Last night I continued to take advantage of the Living Room Theaters' fantastic $5 ticket deal (every Monday & Tuesday) by seeing the marvelous "Bill Cunningham New York," a nimble documentary about the now eighty-something New York Times photographer who has spent the better part of his long life zipping around the Big Apple with his camera trying to spot and shoot the prominent fashion trends of the moment. Cunningham's weekly "On the Street" column appears in every NYT Sunday Styles section and has for more than 40 years running, making the charming, wildly unique old man an unparalleled chronicler of American culture.
What I found most interesting about the film's subject (note the lack of punctuation between the two seemingly separate entities in the title) is the purely appreciative devotion to uncynical observation of everyday artistic expression. The kind of eye Cunningham has developed over the course of his long, happy, extremely solitary New York City life simply cannot be cultivated any longer, not in 2011. Our modern notions of fashion are inextricably tied to judgmental valuation of one thing over another, of retouched digital renderings of would-be actual photographs, of curt fashion editors elevating the self over creative worth, of deadlines defined by the 24-hour news cycle that all but forbid Cunningham's kind of painstaking craftsmanship to thrive, let alone come to fruition.
I've seen plenty of fashion documentaries, and "Bill Cunningham New York" towers above them all. From the behind-the-scenes look at the Anna Wintour/Grace Coddington institution that is American Vogue in "The September Issue" to the elegiac portrait of the end of an era in "Valentino: The Last Emperor," fashion docs have recently emerged as dependable a genre as any, but this one is special. Seriously special. As we emerged from the small, surely sold-out showing at Living Room, four grown men having just experienced something we'll likely never forget, it took all of 30 seconds before every one of us admitted to crying during the movie, most of us several times. It was an hour-and-a-half of laughter, insight, inspiration and, yes, tears, with the spotlight cast upon a man most of us would otherwise never even know about.
"Bill Cunningham New York" is not to be missed. See it by any means possible, as soon as possible. It is the best film of 2011 so far.
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