by Julian Wood
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Martin Parr
Intro:
… isn’t groundbreaking in form, nor does it offer a particularly penetrating insight into the mind of the artist; it is content to let the work speak for itself, which is probably what Parr wants too.
Photographer Martin Parr might well have to introduce himself, as most people wouldn’t know who he is if they met him. Also, in another way, his anonymity is his best disguise. This British photographer – who is in fact much feted within the world of professional art photographers – has been wondering around just photographing things for decades. He doesn’t do still lifes or landscapes much, but he loves people and this plainly comes out in his body of work. This warmth combined with a natural eye for framing is all that he has ever needed.
This documentary from Lee Shulman is very much in the spirit of this approach to art. It spends most of its running time just following Parr around as he follows people.
Parr loves English seaside towns, with their inherently slightly naff elements of the British on holiday. He looks for that telling moment – the ice cream cone about to fall, or the person too large for the push bike they are wobbling on, and his trusty camera is ready to shoot it. He himself is now in later life and not that steady on his pins, but it doesn’t stop him getting out and about. Far from it. Pushing his frame before him, he ventures into the fray, photographing everything and everyone. The fascination of people watching (and recording) hasn’t left him. His long-term wife appears briefly to tell us that it is what keeps him going.
As implied, he is now taken quite seriously in the art world and Shulman lines up a few talking heads. Most say the same thing though; Martin is just Martin. Perhaps the most famous of these friends and peers is Grayson Perry, the ceramicist. Perry is a fellow eccentric who thinks Martin has managed the great artist’s trick of being an insider and outsider at the same time. Somehow, over the decades, he has produced a treasurable ‘informal archive’ of British life with a charm all of its own.
The doco isn’t groundbreaking in form, nor does it offer a particularly penetrating insight into the mind of the artist. It is content to let the work speak for itself, which is probably what Parr wants too. Just showing photo after photo could risk it becoming a slide show, but the images are often so sweet and arresting that it doesn’t matter. In fact, you often wish the film would stay on an image longer, but there are so many more to see.
The force of this simple approach does have an accumulative weight, and you come away really liking the artist and his work. As inferred, it is also a tribute to ordinary Britishness, and it shows a country that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is the sort of place which supports amiable eccentrics like Parr and long may it be so.
