Photography? Wink-wink, nudge nudge? Say no more?

The Balboa Theater's twinbill of documentaries about photographers seemed like an obvious choice for me. Midday matinee double features are my thing, you know. So I walked down there on Sunday to take in the films while I recovered from the One Night Stand, in which I had portrayed Gerry Roslie and a portion of Mick Ronson the night before.

I hadn't known much about Henri Cartier-Bresson before, but once he started holding up prints of his photos I started to recognize images that I've been seeing my whole life. (Kind of like that one room at the Met in NYC.) I enjoyed hearing the master talk about geometry and timing, and his story about being present moments before Gandhi's death was striking. There were a lot of audible gasps in the theater for that one. Arthur Miller and Isabelle Huppert, among others, added good commentary as well. The film was rather brief at 72 minutes, and I could've stood some more; maybe they were saving it for the DVD or something. Anyway the film's called The Impassioned Eye, and it's not rotten, though I'm willing to admit it may be "wispy".

I actually went down there more interested in William Eggleston In The Real World, having seen his exhibit at SFMOMA a couple of years ago, but I left a lot less interested. Quite honestly, I have no idea how the Chron's Kenneth Baker and several others could cheer this one. Caveat emptor: there is a nauseatingly wobbly five-minute-plus sequence of a squirming drunk woman ranting about how it's better to blow your brains out than die slowly of cancer while Eggleston draws quietly in the background, as R.E.M.'s Out of Time album plays so loudly that the conversation has to be subtitled. ("Shiny happy people holding hands...!") There are long camcorder shots of Eggleston walking around in the wind (noisy!) taking pictures that you don't ever get to see, and there is a final interview in which the documentarian asks annoying art-school-sophomore questions which a drunken Eggleston deflects as he tries to eat dinner in some barbecue joint. The parts where you see the photographs with voice-over narration are just fine, but those should hold together the best parts of the film, not be them. Incompetently edited, not illuminating, and certainly irritating. If I'd paid full price for just this film, I would've been really angry.


FMFM: Alberta Hunter, in the 1920s and again in the late 1970s.