The prolific gay filmmakers Fenton Bailey &
Randy Barbato start this latest documentary of theirs on the celebrated and controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989 with the scene of the right wing Republican Senator Jesse Helms angrily pleading with the Senate to stop the public funding of the latest Mapplethorpe Exhibition. The fact it didn’t actually receive any monies from the National Endowment for the Arts was probably irrelevant to Helms (if he had known) his objection was to pornographic nature of some of the photographs which offended him as the self-appointed guardian of the nation’s morality.
However the main thrust of this compelling profile is actually to show the full range of Mapplethorpe’s prolific work over the different periods of his life and how, like the men he chose for lovers, covered a very broad spectrum and not just for the homoerotic images that gave him a certain notoriety. His work usually in highly stylized black and white featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers.
The film tracks the preparation of two major new retrospectives of his work which in a rare spirit of cooperation are being prepared together by two different museums in L.A. : the Getty and LA County Museum. As the different curators collate the work they want to consider including they describe and discuss it all in a refreshing manner that reflects their in-depth knowledge of the work, but just one for a change they do not over intellectualise it all.
The filmmakers were fortunate enough to be able to use quite a few archival recordings of Mapplethorpe himself, which blended with interviews with friends, family and lovers piece together a excellent portrait of the man himself. They include Patti Smith with whom he had a lengthy affair before he came out as gay, and friends such as Fran Lebowitz and Debbie Harry. One of the more telling contributions came from ex model/pornstar and gay erotic photographer Peter Berlin who said “I took my pictures just as a means to get laid, where as Robert did it as a means to get famous.”
Mapplethorpe’s rather bemused elder sister still living in Long Island where the family had been brought up, talked with great affection and admiration of her late brother and his work even though it had originally shocked her to the core. His brother Edward was not quite so fond as he too was a photographer and Robert had insisted that he change his surname so that the public wouldn’t confuse their work.
Mapplethorpe died of AIDS on 1989 before the Helms outcry and before the Police raided an exhibition of his work in Cincinnati bringing charges of indecency against the Gallery’s Director, of which he was found not-guilty. Interesting enough although there is no such talk of taking such extreme measures, it is very obvious that his Mapplethorpe’s extremely personal series of sadomasochism will always be highly controversial and contentious.
The very best thing about this Bailey & Barbato film for HBO are the pictures themselves and they show a great many of them and in detail that simply remind you (if it was really necessary) of what a sheer genius the man truly was, and probably the likes of whom we will never see again.
