A documentary portrait of provocative photographer Helmut Newton, who shocked the entire fashion industry for half a century.
Helmut Newton was born in Berlin in 1920, but at the age of 18 he had to leave his homeland, where power was now in the hands of the Nazi Party. He was interested in photography from a young age. In emigration it became his main occupation and by the early 1960s he was working with the American and European editions of Vogue. The director of this documentary, Gero von Boehm, spoke to numerous subjects of Newton’s shoots, who were the main witnesses to his creativity. They include supermodels Grace Jones and Claudia Schiffer, actresses Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini, editor of American Vogue and fashion industry legend Anna Wintour, and the most important woman in the photographer’s life, his wife and fellow photographer June Browne. The archive shots of Newton, who died in 2004, and the feelings and thoughts of his subjects combine to produce a unified film-portrait of this legendary photographer.
Regardless of Newton’s status as a superstar of photography, Gero von Boehm is not overwhelmed by the legends surrounding him or the rapturous reminiscences of his models. He includes an excerpt of Newton’s discussion with Susan Sontag, who was researching photography and images from the point of view of feminist critique. She disputed the objectification of the women in Newton’s shoots and the images of women in his photographs, feeling that they were in danger, unnecessarily sexualized, and always canonically beautiful. Next, his models’ thoughts about the sources of Newton’s visual style tread a thin line. For many, the heroic and ideal bodies of the women in his photographs are like plaster casts of bodies that were considered idea in Nazi Germany and which fill the documentaries shot by Leni Riefenstahl. Newton’s method, which is based on provocation and a radical rejection of prudish norms, leaves the viewer with questions as to whether he was a beautiful or a bad photographic genius.
The film will be shown in English, German, and Italian with Russian subtitles.
Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
Director Gero von Boehm
Germany, 2020, 93 min.
18+