Word: arbus
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According to the credits Fur is "inspired" by Patricia Bosworth's sober, well-researched and touching 1984 biography of Diane Arbus, the photographer who specialized in making indelible images of the freakish-giants, dwarfs, Siamese twins and the like-in mid-20th century America. The filmmakers, in an on-screen foreword, say that what we are about to see is "a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path...
...This completely fictional figure is, of course, intended to symbolize all the freaks who preoccupied Arbus for the rest of her short life (she is one of those artists whose brief stay among us adds tragic resonance to a relatively modest body of work). Arbus herself is presented as a shy, somewhat dithering, woman, working as an assistant to her successful fashion photographer husband, whose powerful need to make some sort of artistic statement of her own is thwarted by her lack of a subject, something that might mobilize her compassion and engender a style with which to express...
...role into an account of a real life, what can you usefully take away from the movie? That blather about being "inspired" by a good book when what they're really talking about is travesty is an excellent clue. So is that stuff about expressing "what might have been Arbus' inner experience." It is really a statement of desperation. It might just as well not have reflected her inner experience. How are we to know? For we are not talking "untrustworthy narrators" here; we are talking outright liars, people who couldn't figure out a compelling story from the materials...
...They are aiming at the transgressive, something that will shock people down to their boots. But in so doing, they travesty Arbus. Her photographic manner was quite objective. Mostly she just had her subjects stand before her and stare, more or less expressionlessly, into her camera. Her pictures often seemed like snapshots raised to flashpoint and their intention seemed to me to reinsert the freakish back into the quotidian, to make us see the human normality lurking beneath the outer forms nature cruelly imposed upon her subjects. To put it simply, underneath her apparent artlessness there was great artfulness...
...prostitutes, barflies, transvestites and others living on the margins of society ever had a portraitist, it was Diane Arbus. The New York-born photographer produced some of the most memorable portraits ever made before her suicide in 1971, and the best have been gathered for a major retrospective of her work at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (www.vam.ac.uk), showing between now and next January. Her most iconic images are present...