Eggleston on film.

BY THE WAYS: A JOURNEY WITH WILLIAM EGGLESTON

BY VINCENT GERARD AND CEDRIC LATY

85 MINUTES, 2005

WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD 

BY MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

86 MINUTES, 2005

  Art ... You can love it and appreciate it, but you can't really talk
  about it. Doesn't make any sense.--William Eggleston, from William
  Eggleston in the Real World

The track record of documentaries on contemporary artists has unfortunately been rather inauspicious. The nature of the problem is compounded when the artist depicted is also a documentarian of sorts. An examination of two recent films on photographer William Eggleston brings to bear many of the difficulties surrounding the cinematic depiction of a highly eccentric, mercurial, and significant artist. Eggleston is as intriguing a subject as any filmmaker might hope to find. Inextricably linked to the American South, he has spent much of his life in Memphis, Tennessee, ceaselessly and ravenously photographing his surroundings.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

French filmmakers Vincent Gerard and Cedric Laty are surprisingly adept (especially for first-time directors) at creating a cohesive portrait of the artist through fragments that, while often relevant, take intriguing detours, befitting the film's title, By the Ways: A Journey with William Eggleston (2005). However, Michael Almereyda's documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World (2005), suggests a parody of the documentary form. Almereyda, an accomplished director of fictional narratives, prefers the use of long, uninterrupted, and often uninvolving scenes to establish the film's meandering itinerary.

However comfortably Eggleston may be placed within the documentary tradition of postwar photography, both the matter of his influence and his own voluminous, ongoing production are far more complicated than referencing such a tidy and direct lineage might imply. His work raises various questions: Is Eggleston more an inheritor of Walker Evans or the grandfather of Andreas Gursky? Is his cool, nonjudgmental approach part of a longstanding modernist commitment to recording the everyday or an exactingly rendered postmodernism before the fact? Is Eggleston's evasion of discourse surrounding the work old-fashioned and genteel or rather timely and fashionable?

In favor of scrutinizing the taciturn man who made the inscrutable art, these questions are not directly addressed in the current films. Context is everything when banking on the artist as "personality." Gerard and Laty are most successful at conveying the importance of Eggleston as a product of Memphis, the home of blues, rockabilly, and, later, such musical individualists as Alex Chilton and Tav Falco. One of the most charming bits of By the Ways features Falco, leader of the band Panther Burns, coiffed with a flowing black pompadour and sporting a pencil-thin moustache, expounding on the relative perfection of Eggleston's contact sheets and the lingering influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Arguably the most indelible of Eggleston's photographic achievements is the volume William Eggleston's Guide (1976), forty-eight photos that serve to collate an idiosyncratic vision, marked by its concise and insistent clarity. Guide accompanied the photographer's now-benchmark and then-controversial solo exhibition of color photographs, a rarity at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City and a major arbiter of taste in the narrow sliver that is/was the world of fine art photography. Photographer and critic Mark Power once succinctly remarked that it was one of the few photography books that "reads like a novel." (1)

John Szarkowski, then-director of the photography department at MoMA, and curator of the exhibition, wrote a penetrating and insightful analysis of Eggleston's work for the introduction:

  These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our
  expectations. We have been told so often of the bland synthetic
  smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant
  insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its
  irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus
  are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of
  prototypically normal types on their familiar ground ... who seem to
  live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign. (2)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Although Szarkowski is entirely correct in his alignment of that particular body of work with "ordinary" subjects, Eggleston has also committed a great and eclectic variety of material to film, whether on movie sets, in Elvis Presley's home, in nightclubs, or while abroad. Eggleston, a specialist in terse replies to interviewers, has also generated many memorable dicta such as his notion of The Democratic Forest (the title of the long-awaited 1989 sequel to Guide), that no image is of estimably greater significance than another, or his methodology of taking "only one picture of only one thing." He has also disdained the reading of his work as deriving from the "snapshot" with the retort: "They want something-obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word 'snapshot.' Ignorance can always be covered by 'snapshot.' The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious." (3)

In several scenes in Almereyda's documentary Eggleston is evasive, eluding interrogations and appearing to simply go about his business. These infuriating exchanges are characteristic of the film as a whole, which initially promises much more as it circles in a deliberate, intense way around its protagonist. In an admittedly perverse fashion, a viewer could also treat this bizarrely disconnected document as a marvel to behold. The audience could then decide who is controlling the situation here. The film becomes a lugubrious situation comedy, reaching its nadir in scenes depicting the photographer doodling with colored pencils and noodling away on musical compositions. Is this only a draft for a film, a sketch, some rough takes? The director does little to correct this impression--even with his sporadic voice-over, which, like many such meditations on the significance of photography, often reaches for the profound and settles for the banal.

