This one sets Cartier-Bresson in his context:
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the relatively reclusive master of 20th century photography and the grandfather of photojournalism, personally involves himself for the first time in a film project about himself in HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: THE IMPASSIONED EYE.The intense vitality and presence of Cartier-Bresson’s recollections bear eloquent testimony to his “impassioned eye.” An incomparable visual journey traces half a century of photographic assimilation of the world, exploring entire continents and introducing us to people, whose often delightfully humorous portraits by Cartier-Bresson, are frequently as famous as the sitters themselves.Actress Isabelle Huppert, playwright Arthur Miller, publisher Robert Delpire and the photographers Elliott Erwitt, Josef Koudelka and Ferdinando Scianna present their own very personal views on Cartier-Bresson as friend and photographer.
One reviewer says the film didn't really fit the mold of a documentary but still reveres it:
"Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye" is not a documentary in any of the many accepted forms we know. It is not the documentary I would have made had I the same material at my disposal. This aside, as short a film as this is — it runs 72 minutes — and lacking the context it deserves and should have had about the man and his life, it gives us a fascinating insight into one of the greatest photographers who ever lived.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's legacy is enormous as a photographer and a man, and for the many photographers he influenced in his long life. We will probably never see the likes of him again. Sadly, he died in 2004 at 95 shortly after his interviews for the film. Despite the film's deficiencies, Cartier-Bresson comes to life as a warm, insightful man who always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. How he arrived at each place, when and why is never explained, but he traveled the world, from India, to China, to Mexico, to the United States. There he is in India with Mahatma Gandhi on the day he died. There he is in Mississippi covering a neglected part of America. There he is in Mexico rife with poverty, but glorious in its faces and landscapes. There he is in Paris for its liberation in World War II. There he is in China for the Communist takeover.
He rarely photographed the obvious, preferring to make his way where his instinct told him to go and then, simply — not quite the right word — take the picture destiny laid out for him. In some cases he needed only one shot, in other cases, just a few. And, perhaps, that was his genius. As some critics indicated, in the film we enter a master class in photography. To that I have no objection. I found what Cartier-Bresson said useful and insightful, and disarming as well as charming.
The film is mostly an extended interview in a number of different settings conducted by director Heinz Butler — rare for Cartier-Bresson, considering he was a private man in a very public profession. Music surrounds many of his comments. Sometimes we even pause long enough to meditate with Cartier-Bresson as we listen with him to the classical piano in the background. Despite the director's static approach, it is triumph enough to hear Cartier-Bresson talk about only a handful of the pictures from his cannon. His memory of the places he had visited and the people he had met was clear and often infused with good humor. Considering how rare it was for him to allow the public an opportunity to understand his work as a photojournalist, to see him recall how he took those pictures was worth the price of the ticket.
His portraits of Igor Stravinsky, Samuel Beckett, Alexander Calder, and an enthusiastic Leonard Bernstein conducting are remarkable because they are not what we expect. He easily and sometimes simply, too simply for my taste, recounts his long history of wandering about the world, camera in hand, his eye concentrating on the unexpected. He tells us he believes in grabbing the moment, and when he did, which was often, when his finger skillfully pushed the button to get the image, the resultant photos are memorable.
Most of the photos we see were taken with his 35mm Leica between the 1930s and 1960s. We see some of these photos as they appear in books, or when Cartier-Bresson holds a print before the camera and discusses its origin. We see a marvelous, thoughtful picture of Marilyn Monroe. We share the deadpan look on Marie and Pierre Curie as he enters their apartment and takes an inspirational photo of them. We see Henri Matisse framed in the doorway of his farmhouse. We share with him his remarkable ability to create geometry and architecture where none might have been apparent until he squeezed the trigger of his camera. We see a man leaping over a puddle and I wonder how in the world he made that shot because I know it would be impossible ever to duplicate it.
Had I made the film with the same material I would have added more background to get an understanding of Henri Cartier-Bresson's life, his loves, his adventures, his failures, and how success changed him or not. We get little of this in the film, but what we do get is priceless, and we should be grateful for even this small look at how he worked, which is now permanently on the record.
I think this reviewer has a point; here's a chronology of Cartier-Bresson's life, and another biography of the photographer.
Here's an interesting hour that Charlie Rose produced on Cartier-Bresson, too.
And here's the Washington Post obituary of Cartier-Bresson, who died less than a year after sitting for the interviews featured in this documentary:
Henri Cartier-Bresson, 95, who revolutionized photography as an art and a reporting tool by capturing what he called "the decisive moment," died Tuesday at his home in the southwestern Luberon region of France. No cause of death was provided.
Whether taking pictures of French resistance fighters and Gestapo informers during World War II, the death of Gandhi, a grizzled eunuch during the Communist revolution in China or a slew of celebrity shots, he was the epitome of the photographer who was at the right place at the right time -- all the time. "In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick," he once said. "Like an animal and a prey."
His images, mostly taken with his ever-present 35mm Leica, were alive with playful shadows and rich geometric patterns based on his early interest in surrealism. He called himself a painter at heart, and the sheer beauty of his shots was heightened by the fact he never posed or planned them or later cropped them in any way. Each caught the drama, wit or joy of the immediate, or "decisive," moment.
With a productivity matched by the haunting grandeur of his pictures, Cartier-Bresson was a founder of Magnum Photos, a co-operative photojournalism agency based in New York and Paris; was the subject, in 1954, of the Louvre's first exhibit of photography; had exhibits at all the world's major galleries; and compiled his work in acclaimed books that showcased his worldwide travels. "No photographer alive has a more secure position in the history of art than Henri Cartier-Bresson -- aesthete, man of action, artist and reporter," Washington Post art critic Paul Richard wrote in 1981.
During his career, Cartier-Bresson also worked as a filmmaker. He was assistant director to director Jean Renoir, son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in the mid-1930s, and later directed his own documentary, in 1945, about weary French refugees returning to their homeland after World War II.
Cartier-Bresson, thin, wiry and slightly aloof, was long regarded as one of the art world's most unassuming personalities. He disliked self-aggrandizing publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Likewise, he never used his camera to intrude on moments he considered too private for others. That contributed to winning cooperation from such people as William Faulkner, Jean-Paul Sartre, Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe, each captured in rare moments of unguardedness.
...
The notion of the decisive moment had its detractors, who said it amounted to snapping scenes quickly and slapping a fancy label on it. But Cartier-Bresson, who late in life returned to painting, argued that his photographic work required an essential intuitive, creative impulse.
"Photography is not like painting," he told The Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera."
"That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."
There's more of the obituary that I clipped out from this note, but I encourage reading the whole text. It's worth it.
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