Bill Cunningham New York (2011)

One of the recurrent narrative elements in this character-sketch is the imminent closing down of the Carnegie Hall artist studios where the film's subject, New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, has lived for many decades. The filmmakers interview the other remaining tenants, who are a batty crew of old lady photographers and choreographers... perhaps this dying artists' colony was initially even the focus or premise of the film. We are supposed to find it a cultural tragedy that, e.g. a place where Andy Warhol or Marlon Brando once stood will soon become a corporate office, because that pays higher rent than the rent-controlled artists' studios.

But Bill Cunningham does not care about this part of his life. His studio is not a cultural landmark. It is a mess of filing cabinets, a twin bed, a couple of clothes-hangers, fashion books, and more filing cabinets. What is there to be nostalgic about? He muses that wherever he lives next will probably have a kitchen and a bathroom (his studio has neither), and his response: who needs 'em? This man does not have a "home life." Doubtless the artists' studios are a beautiful and sadly bygone idea... but Bill Cunningham treats his spartan private quarters as so much square footage. "I have never 'dined in,'" he says.

This is a man without a personal life, a workaholic. Everything that is not photographing clothes, simply doesn't exist for him. The movie provides ample fodder for a Freudian reading of sexual "sublimation"--all of his energies go HERE instead of ELSEWHERE. Yes. 100 % true. But this isn't interesting: what is interesting is that there is nothing "behind" the door marked "Bill's psyche." What is interesting is his practice; his opinions are secondary to his practice, his whole life is secondary to this practice.

Most touching moment of the film for me: everyone around Bill, including the filmmaker, is making a big deal about his having to move into a new apartment. He shrugs it off, is annoyed that this will be an inconvenience. "You can't let that interfere with your life," he says.

Hold onto that thought for a second. Isn't that the exact opposite of what we mean by "life"? Where we live, whom we live with, where our money goes, errands, our stuff... isn't that "life"? And doesn't Bill Cunningham mean... work? How could he have made such a confusion!

Many people will see this film and read it (correctly) as about journalism, or New York, or a curmudgeonly character. It's all of those things; and it is well-paced and punchy and I left the movie feeling better than I have in a long time. The line outside Film Forum has become the stuff of legend, but please brave the dreary weather and the line and go see this movie. It's all of those things... but for me, this movie is the ultimate rebuttal to something like the Youtube sensation of "The Last Lecture," or "Eat Pray Love," or any insipid bourgeois pablum about how life is about who you love, and how much you enjoy yourself, and thanks for the memories and the grandchildren. "Bill Cunningham New York" is a beautiful picture of life--I don't think you can walk away from it without accidentally saying to yourself that Bill Cunningham is an "artist"--but it is a picture of a deeply anti-social, stark, all-consuming obsession, too. What Bill is obsessed with is... life, social life, expression. What he regards is that which makes the world less dreary, more colorful--Walter Benjamin's "wide-eyed facticity" (Adorno); and like Benjamin he is a quintessential flaneur. But make no mistake: it takes an enormous amount of personal courage to live this way, and to do this work. Or: not to live, except by doing this work.

It's an exhilarating challenge on how to live, and all the more so when cast in the reflected light of fashion's ephemera, and the Heraclitean fire of the flash bulb.