With even a cursory scan of archived material, one easily discovers that Eggleston's answers to interviewers in print have often been far more inclusive and revealing than the bits shown here. In fact, critic Jim Lewis prefaced his interview in 2000 with the following comments: "Eggleston's first answer to nearly every question was 'I don't know,' or 'I never think about that,' or 'I don't care about that'--an interviewer's nightmare, until I realized that he was simply being laconic in the extreme. Left in silence for some time, he'd eventually address himself to the matter at hand." (4) In the most lucid and revealing comment made by Eggleston to Almereyda, he recalls dreaming of "brilliant beautiful pictures," and laments, "I've always hated that technology is not yet here to record our dreams."

Both film crews frequently rely on other voices in addition to Eggleston's deep and indistinct rumble (usually subtitled in The Real World). In By the Ways, a perky David Byrne recounts anecdotes from a downtown loft while photographer Rosalind Solomon describes meeting and making portraits of Eggleston in the sixties. Dennis Hopper turns up in an entirely superfluous cameo. Almereyda chats with the garrulous Rosa, Eggleston's wife of forty years, who shares weathered photo albums dating from their teenage years.

By the Ways is constructed using a tightly organized series of twelve "chapters," or segments. The filmmaking duo also patterns their cinematographic approach after a gently mimetic relationship to Eggleston's vivid palette and simple framing. The film has a languorous quality without ever becoming dull. These non-natives of the South have filmed its unhurried pace with exquisite deftness. They rarely show Eggleston at work, a mistake made by Almereyda, as watching a photographer stroll along--even one of his estimable stature--is a very uninteresting proposition. It is actually more evocative to witness large trays mechanically rocking Eggleston's prints into existence in a custom photo lab. The film shows a darkroom technician humming along to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" (1965) as the artist flips carefully through prints while wearing leather gloves.

Eggleston's sheer mysteriousness is emphasized repeatedly in By the Ways, which opens with the photographer discussing the impact of Alfred Hitchcock's color films, such as the lurid North by Northwest (1959). This is a significant reference because the documentary concludes with the camera following Eggleston's daughter, Andra, on the street without any interaction--an apt Hitchcockian denouement. In a later section of By the Ways, Sherlock Holmes becomes an allegorical stand-in for Eggleston as Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective is described in a lengthy passage by Dr. Watson, who expresses astonishment at "his ignorance of literature, philosophy, and politics" simultaneously coexisting with his attention to minute details: "No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reasons for doing so." This narration works wonderfully well, and, after a time, I remembered that Holmes was a literary favorite of none other than Jorge Luis Borges.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Incidental music is also handled effectively by Gerard and Laty, lending an enthralling sonic texture, from blues and rockabilly to arias and fugues, to the distinctive visual character of By the Ways. Near the beginning of the film, we are serenaded by an Elvis impersonator in a parking lot and, by its final section, we are treated to Peggy Lee's melancholy 1969 hit "Is That All There Is?": "Is that all there is, is that all there is/If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing/Let's break out the booze and have a ball/If that's all there is."

