Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary about a photographer whose work was only recognised after her death, takes audience on a voyage of discovery.
USA
4*
Directors:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Screenwriters:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Director of Photography:
John Maloof
Running time: 80 minutes
When he bought his first box of Vivian Maier negatives, John Maloof had no idea who the photographer was. At the time, in 2007, Maloof was just a 20-something guy who knew little about photography but sometimes frequented flea markets and auctions, a gift that had been passed down from his father, and to him by his father before him. He says he always had a talent for noticing something worth having, and when he started sorting through the negatives he had bought, he was struck by their consistent quality.
He knew these pictures were the work of a certain Vivian Maier, but searching online did not help him very much, as Maier had never achieved any kind of professional success. Two years later, after posting some of the pictures on the Internet and getting an unrestrained euphoric reaction from commenters, he tried again. This time, he found an obituary, posted only a few weeks earlier, that helped him embark on a journey of discovery into the life of this unknown but obviously talented individual.
There is no question that Maier is a subject worthy of an investigation that runs the length of a feature film, even though the opening sequence, clearly meant to be comical, shows us her acquaintances unable to come up with a word to describe her. They eventually more or less settle on “eccentric”. Although it becomes clear that people did not particularly dislike her, she was generally perceived to be somewhat odd.
There are multiple reasons for this, and whenever Finding Vivian Maier pursues another strand of her story, it always grabs our attention. The first act, however, is by far the most interesting, as Maloof takes us through his early realisation that he was onto someone remarkable. He also waits until just the right time to reveal to us what Maier looked like, and we get a real rush from the small discoveries along the way, from her name and her accent to her photographs and her occupation, and finally, her appearance.
For a long time, there is uncertainty as to whether Maier was French or American, and the interviewees have vastly contradictory statements. Along with Maloof, who has managed to get hold of some very curious individuals to interview for this film and thereby made them and the film especially memorable, we find out when she was born and what she did for most of her life. She started in a factory and eventually worked as a nanny, even though her approach to child-rearing is far from admirable, and late in the story we get to the darker side of her character, which unfortunately is examined rather superficially.
We watch the film, the photos and the person herself develop in front of our eyes from our perch inside the theatre – itself a darkroom of sorts – and ultimately the image we get is one from which we simply cannot turn away. Maier remains elusive to the end, and even though Maloof makes do with little information about her past, except for snippets revealed by a genealogist or those she worked for over the years.
Yet the magnetism of the story lies primarily with the photos, as would Van Gogh’s paintings, Mozart’s music or Kafka’s stories. In contrast with these artists, however, Maier created her pictures as a full-time hobby rather than her occupation, and she never tried to actively sell her work or get it seen by the public. She had taken more than 100,000 negatives over her lifetime, but almost none of them had been developed. Countless pictures are shown onscreen, accompanied by breathtakingly emotive music scored by Academy Award–winning composer Joshua Ralph, who has worked on some of the most widely acclaimed documentaries of the past few years, including Man on Wire and The Cove.
Maier shot hundreds of rolls of photographic film and film stock, but while we get to see an impressive variety of her films, we almost exclusively see her photos in black and white taken in the 1950s and 1970s, and the lack of colour photos, which goes unexplained in the film, is rather peculiar. What we see in these black-and-white pictures, however, takes our breath away, and there are many visual references to pictures by other renowned photographers of the era whom Maier was either consciously emulating or by whom she was influenced. Or perhaps she was doing all this without even knowing about someone like Diane Arbus or Helen Levitt.
It helps that Maloof himself is such a visual filmmaker, and his curious eyes draw us into the story he is telling, but we never get a satisfactory explanation for why he signs the backs of Maier’s prints that go on sale and are shown to great success at art galleries around the world. Another detail that was a bit hard to swallow involved him trying to track down a church steeple in a French town on some of Maier’s pictures: He says he used Google images by typing something like “French church steeples” and somehow found the picture. Perhaps because of a lack of information from the filmmaker, this bit seems mind-blowing at first and then suspicious in retrospect, especially because the village somewhere deep in the Alps only has only a few dozen inhabitants.
Whatever qualms there may be about the investigation itself, the quality of Maier’s images is unassailable, and while the character herself may fade into the background after we have seen the film, the striking compositions of her work will not.
Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel expertly connect details from interviews with the life captured in Maier’s tens of thousands of photographs, and while we cannot retrace the subject’s life exactly or feel like we are following in her footsteps, we do get multiple glimpses of the moments she caught with her camera. She may have been eccentric or even mentally unstable, and she may very well have lacked social tact, but what remains today is her extensive body of work, and everybody who sees Finding Vivian Maier would agree that her pictures have earned her a place alongside some of the greatest photographers of people of the 20th century.