Fascinating story from start to finish: Finding Vivian Maier

As a work of cinema it breaks no new ground - and I really wish contemporary documentaries would give up on the idea of a pulsating, beat-driven musical score - but John Maloof's Finding Vivian Maier tells an incredibly fascinating story and is riveting from start to finish - constantly amazing us and provoking us with complex and unanswerable questions about a strange genius with a dark and mysterious personality. As all probably know, Maloof bought a cache of undeveloped negatives at a Chicago auction house - he was looking for some pictures of old-time Chicago for a history project he was working on - and found the photos he bought to be of extraordinary quality. He engaged in the research of a historical detective - he must have training in the field, as well as incredible drive, tenacity, and curiosity - and found that the photographer, Vivian Maier, was a complete amateur with no training - she worked for many years as a nanny in suburban Chicago. The film consists of interviews with the for whom she worked, the now-adult children in her charge, as well as some photographers and film historians. Maier shot thousands of frames - as well as some super 8 film - over the course of her life and never made any serious effort to show her work to anyone. Anyone looking at these knows right away that these are simply great photographs - and now they've been exhibited quite widely and she's gained or is gaining posthumous recognition as one of the great street photographers of the 20th century. It's incredible and shameful that nobody recognized this in her lifetime, but she just didn't have the connections - right school, right agent, right gallery, right friends - to get her work seen. She also was hindered by her very odd personality (actually, her oddity is probably what allowed her to approach people, often people in pain and suffering, and take beautiful photos) - she was clearly a victim of abuse, was distrustful and even hateful of men, was often cruel to the children in her care, later in life because a very serious hoarder - apparently a few people she worked for and with helped her out in the last years of her life (she died in 2009) but Maloof leaves this a little vague. She died in poverty, though, and her photos are now worth a lot of $ - Maloof quite frankly says he wishes he could share his bounty with her in some way. I think he has! One of the astonishing moments - maybe not surprising, when you think about it - is when he shows that he offered her collection to MOMA only to receive a form letter saying sorry not interested. Connections matter, I guess - be they wish now that they'd actually looked at what Maloof was offering. BTW I would not consider Maier an "outsider" artist; she was an outsider person, but her work is not outside of any tradition of unusual in itself - it is direct (as Maloof notes) in line with the great street photographers who were her contemporaries or predecessors - Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, et al.