Eggleston on film.

BY THE WAYS: A JOURNEY WITH WILLIAM EGGLESTON

BY VINCENT GERARD AND CEDRIC LATY

85 MINUTES, 2005

WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD

BY MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

86 MINUTES, 2005

Art ... You can love it and appreciate it, but you can't really talk

about it. Doesn't make any sense.--William Eggleston, from William

Eggleston in the Real World

The track record of documentaries on contemporary artists has unfortunately been rather inauspicious. The nature of the problem is compounded when the artist depicted is also a documentarian of sorts. An examination of two recent films on photographer William Eggleston brings to bear many of the difficulties surrounding the cinematic depiction of a highly eccentric, mercurial, and significant artist. Eggleston is as intriguing a subject as any filmmaker might hope to find. Inextricably linked to the American South, he has spent much of his life in Memphis, Tennessee, ceaselessly and ravenously photographing his surroundings.

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French filmmakers Vincent Gerard and Cedric Laty are surprisingly adept (especially for first-time directors) at creating a cohesive portrait of the artist through fragments that, while often relevant, take intriguing detours, befitting the film's title, By the Ways: A Journey with William Eggleston (2005). However, Michael Almereyda's documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World (2005), suggests a parody of the documentary form. Almereyda, an accomplished director of fictional narratives, prefers the use of long, uninterrupted, and often uninvolving scenes to establish the film's meandering itinerary.

However comfortably Eggleston may be placed within the documentary tradition of postwar photography, both the matter of his influence and his own voluminous, ongoing production are far more complicated than referencing such a tidy and direct lineage might imply. His work raises various questions: Is Eggleston more an inheritor of Walker Evans or the grandfather of Andreas Gursky? Is his cool, nonjudgmental approach part of a longstanding modernist commitment to recording the everyday or an exactingly rendered postmodernism before the fact? Is Eggleston's evasion of discourse surrounding the work old-fashioned and genteel or rather timely and fashionable?

In favor of scrutinizing the taciturn man who made the inscrutable art, these questions are not directly addressed in the current films. Context is everything when banking on the artist as "personality." Gerard and Laty are most successful at conveying the importance of Eggleston as a product of Memphis, the home of blues, rockabilly, and, later, such musical individualists as Alex Chilton and Tav Falco. One of the most charming bits of By the Ways features Falco, leader of the band Panther Burns, coiffed with a flowing black pompadour and sporting a pencil-thin moustache, expounding on the relative perfection of Eggleston's contact sheets and the lingering influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

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Arguably the most indelible of Eggleston's photographic achievements is the volume William Eggleston's Guide (1976), forty-eight photos that serve to collate an idiosyncratic vision, marked by its concise and insistent clarity. Guide accompanied the photographer's now-benchmark and then-controversial solo exhibition of color photographs, a rarity at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City and a major arbiter of taste in the narrow sliver that is/was the world of fine art photography. Photographer and critic Mark Power once succinctly remarked that it was one of the few photography books that "reads like a novel." (1)

John Szarkowski, then-director of the photography department at MoMA, and curator of the exhibition, wrote a penetrating and insightful analysis of Eggleston's work for the introduction:

These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our

expectations. We have been told so often of the bland synthetic

smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant

insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its

irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus

are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of

prototypically normal types on their familiar ground ... who seem to

live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign. (2)

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Although Szarkowski is entirely correct in his alignment of that particular body of work with "ordinary" subjects, Eggleston has also committed a great and eclectic variety of material to film, whether on movie sets, in Elvis Presley's home, in nightclubs, or while abroad. Eggleston, a specialist in terse replies to interviewers, has also generated many memorable dicta such as his notion of The Democratic Forest (the title of the long-awaited 1989 sequel to Guide), that no image is of estimably greater significance than another, or his methodology of taking "only one picture of only one thing." He has also disdained the reading of his work as deriving from the "snapshot" with the retort: "They want something-obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word 'snapshot.' Ignorance can always be covered by 'snapshot.' The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious." (3)

In several scenes in Almereyda's documentary Eggleston is evasive, eluding interrogations and appearing to simply go about his business. These infuriating exchanges are characteristic of the film as a whole, which initially promises much more as it circles in a deliberate, intense way around its protagonist. In an admittedly perverse fashion, a viewer could also treat this bizarrely disconnected document as a marvel to behold. The audience could then decide who is controlling the situation here. The film becomes a lugubrious situation comedy, reaching its nadir in scenes depicting the photographer doodling with colored pencils and noodling away on musical compositions. Is this only a draft for a film, a sketch, some rough takes? The director does little to correct this impression--even with his sporadic voice-over, which, like many such meditations on the significance of photography, often reaches for the profound and settles for the banal.

With even a cursory scan of archived material, one easily discovers that Eggleston's answers to interviewers in print have often been far more inclusive and revealing than the bits shown here. In fact, critic Jim Lewis prefaced his interview in 2000 with the following comments: "Eggleston's first answer to nearly every question was 'I don't know,' or 'I never think about that,' or 'I don't care about that'--an interviewer's nightmare, until I realized that he was simply being laconic in the extreme. Left in silence for some time, he'd eventually address himself to the matter at hand." (4) In the most lucid and revealing comment made by Eggleston to Almereyda, he recalls dreaming of "brilliant beautiful pictures," and laments, "I've always hated that technology is not yet here to record our dreams."

Both film crews frequently rely on other voices in addition to Eggleston's deep and indistinct rumble (usually subtitled in The Real World). In By the Ways, a perky David Byrne recounts anecdotes from a downtown loft while photographer Rosalind Solomon describes meeting and making portraits of Eggleston in the sixties. Dennis Hopper turns up in an entirely superfluous cameo. Almereyda chats with the garrulous Rosa, Eggleston's wife of forty years, who shares weathered photo albums dating from their teenage years.

By the Ways is constructed using a tightly organized series of twelve "chapters," or segments. The filmmaking duo also patterns their cinematographic approach after a gently mimetic relationship to Eggleston's vivid palette and simple framing. The film has a languorous quality without ever becoming dull. These non-natives of the South have filmed its unhurried pace with exquisite deftness. They rarely show Eggleston at work, a mistake made by Almereyda, as watching a photographer stroll along--even one of his estimable stature--is a very uninteresting proposition. It is actually more evocative to witness large trays mechanically rocking Eggleston's prints into existence in a custom photo lab. The film shows a darkroom technician humming along to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" (1965) as the artist flips carefully through prints while wearing leather gloves.

Eggleston's sheer mysteriousness is emphasized repeatedly in By the Ways, which opens with the photographer discussing the impact of Alfred Hitchcock's color films, such as the lurid North by Northwest (1959). This is a significant reference because the documentary concludes with the camera following Eggleston's daughter, Andra, on the street without any interaction--an apt Hitchcockian denouement. In a later section of By the Ways, Sherlock Holmes becomes an allegorical stand-in for Eggleston as Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective is described in a lengthy passage by Dr. Watson, who expresses astonishment at "his ignorance of literature, philosophy, and politics" simultaneously coexisting with his attention to minute details: "No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reasons for doing so." This narration works wonderfully well, and, after a time, I remembered that Holmes was a literary favorite of none other than Jorge Luis Borges.

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