Finding Vivian Maier

The first film in the Best Documentary Feature category I've looked at is Finding Vivian Maier. I was pretty certain Life Itself, which I have seen already, would get nominated, but that film, about Roger Ebert, did not. Instead, this film, about a mysterious woman who took amazing photographs, was, and it was co-directed by....Charlie Siskel, Gene Siskel's nephew.

Finding Vivian Maier deserves its nomination. I had no idea what it would be about and I was absorbed. The other director is John Maloof, who drives the story. He's one of those guys who haunts storage auctions and estate sales, and he came across some negatives taken by a Vivian Maier. He googled her and came up with nothing, but the photos were so striking--think of Robert Frank crossed with Diane Arbus--that he did a little digging and found out she was a nanny. The last family she worked for was about to toss everything in her overstuffed storage space, and offered Maloof the opportunity to take anything he wanted. It turned out to be the artistic find of the decade.

Maier, who worked as a nanny in various places from the 1950s to near her death in 2009, was a street photographer. She used one of those old-fashioned cameras that you hold at the waist, looking down into the lens. She tended to prowl the less fashionable neighborhoods, getting shots of everyday people in their everyday environment. Master photographers hailed her work. Even by limited understanding of photography, I could see their brilliance.

But she never showed her work, and it wasn't even printed. Maloof found hundreds of undeveloped rolls of film. In all there was more than 150,000 photographs, which he had scanned. Like a dog with a bone, he went back to the French village where Maier's mother was from (she had a French accent, but was born in New York, and a linguistics expert claimed her accent was phony) and met people who knew her. He tracked down and interviewed children she oversaw and the parents who worked for her. Some had nice things to say, others did not. One woman claimed Maier beat her. All agreed she was eccentric. She never married or had a social life. By the end of her life she was a compulsive hoarder.

I'm sure there are many out there like Maier. She even went to supermarkets and interviewed people on tape about politics, but never did anything with it. She gave false names, and told one man she was a spy. The difference between her and a garden-variety nut is that she had immense talent.

Most who knew her said she would have hated the intention. One man, in a kind of a twisted irony, said she would probably have liked that she was only famous after she was dead.

This is a terrific film, a mystery and a fine story about the artistic imagination. See this movie, and take a look at her photos online.

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