If, as suggested at the beginning of Ron Howard’s documentary “Avedon,” the genius of the archetypal Richard Avedon image lies in the way it strips away everything external—so that nothing is left but the audience, the subject, and the white background—then making a film about Avedon might not be worth it. Additional context is not important; art is the thing.
Still, “Avedon”—showing in Cannes’s Special Screenings section—has more than its share of sharp insights into the photographer’s working methods, and some gossip about his interactions with (seemingly) almost every important figure of the 20th century. While the worshipful tone of Howard’s movie is what you’d expect from a profile produced in partnership with the Richard Avedon Foundation—there are a few asides about how the barbs from art critics sting—there are plenty of photos of Avedon himself, and anecdotes from friends that give a vivid sense of his personality. (Writer Adam Gopnik suggests that Avedon had a habit of leaving answering machine messages with the words “do not pick up.”)
It is interesting to hear that Avedon felt that the camera interfered with him, and that if he had known, he would have taken pictures directly with his eyes. (He eventually switched to a system that allowed him to stand to the side of the lens instead of behind it.) Isabella Rossellini compares him to a hunter waiting for his shot, an attitude he compares to the happy photographers he shows populate the fashion world.
We hear how long it took Avedon to get an unguarded photo of someone as familiar with cameras as Marilyn Monroe. His approach to politics is explored through his portraits of civil rights figures, Vietnam War officials, and the New Yorker series “Democracy” he was working on at the time of his death in 2004. There are moments when Howard’s documentary falters, especially towards the end, but that’s part of the lesson in putting together the work—if the film’s numbers are accurate—that includes 0600.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” is one of the closest things to a consensus favorite in the competition so far, and part of the reason it’s being watched is its economy. It sets its narrative momentarily in 1949 when the German writer Thomas Mann, an outspoken anti-Nazi living in the United States, returns to Germany after the war for the first time. In that place, the film shows the past and the future of the country.
At the Cannes Premiere, Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Tour,” based on Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel published in English in 2010, takes a different approach. It covers decades of German history, but it does so mostly in one location—the lake house and its surroundings—where different families are swept up in the changes brought about by the Nazi era and the Cold War.
The first part, which continues to the beginning of the post-war reconstruction period, tells the rise of the Nazis as experienced by an architect (Lars Eidinger, also in Cannes in László Nemes’s French Resistance play “Moulin”) and his wife (Susanne Wolff) and the family of Jewish neighbors who closed the walls against them.
The tragedy of that family leaves a trace: The letters that Doris wrote to her grandparents in Poland are still locked in the house in the second part, when a family of fanatical German Communists who spent the war living in the Soviet Union returns to East Germany and immigrates—and finally encounters a country built more on drawing back than on the socialist ideas to which he is committed, and Martin Gedeckra.
Nora’s granddaughter, Marija, is the narrator of both parts and grows up over the second lesson. Another drawback of the extended scope is that Schlöndorff blows up with some events while sacrificing clarity for others. The fate of Eidinger’s character, who initially seeks to win the favor of the Nazi painter Albert Speer, and then later tries to turn Speer’s rejection into a post-war profit, seems too hasty.
But the conceit of using a single, lakeside-idyll, which is given the “Cherry Orchard” treatment at the end, carries its own weight. These are characters who are stuck in history even in a spectacular escape.
