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Not such a bad boy
This hagiographic documentary of the famed fashion and celebrity photographer Helmut Newton is based on interviews with him and his wife, and on uniformly positive interviews with the women who posed naked for him for sexy, stylized—some would say erotic--photos (“Men,” he said, “are accessories”). Actress Charlotte Rampling describes herself as a participant in Newton’s creative process, which gave her a feeling of “huge power.” Though Newton says he cared about “face, breasts, and legs” rather than the inner being of the woman he was photographing, singer Marianne Faithfull says, “he captured my soul.” Another model recalls how being photographed naked by Newton made her “strong” and emphasized his “respect” for her. Jamaican model and singer Grace Jones, whose photo of her chained, naked black body is perhaps the most discomforting of the images presented, laughs as she calls Newton “a little bit of a pervert” whose work was “always in beautiful taste.”
Newton’s black-and-white photographs are of nude or semi-nude women, most of them tall, thin, and big-breasted, in a variety of disturbing positions.
“In beautiful taste” hardly seems an apt description of Newton’s black-and-white photographs of nude or semi-nude women, most of them tall, thin, and big-breasted, in a variety of disturbing positions: one model in a wheelchair and on crutches, another eating raw meat, another with an enormous (artificial) swan in her bed, and one whose torso and head are inside the body of a stuffed reptile. Editor Anna Wintour, who published many of Newton’s photos in Vogue, valued his work for its shock value, as a “stopper” that would cut against the “visions of loveliness” for which her magazine was known.
In one of its few attempts to explore the sources of Newton’s vision, the film appropriately links his work to the transgressive expressionism of the Weimar era, when Newton, born in 1920, was a boy in Berlin, and to that of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose productions for Nazi Germany glorified the (male) body. A Jew, Newton fled Germany in 1938.
Newton seems never to have been tempted or strayed—apparently not even guilty of Jimmy Carter’s “lust in my heart.”
The documentary is equally hagiographic in its depiction of Newton, a self-described “naughty boy,” as charming: jocular, funny, open, playful, sufficiently humble to credit a two-year apprenticeship with Yva (who died in a concentration camp in 1942) with teaching him to use a camera, occasionally insecure (using his camera as a shield), and a good husband and faithful companion to fellow photographer June, who calls him “Helmy.” Although he admired the female body and photographed many women without clothes, he seems never to have been tempted or strayed—apparently not even guilty of Jimmy Carter’s “lust in my heart.” Nor does he come across as brilliant but abusive in the way of Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry. In other words, this portrait of him hardly seems entirely believable. Given his body of work and the power he held (he could make your reputation as a model, says Jones), it seems unlikely that none of his subjects felt used in this unequal power dynamic.
Through these interviews (there is no voice-over, no authoritative narrator), Newton is also presented as an obsessive, creative genius. Obsessive, surely. He was meticulous in positioning his subjects; good photos, he notes, require “hard work” and “pain.” He was obsessive, too, in shaping a body of work that is instantly identifiable as Helmut Newton. Yet there’s a sameness to his staged photographs that suggests his creativity took place within a frame, a frame that emerged from deep in his consciousness (or unconsciousness) and functioned as much to confine and limit him as it did to “open [him] to the world,” as Wintour puts it.
We first saw Newton’s work in Bologna, Italy in 1989. We brought home the exhibit’s poster, had it framed, and today it hangs in our Buffalo apartment. The poster features Newton, a large video camera to his eye, hovering over the body of a blond woman, naked except for high heels, her pelvis thrust towards him. For Dianne, the photograph (which is, of course, not by Newton but was certainly staged by him) is about power and aggression, and it is threateningly (rather than consensually) sexual. The 24-year-old girlfriend of our son, who saw the same show, returned from it upset and angry, recounting several photographs that featured a woman with a gun in her mouth, and another with the same woman with an ecstatic smile as a man appears to tighten a chain around her neck.
You won't hear much criticism of the man or his work, as controversial as it has been over the years.
You won’t see any of these photographs in German documentarian Gero von Boehm’s 93-minute film, nor, except for some comments by feminist photographer and essayist Susan Sontag—who disliked Newton’s photographs for their misogyny, objectification, and humiliation of women—will you hear much criticism of the man or his work, as controversial as it has been over the years. Newton died in 2004.
The film’s subtitle apparently refers to the “beautiful” bodies Newton photographed and to the “bad” boy who did the work. Unfortunately, there’s little “bad” in von Boehm’s documentary; one can speculate that had something to do with the participation of the Helmut Newton Foundation. This potentially fascinating subject comes across, reputation intact, as a one-dimensional good guy. Not, perhaps, what Helmut Newton would have wanted—or deserves.
Date: 2020
Director: Gero von Boehm
Starring: Helmut Newton, June Newton, Charlotte Rampling, Maryann Faithfull, Grace Jones, Anna Wintour, Claudia Schiffer, Isabella Rossellini
Country: USA
Languages: English; some German and French (subtitled in English)
Runtime: 93 minutes
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