One of Eggleston's photographs--of a lone incandescent bulb wired into a blood-red ceiling--adorned the cover of Radio City, the second LP by Memphis rock band Big Star, whose singer Alex Chilton has long been an icon in the independent pop world for his clear, direct music commenting on depression, dissolution, and other aspects of entropic decay. Until I watched Eggleston's video from 1974, Stranded in Canton, I had not realized how similar his approach was to Chilton's. Eggleston did more than cross paths with Chilton--even accompanying him once on piano, as he later recounted to critic Barry Schwabsky: "I was, the way I put it, playing around him. His singing was the musical equivalent of abstract painting and I was playing very clearly, not abstract music." (5) Eggleston is a true American amalgam: mix unequal parts of William Faulkner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hunter S. Thompson, and stir.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A new edit of the Stranded material is a major--if uncharacteristic--addition to the more canonical work. Neither precisely cheerleader nor clinician, Eggleston dwelt in the midst of semi-coherent partiers capturing the gory details and repetitive phenomena of seemingly endless Saturday nights. It would be invaluable as a time capsule of the early seventies, but it has gained legendary status as a "lost" work, particularly as, after a short stretch, Eggleston abandoned the video camera altogether. The current compilation was assembled by Robert Gordon, a filmmaker and author of the highly entertaining and informative history of the region's pop music and cultural production, It Came From Memphis (1995).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One might wonder what is offered in a video edited from approximately thirty hours of thirty-year-old videotape material. Among the dubious highlights are fellows enacting the "geek" trick--biting the heads off live chickens--on a Memphis street, an utterly tuneless acoustic rendition, a chant really, of John Lennon's 1971 hit, "Power to the People," and other songs interrupted by a pistol shot into the air. The last several scenes of Stranded appear as a procession of increasingly disturbing tableaux, a Western of drunken scatological hedonism. This is the post-1960s, not yet the New South, its protagonists stumbling about as in a Samuel Beckett drama, three sheets to the wind.

The cast of characters is visually memorable even though we are only introduced to them in an oblique, glancing fashion. A bleached blonde transvestite is shown in prime form, crooning, posing, grimacing, and wisecracking. (Eggleston: "A transvestite that makes a travesty of being a transvestite.") Eggleston's "partner in crime," longtime friend Vernon Richards, who is seen screaming and ranting in Stranded, turns up in a more reassuring guise in By the Ways as he speaks of being "a real dilettante ... I dabble in just about everything." To introduce Richards in his recent voice-over narration to Stranded, Eggleston states: "sometimes he would provoke a scene just by being himself."

Not without irony, the viewer is dropped abruptly and unceremoniously into these dark, black-and-white home movies shot by one of the world's most accomplished color photographers. Stranded is visually characterized by the consistently murky, near-hallucinatory quality of early Sony PortaPak video, although Eggleston improved matters greatly by using sharper custom lenses during his low-light taping. If restraint and elegance are hallmarks of his photographs, these qualities have been jettisoned here. Eggleston is, for the most part, behind the camera rather than onscreen but is often addressed in familiar terms, both fondly ("Egg!") and not-so fondly ("You're an imposing asshole, Eggleston. A mirror would be better.").

Eggleston also captures memorable moments that do not seem to be portending catastrophe, such as the opening shots of Eggleston's children, Winston and Andra, quietly mugging for the camera; living room performances by the legendary blues musician Furry Lewis; the artist's cohorts munching Krystal hamburgers to Muzak under the glare of fluorescent light; and convoluted conversations within domestic interiors. A relative recorded close up to the camera--as almost everyone is--speaks with maternal tenderness: "Bill, you're a mess. I can't wait for you to eat ... I don't know how you stand yourself all the time." However, these are but mere interludes in the predominantly all-night-party style atmosphere.

A convincing portrait of Eggleston the artist may never be made in the form of a documentary film. By The Ways is certainly the more successful in that it exhibits awareness that the most meaningful import of the artist's work derives from his unconventional eye and not simply his personal idiosyncrasies. What we can ascertain from the recorded residue of Eggleston's actual ventures into the real world is that his own photographs are so much more lucid and evocative than any of these other glimpses, however fascinating, can manage to convey.

MARTIN PATRICK, an art critic and historian, is assistant professor of contemporary art history at Illinois State University in Normal.

NOTES 1. From Frances Fralin, Washington Photography: Images of the Eighties (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982), 10. 2. John Szarkowski, William Eggleston's Guide (New York: MoMA, 1976), 13. 3. From a 1988 conversation with Mark Holborn in The Democratic Forest (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 173. 4. "The Condition of Music: Jim Lewis talks to William Eggleston," Frieze. May 2000, 80. 5. Interview with Barry Schwabsky in kultureflash 104 (www.kultureflash.net).