god’s spy
by Douglas Messerli
John Maloof and Charles Siskel
(directors) Finding Vivian Maier /
2013
Come, let’s away to prison;
We
two alone will sing like birds I’ the cage:
When
thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And
ask of thee forgiveness: and we’ll live,
And
pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh
At
gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk
of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who
loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And
take upon’s the mystery of things,
As
if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In
a wall’d prison, packs and sets of great ones
That
ebb and flow by the moon.
King Lear, ACT V, Sc. 2
John Maloof’s and Charles Siskel’s
2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier begins
with several of the interviewees—former employers of Maier’s, children for whom
she served as nanny, and art critics—seemingly being momentarily speechless,
apparently since they have just been asked to describe their central emotion
regarding the figure at the center of this film.
If they express slightly different responses, all of them, nonetheless
express a kind of bemused wonderment and confusion about this fascinating
woman’s existence—that is except for the art critic’s expression of envy of the
film’s narrator, Maloof, who uncovered the vast cache of photographs (most of
them still undeveloped), payment stubs, pins, toys, medals, and newspapers that
Maier had left behind.
What gradually becomes apparent through the nearly hour and a half that
follows is that Maier was a brilliant outsider artist working within numerous
traditions of street photography that might be compared with photographs as
different as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and Gordon Parks to
Cartier-Bresson and numerous other older U.S. and international photographers,
while still remaining absolutely original.
Maier was a true talent, who evidently (so we eventually discover)
perceived photography as her major endeavor, yet never printed or apparently
even saw most of the images she shot. The art establishment, accordingly, has
had a difficult time in characterizing and evaluating her work: an outsider
artist is one thing, but an outsider who never even attempted to reveal most of
her artifacts and, literally, hid them away, is quite another. Who was this
woman, who worked throughout most of her life as a nanny, and yet appeared to
many of her families as aloof and apart, a figure, much like the stereotype of
an artist, who often treated their own children with a certain, objective,
aloofness and even disdain that might even have put them in harm’s way?
While some of those interviewed attest to her love of children and their
love of her, others—including a couple of those children grown up—admit to a
darker side of Maier’s personality that when revealed puts them at the center
of what sounds like mild child abuse: force-feeding, slaps,
and even somewhat compulsive
behavior (as when one young girl’s purchase of trinkets is hosed down in a
highly ammoniac concentration of water). Films Maier left behind show her
sometimes gently questioning and frolicking with her young charges, while at
other times she appears to be following in the tracks of a famous murder victim
as described in the daily headlines.
Maier, it appears, was also a kind of pack-rat, saving an enormously
large collection of newspapers whose lurid headlines shouted out murders and
other horrific deeds with which she as morbidly fascinated. One senses a
desire, when she combines this with her photography, to play, at least
temporarily, the role of journalist. I, too, occasionally save newspaper
articles which may later find their way into my annual writings; but I clip out
particular pieces and rarely save them after I’ve put them to use or realized
that these possibly interesting subjects nonetheless remain separate from my
specific concerns. Maier saved them all in total, almost as a librarian might,
hinting she saw them not only as sources for her art but as a kind of record of
or testament about the cruelty she found in the world.
What becomes an open question of this often clear-headed and yet
sometimes obscurantist film is what happened to Vivian Maier as a young girl
that led her to compulsively explore the dark side of human behavior. It is
apparent that some sort of abuse she had experienced or observed drove her to
art. At times she appeared to be interested merely in people going about their
everyday business, working people smiling, simply enjoying themselves; but far
more often her figures, human and animal, appear to have been abandoned by the
society around them, abused, punished, even tortured. Like the German artist,
Hans Bellmer, she appears to be utterly fascinated by the naked manikins in
store windows, lying about without heads, arms, and legs. At one point a child
with whom she associated, hit by a car, is objectified by her camera as a
victim. And many of her street encounters concern figures clearly victimized by
the society around them, representing children in tears, a small Black boy
shining the shoes of another white boy of the same age, the poor forced into
manual labor in order to survive. A tall woman, with what is described by all as an overly-strident and
determined gait, Maier apparently saw himself as a kind of monstrous Cyclops
(in one memorable photo her figure rises up as a dark shadow at the center of
which lays the reflected image of the camera lens, the tool of her art being
more realistically registered than the artist behind it) surrounded by the
trolls for whom she was caring.
In some respects, her choice of
occupation makes perfect sense: her job as children’s caretaker allowed her
complete entry into wealthy homes, food, housing, at least a regular, if small,
salary, and an opportunity to move out into the community with her charges in
tow. An office job, clearly, would never have allowed her to carry her camera
daily around her neck as she was allowed by her rather open-minded parents, or
the possibility of movement throughout the city—although there is some evidence
that she was chastised for taking the children into disreputable neighborhoods.
What her nanny job also permitted was for Maier to declare her own space
as inviolable, a sacred domain in which no one was allowed entry. Her employers
evidently felt that she deserved this small concession (sometimes along with
the larger ones she demanded). But what was even more strange is the fact that,
although to her employers she was a fairly open figure named Vivian Maier, to
most others she intentionally remained shadowy, refusing to give up even a name
or address to tradesmen and others whose lives were lived outside of the circle
of her temporary home position. Possibly, Maier even affected a French-Alsatian
accent in an attempt to further hide her American identity.*
It was almost as if, in practicing her art—an art that seemed to be
concerned with a documentation of her world and a testifying to the evils in
it—she felt the need to be incognito, to be a secret agent, or a kind “God’s
spy” determined to reveal the details of the evil she had discovered in
mankind’s heart, while she operated, meanwhile, in a kind of protected cocoon
of innocence—surely also a sort of prison—in which the children around her
existed. While Maier—who was very much, it appears, in touch with the world
around her and aware of cultural precedents—cannot precisely be described as an
outsider artist, although she shares some kinship, it appears, with Henry
Darger, who felt compelled to tell, in painting, collages, and writing, of the
terrible adventures of the innocent yet sometimes brutal young girls—oddly
enough, named the Vivian girls—who lived in a world that threatened them with
murder and mayhem.
What we are left with in the thousands of rolls of photographs and films
she left behind, no matter how brilliantly imaged, lit, and framed, seem to be
part of a larger whole which we never will fully comprehend. Perhaps, as this
documentary implies, Maier saw herself as a grand documentarian, as a purposely
mysterious figure whose purpose was to take down in her images the realities of
human behavior that resulted in suffering, hurt, pain, even torture. Clearly,
she saw the human situation, at certain moments, from the other end of the
looking glass; many of works, indeed, reveal the possibilities of joy and
meaning in life. But one feels that, at heart, Vivien Maier saw a more
important role as witness to the horrors of the 20th century, and that, even for
her hard-working, smiling figures (as in the works of Arbus) another darker
drama lay behind their lives. If her street scenes are often vibrant, so too
are they fraught with danger, or simultaneously imply that there are darker
realities just behind the frame. Her Rolleflex camera hanging between her
breasts, freed her to look straight into the face of her dissembling believers
while trapping the despair she sensed that surrounded them.
*Although Maier was born in the US,
her mother was apparently from Alsace, and Maier herself traveled there at
least twice for periods of time.
Los Angeles, January 25, 2015
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2015).
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