Advertising
Supported by
This cheerful and communicative view of photographer Helmut Newton’s life and paintings precedes gossip.
By Jeannette Catsoulis
When you purchase a price ticket for an independently qualified movie on our website, we earn an associate fee.
Any artist who puts Susan Sontag’s hair on end deserves further examination, and Gero von Boehm’s “Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful” is eager to help. However, this brilliant documentary, animated through affectionate memories and admiring voices of outstanding beauties (Charlotte Rampling, Catherine Deneuve, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Jones), is as hostile to research as its unspeakable subject.
It’s not that Newton, a photographer with an ordinary brain and bravelled eroticism (he died in a twist of car destiny in 2004), would have appreciated being called an artist. (For him, “art” was a dirty word.) A Jewish teenager living in Berlin under the Nazis, she was encouraged through photographs of Leni Riefenstahl’s athletes and an apprentice to theatre photographer Madame Yva (who was later killed in a concentration camp. ).
These influences flourished in her questionable fashion shoots for Vogue in the 1960s and beyond. A declared lover of breasts, legs and attitude, he can turn stilettos and tight skirts into weapons of power, drawing attention to the muscular flesh underneath. His naked sculpturals, set as inaccessible valkyries, were sheltered from the gaze of the men who crouched beneath them in the frame. Like those of artist Robert Crumb, Newton’s compositions can range from objectifying and celebrating, animosity and desire. However, “Helmut Newton” only takes a look at his disturbing maximum readings, leaving Sontag’s misogyny accusations (here expressed in a French communication program) necessarily unanswered.
What dominates instead is a talkative portrait of a captivating and depraved boy whose genius is perhaps most productive a display of the moment with the sound off and his eyes wide open.
Helmut Newton: The bad and the beautiful, outstanding. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Look at Kino Marquee.
Advertising