hugely respected, people write about them, sometimes very cleverly, but the photos tend to defy that. I’m hoping to present the mystery without framing it with words.
DRE: Was he an influence on you?
MA: Sure. Early on a lot of people compared my movies to David Lynch [who produced Nadja]. That was flattering, but the connection always felt relatively incidental to me. Two sharper influences happen to be Shepard and Eggleston. In a weird way Lynch is kind of a fusion of those two but he probably has never read Shepard’s work. It’s just a shared sensibility, recognizing that mundane reality is pretty weird. If you respect it then it can be more shocking and disturbing than any kind of horror movie.
...
- bill 1-17-2005 9:14 pm [add a comment]