Brooklyn native ex-punk rocker turned photographer Gregory Crewdson is something of an enigma. Over a period of some six years he produced a whole body of work called ‘Beneath The Roses’ which were large scale photographs of meticulously designed scenarios that he had set up as full-blown movie sets. In this fascinating documentary by filmmaker Ben Shapiro (‘Paul Goodman Changed My Life’) we follow the progress of many of these pieces from conception to realisation, and its all rather intriguing to say the least.
Crewdson works are an extension of himself as a person i.e. completely surreal, and as his large team go about their tasks he acts less like an artist, and more like a producer and ringmaster as he painstakingly micro-manages very detail of the set-up to the finished ‘art’. He is accompanied by a Production Designer and Director of Photography and a substantial-sized crew that probably exceeds the budget of most Indie Movies, and all for his one photograph. His nit-picking obsessiveness about everything can either be excused as his right as the ‘artist’ or, as I was beginning to suspect, dismissed as just another trait of the total self indulgence of this whole project.
He chooses a few of the small industrial towns in Massachusetts that are dying and in decay as his backdrops and ‘live’ sets. He is there so often scouting for locations and befriending the locals that as bewildered as they are by the total disruption and his shenanigans, they all appear to welcome him warmly.
Available at Amazon
★★★★★★★★
Labels: 2012, art, biography, documentary
