If, as is suggested early in Ron Howard’s documentary “Avedon,” the genius of an archetypal Richard Avedon photograph lies in how it strips away everything extraneous—so that nothing remains but the audience, the subject, and a white background—then making a film about Avedon might be counterproductive. Additional context is irrelevant; the 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, along with some good gossip about his interactions with (seemingly) nearly every important personality of the 20th century. While the worshipful tone in Howard’s movie is what you’d expect from a profile produced in association with the Richard Avedon Foundation—there are a few asides about how barbs from art critics stung—there is ample footage of Avedon himself, and anecdotes from friends provide a vivid sense of his personality. (The writer Adam Gopnik suggests Avedon had a habit of leaving answering-machine messages with the words “don’t pick up.”)
It is interesting to hear that Avedon felt the camera essentially got in his way, and that if he could, he would have snapped photos directly with his eyes. (He eventually switched to a system that allowed him to stand beside the lens instead of behind it.) Isabella Rossellini compares him to a hunter waiting for his shot, an attitude she contrasts with the snap-happy photographers she indicates populate the fashion world.
We hear about how much time it took Avedon to get an unguarded image from someone as used to cameras as Marilyn Monroe. His approach to politics is examined through his pictures of civil rights figures, Vietnam War officials, and the New Yorker “Democracy” series he was working on at the time of his death in 2004. There are stretches when Howard’s documentary rambles, especially toward the end, but that is par for the course for covering a career that—if the film’s numbers are accurate—encompassed around 16,000 sittings.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” is one of the closest things to a consensus favorite in the competition so far, and part of what is bracing about it is its economy. It restricts its narrative to a brief moment in 1949 when the German writer Thomas Mann, who had been an outspoken anti-Nazi living in the United States, returned to postwar Germany for the first time. From that vantage point, the movie reflects on the country’s past and future.
In the Cannes Premiere section, Volker Schlöndorff’s “Visitation,” based on a novel by Jenny Erpenbeck that was published in English in 2010,takes the opposite approach. It spans decades of German history, but it does so largely from one location—a lake house and its surroundings—where different families are swept up in the changes brought by the Nazi era and the Cold War.
The first half, which continues through the start of the immediate postwar rebuilding period, deals with the rise of the Nazis as experienced by an architect (Lars Eidinger, also at Cannes in László Nemes’s French Resistance drama “Moulin”) and his wife (Susanne Wolff) and a family of Jewish neighbors who feel the walls closing in on them.
The tragedy of that family leaves behind traces: Letters that the youngest, Doris, wrote for her grandparents in Poland are still tucked away in the house in the second half, when a family of ardent German communists who spent the war living in Soviet Union return to East Germany and move in—and ultimately encounter a country built more on back-scratching than on the socialist ideals to which the matriarch, Nora (Martina Gedeck), remains committed.
Nora’s granddaughter, Marija, is the narrator of both halves and grows up over the course the second. One drawback of the expansive scope is that Schlöndorff winds up plodding through certain events while sacrificing clarity in others. The fate of the Eidinger character, who initially seeks to win the favor of the Nazi architect Albert Speer, then later tries to turn Speer’s rejection into a postwar advantage, seems particularly rushed.
But the conceit of using the single, lakeside-idyll location, which is given the “Cherry Orchard” treatment at the end, carries a charge in itself. These are characters who are caught up in history even in a place of ostensible escape.
