Sunday, April 10, 2011

I had never heard about Bill Cunningham until I met my girlfriend. A fashion-fan to say the least, I stumbled in to our room one day to find her giggling at a New York Times slide show of an older man talking over a series of pictures of fashionable people walking the streets of New York. At times the pictures weren’t great, at times his monologue rambled in to possible senility, but there was something charming about the low-budget procession of themed fashion photography and the reedy voice that loomed above them. In time I found myself seeking out Bill Cunningham’s "On The Street" slide-show, watching it by my lonesome late at night, enjoying not only the eccentric world of fashion Cunningham was able to uncover, but the character of Cunningham himself. This strange, adenoidal old-timer who ventured out in to the traffic of New York on only a bike to capture the world of street fashion. Richard Press' Bill Cunningham: New York is an extension of this character, a fascinating exploration of not only the life and times of Bill Cunningham, but the fading world of idiosyncratic art Cunningham so avidly captures.

Review - Bill Cunningham

First and foremost a film about Bill Cunningham thrives solely on the sheer energy and charm of its subject. Cunningham, a haberdasher turned fashion photographer, is a bundle of idiosyncrasies and good natured hostility in a way you’d imagine to be written in a J.D. Salinger novel. He’s eighty-two years old and still spends every day and every night photographing the world of fashion and the ultra-rich. Press' crew does a fine job of keeping it simple - he focuses on Cunningham and the world Cunningham shoots, and in doing so expands the frame of Cunningham’s life. Bill Cunningham is a fascinating character, one part happy-go-lucky photographer, several parts obsession and a sort of religious frugality and preferred loneliness, that only emerges as Press digs deeper in to his life. Cunningham lives alone in a room full of file cabinets stuffed with the negatives that have defined his life. His bed is a cot wedged between his life’s work. Yet Press never allows the film to veer negatively in terms of Cunningham’s life, instead it becomes a chronicle of the at times curious tics that push this man forward and at times hold him back. Near the end of the film, Press pushes forward with a duo of questions I can only imagine every audience member was curious about, and Cunningham’s responses are both touching and telling.

And as Press pushes deeper in to Cunningham’s life, to the high-eyebrowed chagrin of his subject, the wide world of art and fashion comes in to focus around it. For a Cunningham newcomer like myself, I thought I’d stumbled across a New York Time’s foible, a sort of ongoing fashion gag, but the truth is much different. As Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue and subject of her own fascinating documentary, "We all get dressed for Bill." As Press' documentary explores, Cunningham’s camera has become the harbinger of trend in the fashion world. What Bill shoots helps to define what the world considers fashionable. The film finds Cunningham determined, but straddling old age, with the world he’s known for his entire life starting to move past him. A series of interviews with Cunningham’s neighbor in the soon to be emptied Carnegie Hall lofts paired with Bill’s sad-faced touring of new, spacious apartments says it all - this man is a living legend but the world he’s helped to create is already moving past him.

If you haven’t discovered Bill Cunningham in any way, I implore you dive in to the archive of his "On The Street" slideshow at The New York Times, or if you’re too busy, or too daft, to do so, just watch this film.

- Noah Sanders -



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