Most media savvy people have seen many of Bruce Weber’s photos over the past 30 years — in editorial layouts for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and in ad campaigns for Abercrombie + Fitch and Ralph Lauren — but his long career as a filmmaker is not nearly as well known.
The ultimate independent director, Weber has self-financed documentaries and shorts for the past 20 years, but they have never been widely distributed in theaters and their video lives have been spotty as well (the great Chet Baker documentary, “Let’s Get Lost,” seemed to go out of print almost as soon as it was released on video by a record company subsidiary in 1990).
The range of Weber’s interests is very wide and somewhat eccentric, so the films often feel like the private visual journals of an obsessive fan and collector.
Weber clearly has a “thing” for men who look like the late jazz trumpet player and singer Chet Baker — two of his documentaries, “Broken Noses” and “Chop Suey,” focus respectively on a boxer and a model who bear striking resemblances to Baker before his good looks were destroyed by drugs and booze and brushes with violent criminals.
Neither of these young men — Andy Minsker and Peter Johnson (below) — have personalities interesting enough to support feature-length study, so Weber uses them as jumping off points for moody, slightly surreal films about masculinity, old time Hollywood, people and their pets, and cult music figures such as Frances Faye.
You name it and Weber has tossed it into his filmmaking pot, combined it with terrific music, and whipped up movies that are strikingly beautiful, emotionally elusive and unlike the work of any other American director.
Last week, the Sundance Channel launched a month-long festival devoted to Weber that includes the American television premieres of “Let’s Get Lost” and “Chop Suey” and a bunch of short films that have never been seen outside a handful of museums and non-profit venues such as Film Forum in Manhattan.
Weber has been fortunate in finding cinematographers who have been able to capture the style of his pictures on film. In some cases, movie scenes were shot as Weber worked on ad campaigns and personal photographic projects (he devoted a whole book to pictures of Johnson in and out of his clothes and garbed in some odd transgender costuming).
The photographer narrates most of his films, adding bits of sometimes embarassing personal history to the montages (we find out about his psychoanalysis, his lifelong interest in Elizabeth Taylor, and the obscure records and pictures he has been collecting since he was very young).
The movies in the Sundance festival are highly variable in quality — “Chop Suey” wanders around aimlessly for more than an hour, only coming to life in a tantalizing sequence from a decade ago showing the late Robert Mitchum (above) working on a recording project with Dr. John (this is, apparently, part of the Mitchum documentary Weber has been talking about for many years).
“Let’s Get Lost” is a jazz biography masterpiece, however, and is getting its first Sundance showing tonight at 10 p.m.
Two of the Weber shorts are terrific. “Wine and Cupcakes” is a celebration of Central Park, shot in the aftermath of 9/11, which follows a middle-aged artist couple on a long autumn afternoon spent doing nothing special, but nevertheless storing up wonderful memories of a perfect New York day.
And “Liberty City is Like Paris to Me” is a beautiful celebration of a black neighborhood in Miami on Inauguration Day last January — Weber brings in a couple of professional dancers for a street ballet that is a real knock-out.
The Bruce Weber festival runs through the month. Sundance has also set up a special web page, with an exhibit of Weber photography and some of his short films available for downloading:
http://www.sundancechannel.com/bruce-weber/
