Portrait of an Artist: Gregor Crewdson

Ben Shapiro's documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounter is the kind of low-key documentary that I most admire (see Sweetgrass as a perfect example thereof) - the filmmaker is completely a background presence, and the film is a pane of clear glass through which we view the subject matter (or it appears to be so - of course there are a million directorial decisions, in filming, editing, and so on - but in the best documentaries we are not aware of these decisions at all, we appear to be or feel as if we are just looking at life, or just peering into someone's consciousness - like great fiction, for that matter - the mirror held up beside the highway). No background music to control and manipulate us; the only flaw in my opinion was his brief inclusions of the interviews with a few of Crewdson's friends, Banks and Moody and a mag editor, which made the film too much of a testimonial in those moments - should have been just Crewdson talking and thinking. I knew nothing about Crewdson himself until watching this but came away hugely impressed with his photography - as the movie makes clear he "stages" each of his photographs with all the care and attention with which a director stages a scene in a movie, more actually because each shot will stand as an independent work of art, not as a frame among moving images and narration. The influences are obvious, and some are cinematic: the spookiness of Hitchcock, the vibrant eeriness of David Lynch, the loneliness of Hopper. Also his attraction to the abandoned mill towns of Western Mass shows the state and the region in a manner never seen before - his photos are great works of art, monumental. Most impressive, we get to really see how the mind of an artist works during the act of composition - something rarely if ever captured on film or anywhere else (there are moments of this in the Dylan pic Don't Look Back, but nothing like here) - a fine picture on its own and even more powerful as a meta-creation, an homage to a major artist.