Manning the Studio | Photographer Sally Mann in What Remains, part of Metro Cinema’s four-day tribute to female photographers.
WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS ON FILM
Fri-Mon, Jan 18-21. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). See metrocinema.org for details and showtimes.
“I am most often drawn towards creating spectral images of the female form that are intangible and mysterious,” Edmonton photographer Jill Watamaniuk has written, adding that “happy accidents” and mysterious, intangible influences are crucial to her work. In this respect, Watamaniuk has a lot in common with contemporary American photographer Sally Mann, a celebrated artist who is the subject of one of the films in Metro Cinema’s Women Photographers on Film series this weekend.
Watamaniuk is also the curator for this film series; she’s programmed four wildly different international feature films and paired them with three Canadian shorts. “I really wanted to do something in the visual arts,” she says, “because I think that they’re underrepresented, and then I wanted to do photography films, and then I wanted to do women in photography. Of course, it’s a really rare pool of films anyway and it’s even smaller in terms of films about women photographers.” However, Watamaniuk has managed to create a diverse lineup featuring several different artists and aesthetics.
Juan Mandelbaum’s Ringl and Pit is the most straightforward of the batch, as far as documentaries go—it’s a “life and times- type film about photographers Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, two early women commercial photographers who opened the Ringl + Pit studio in Weimar-era Berlin before escaping Nazi persecution and eventually setting in North and South America. Two middle-class Jewish women, Stern and Auerbach defied convention (both socially and artistically), creating daring work often inspired by the Bauhaus school. At only 56 minutes long and with some pedestrian directorial choices (why include so much Kurt Weill in the soundtrack? We get that it’s set in the late-’20s/early-’30s Berlin), Ringl and Pit feels like a PBS special, but the personalities of the two women and the strength of their art make this film worth seeing.
Steven Cantor’s more introspective What Remains reflects on the life and work of Sally Mann, whom Time once hailed as “America’s greatest photographer.” But Mann’s work has also been the target of harsh criticism, most of it directed at her startlingly frank nude photos of her young children. What Remains slowly tells the story of Mann’s life and work while giving a vivid portrait of her artistic process and inspiration, including the ways in which her familial relationships express themselves in her photography. Spanning five years and the creation of a new collection (which includes the beautiful but frightening photos of human bodies in various states of decomposition, also titled What Remains, that Mann published in 2003), the film is a wonderful look at an artist who is reaching iconic status.
Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project also examines a controversial American photographer. Gearon’s 2001 exhibition in the Saatchi Gallery was nearly closed by London police after some labelled it child pornography. Her new work is also challenging: Gearon has undertaken the ambitious project of photographing her schizophrenic (and very difficult) mother. Directors Jack Youngelson and Peter Sutherland film The Mother Project in a cinéma-vérité style that’s nearly as uncomfortable for the audience as Alberta and David Maysles’ 1975 Grey Gardens, occasionally punctuated by Gearon’s aggressive images. Like What Remains, Gearon’s relationships with her family take centre stage, leaving the audience with a haunting sense of how personal her self-proclaimed “therapeutic” art really is.
“Being a photographer myself,” Watamaniuk says, “I knew that my taste would influence the selection of films, but I also wanted to keep in mind the Metro audience and find films that were fascinating in terms of choosing photographers that maybe don’t do the traditional, classical kind of photograph, but do images that are more ambiguous and open to interpretation.”
Sure enough, the four feature films in this showcase are detailed looks at challenging, provocative artists whose works and lives are fascinating precisely because they demand audience engagement.
