hated it

Posted on | June 26, 2007 | 1 Comment

I don’t generally review things here, but we went to see this documentary, Black, White & Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe last week as part of Frameline, and I was moved to, um, speak on it.

We hemmed and hawed, as we always do at the prospect of actually leaving the house, but decided to go because it held some promise, given its fascinating subjects, and because I vaguely knew the director, James Crump, an impeccably-dressed fellow UNM grad who used to run Arena Editions, a small publishing house in Santa Fe that was just about to publish a book I really wanted (I don’t remember the photographer but which included a portrait of Grace Jones) when it went under back around 2002. But I digress.

Now, imagine my delight when, almost immediately, two of my favorite talking-head blasts-from-my-past appeared onscreen: former curator Gordon Baldwin, with whom I used to work at the Getty; and Nia Parry, a brilliant historian with whom I studied at UNM. Rather like a child, I’m always excessively delighted when some place or someone familiar to me appears on screen, and this was no exception. But while Nia and Gordon were distinct highlights, because of my fondness for them but also because of the thoughtful perspectives they brought, I thought the documentary overall was so crammed full of random images and poorly edited that whatever they had to say got lost in the mix, to the degree that, during the Q & A, an audience member had to ask who Nia was and why her bitter-sounding tone differed so significantly from the other speakers in the film. Knowing Nia and knowing something about Mapplethorpe’s history, I didn’t hear her dissenting tone regarding Mapplethorpe as bitter but rather as justly critical of a complicated and by many accounts difficult figure within the history of photography. However, given the lack of context for her comments, I could also easily see how any viewer not familiar with her blunt and unapologetic style or her status within the field could read her as bitter and caustic, a fault which I’d entirely blame on the filmmaker.

The film focuses far more on Wagstaff than on Mapplethorpe, perhaps attempting to right the wrong of history canonizing Mapplethorpe while all but forgetting Wagstaff’s contributions as curator and collector, but if Wagstaff were the real focus with Mapplethorpe (like Patti Smith, who appears in the film) as a supporting character, then it should have been billed as such (especially since most of the audience would be coming, I suspect, for Mapplethorpe). In order to give a sense of Wagstaff’s collecting eye, Crump liberally used images from Wagstaff’s collection (which in 1984 was famously sold to form the basis of the Getty’s photography collection) throughout, although several people I spoke with afterward who weren’t familiar with the images found them boring (ie., they fell asleep) without more contextualization. Early on when, during a sequence of images of the young Wagstaff over which the narrator is speaking about his mother using him as her escort, even teaching him to smoke, the filmmaker cuts to August Sander’s photograph of a young man smoking (what–mother teaches him to smoke so he eventually collects a photo of another man smoking?), he completely lost me.

Most unsettling, though, was the way in which the film awkwardly cut from discussing Wagstaff’s early curatorial career at the Wadsworth Atheneum to his alleged drug use and sexual appetites then back to a brief mention of the end of his tenure in Detroit (what else did he do in Detroit?) without anything tying these aspects of his life and career together. And Joan Juliet Buck, about whom I know little, was such a pretentious-sounding narrator that she was almost a parody of hauteur run amok. The only thing that made it even remotely worthwhile was briefly getting to see Gordon, who’d come up for the screening, as the theatre emptied.

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