Errol Morris's documentary about the photographer, Elsa Dorfman, is a subdued and gentle tribute to a woman that the filmmaker seems to genuinely admire. Dorfman must be in her late seventies now and spent most of her life using massive Polaroid cameras to produce large-format portraits. Raised in the
Boston suburbs, she worked for a time at the Grove Press and, in fact, took many noteworthy black-and-white pictures of famous writers and intellectuals. (She was a lifelong friend to Allen Ginsberg, a figure who features prominently in the documentary.) Things got a little too wild for her the Grove Press -- she says twice in the film that she was a "good Jewish girl" (a charming mischaracterization) -- and, so, she ended up Cambridge peddling her black and white 35 mm pictures for two-dollars a pop on the street. It was in Massachusetts that she became enamored with Polaroid technology and began working with large-scale cameras of that kind. Because she is unorthodox and, even, seems slightly autistic, Dorfman was "never one of their pets." Although arguably she did more to legitimize Polaroids as art than anyone else (except, perhaps David Hockney use of the the Land camera to make cubist-influenced photo-collages), the people at the company were suspicious of her and leery when she wanted to rent their large-format cameras. Nonetheless, she flourished making portraits in a 20 x 24 inch format and, even, created some very notable works in the enormous 20 x.80 inch size. Because the images are available to her within seconds of the exposure, many of her pictures show their subjects holding smaller sized polaroid pictures like tablets or books. Her famous pictures of Ginsberg show him first nattily dressed and, then, stark naked with the life-size picture of him in suit and tie behind his nude body. ("Nice Jewish girl" indeed.!) The context of the film is elegiac -- Polaroid is bankrupt, it's factories are desolate, and the film required for Dorfman's work is no longer available. Once the leading technology in photography, the Polaroid camera is now as defunct as travel agencies and rotary dial phones. Morris films Dorfman in her blackroom now converted into a storage space in which her huge pictures are carefully stored in chronologically labeled filing cabinets. When Dorfman made her portraits, she took two exposures -- the client selected the picture that they wanted, leaving her with the reject, an image that she calls the B-side. (In her view, the B-sides, which often have something idiosyncratic about them -- someone blinks or makes a momentary sour face -- are better pictures than the more flattering images selected by her patrons.)
The film is very simple and Morris' technique, although fantastically polished, is unobtrusive. Dorfman describes events in her life and holds up pictures, sometimes seeming to hide behind the big images. She knew everyone and there are pictures of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and many other famous people. (Jonathon Richman provides an affectionate song for the film's closing credits.) Dorfman herself is completely unpretentious. She's a homely woman with a sweet smile and has an odd clipped way of speaking -- she sometimes refers to herself in the third person: "Why would Elsa do that?" She seems a little eccentric and "on the spectrum" as they say. She doesn't think photography reveals people''s souls: "I'm really not interested in their souls. I want to show how they seem." The "camera" she says "is like a spoon, the instrument you eat with." She is the epitome of "unthreatening" and one can see how she managed to take so many fine and memorable pictures -- people forgot about her, ignored her, and, therefore, revealed themselves in her presence. She embodies something that fascinates Morris -- the notion of the perfect observer, someone who sees and records everything, and doesn't seem to intervene in the transmittal of the truth about what she sees. (Morris appears to be friends with her and, I think, he sees her as a fellow traveler with respect to the documentary revelation of reality.) Of course, she's fascinating and endearing.
Ultimately, photography and film, for that matter, are mortuary arts. (This is a common-place and the theme of critical works by Barthes and Susan Sontag.) Images preserve the real presence of people who have died. Dorfman thinks that a picture"has its ultimate meaning when the person has died." There's a faintly melancholy aspect about the movie -- many of Dorfman's subjects are gone; we see her reacting with repressed emotion to images of Allen Ginsberg. The paper on which her Polaroids were printed is very fragile and the colors are easily damaged by direct sunlight. And, of course, she can no longer practice her profession, at least with Polaroid images, because the film is no longer available. The movie ends with some depressing footage of abandoned Polaroid factories with leaking roofs and big puddles on the concrete floors. But the sadness is only temporary -- Dorfman seems to have had a wonderful life: "I don't like to take pictures of people who are sad. I won't photograph the broken-hearted. I have the misguided notion that my role in the universe is to make people feel better." This seems entirely admirable and the documentary, which seems devoted to the same objective, is brilliant in a very low-key and unostentatious way.
(Dorfman died in May 2020 at 83).
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