Filmmaker and photographer Albert Maysles, owner of Maysles Films, New York, said when interviewed for the documentary Close Up Photographers at Work, created for the Ovation Channel, that “getting close to your subject doesn’t necessarily mean so many feet, but getting into the heart and mind of the person you are photographing.”
Director Rebecca Dreyfus, whose spotmaking home is Maysles Shorts, the commercial production division of Maysles Films, does just that in Close Up, which aired last month and is scheduled to run again in March. In addition to offering an intimate portrait of Albert Maysles in the documentary, Dreyfus offers a glimpse into the private world of photographers Timothy Greenfield Sanders, Sylvia Plachy, Gregory Crewdson and Andrew Moore. The documentary provides a look at their body of work, features interviews with the artists and shows them working during a shoot. Each segment ends with a look at photographs they took during those shoots.
“When Maysles Films came to me with this project, I was immediately drawn to the subject matter, and was excited to do it,” Dreyfus said. “It was a dream in a way to be able to make a wish list of world-class photographers to appear in a show like this–and to be able to approach them, and really get inside their heads–The other rewarding aspect of this job was the opportunity for me to work with Albert as both subject and collaborator.” (Maysles served as a DP on the project.)
This is not the first time that Dreyfus and Maysles have collaborated. He shot a lot of the footage in her film Stolen, which was about the world’s largest unsolved art heist. “We became very close working on that film,” Dreyfus explained. “His camera work is incredible. He has a certain kind of tenderness and intimacy about his shooting that is very rare.
“I am able to bring structure and direction to Al’s approach of not exercising any control. I feel like we perfected the balance of being able to set something up, get control of it in a way and then let something natural happen. This team of Al, editor Megan Brennan (of Company X) and I is something to offer advertisers who are interested in doing reality-based work. It’s something really special.”
Dreyfus reached out to Brennan after seeing her piece about cult painter Steve Keene. “Each portrait in Close Up is constructed around the aesthetic and personality of each photographer and Megan was wonderful in helping me to identify each one,” related Dreyfus. “For example, in Plachy’s portrait in just a short amount of time audiences are able to find out so much about where her motivation comes from for making photographs. She talks a lot about how she was born in Hungary and when she was a little girl she had to leave and a lot of her work has been about feeling displaced or having to leave her home country. Megan was wonderful about finding just the right amount of personal biographical information and bringing it in so you saw her photographs in a different context.”
Dreyfus admitted it was a bit challenging to get the photographers to open up. In fact, Plachy says in the documentary, “It’s very hard to talk about these things. That’s why I am a photographer, so I don’t have to.”
“Each photographer,” notaed Dreyfus, “had such a different personality so it wasn’t like you could come up with a formula for how to work with one and apply it to everyone. Each time it was a totally new deal.”
But she is proud of how she found the balance between making them feel comfortable and getting them to give her access to their world.
“What was exciting for me is I felt like it reached a new level for me,” she said. Based on the success of Close Up, she is developing a series of portraits that will include a broad variety of artists (poets, writers, painters etc.) and will present a survey of contemporary American culture.
She was also so happy with Plachy’s portrait that she got permission from the network to turn it into its own film and has started submitting it to festivals.
Review: Director/Co-Writer Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ “My Dead Friend Zoe”
Even for a film titled "My Dead Friend Zoe," the opening scenes of Kyle Hausmann-Stokes' movie have a startling rhythm. First, two female American soldiers are riding in a Humvee in Afghanistan 2016 blasting Rihanna's "Umbrella." They are clearly friends, and more concerned with the music coming through loudly than enemy fire. Zoe (Natalie Morales) tells Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) tells that if they ever set foot in "some dopy group therapy," to please kill her. Cut to years later, they're sitting in a counseling meeting for veterans and Morales' character has a sour look at her face. She turns to her friend: "Did we survive the dumbest war of all time just to sit here all broken and kumbaya and ouchie-my-feelings?" But after this rush of cavalier soldiering and bitter sarcasm comes a sobering moment. Merit blinks her eyes and is instead staring at an empty chair. Zoe isn't there at all. "My Dead Friend Zoe," co-starring Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris, confronts a dark reality of post-combat struggle with as much humor and playfulness as it does trauma and sorrow. It comes from a real place, and you can tell. Hausmann-Stoke is himself a veteran and "My Dead Friend Zoe" is dedicated to a pair of his platoon mates who killed themselves. The opening titles note the film was "inspired by a true story." Audience disinterest has characterized many, though not all, of the films about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the output has pretty much dried up over the years. "My Dead Friend Zoe" feels like it was made with an awareness of that trend and as a rebuke to it. This is an often breezy and funny movie for what, on paper, is a difficult and dark story. But the comic tone of "My Dead Friend Zoe" is, itself, a spirited rejection to not just the heaviness... Read More