Documentary focuses on iconic photographer Helmut Newton
Although perhaps mistimed, Gero von Boehm’s “Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful” is a celebration of the life and often controversial art of fashion photographer Helmut Newton. Von Boehm turns the camera on the photographer, who stirred up the puritanical wrath with his frequently nude, fetishistic and S&M images of men and women, but mostly women, which adorned the pages of Vogue and other major publications. Newton even once photographed a plucked chicken in heels.
Newton, who died in 2006 at age 83 in a traffic accident in West Hollywood, where he tooled around in a Cadillac convertible, is the film’s biggest asset in existing footage, talking to us from the other side of the lens. But it is also fun hearing Anna Wintour observe that a Newton photo was “a stopper”
— as in stop flipping pages to look at — and how a Newton photograph bears an the unmistakable stamp of its maker.
Born Helmut Neustadter in Berlin in 1920, the son of a hausfrau and a button manufacturer, Newton was a sexually curious adolescent when the Nuremberg laws restricting the freedom of Jews in Germany were passed by the Nazis. After apprenticing with German photographer Yva, Newton fled Germany in 1938 and after living in Singapore and Melbourne, he established himself with Vogue and other publications after moving to London and Paris with his lifelong wife, the actress
June Browne, who is this film’s Mata Hari figure. Onscreen Newton refers to himself as an “old naughty boy” and is witty, raffish and, yes, naughty. The women he worked with over the course of his career, speak of him in terms of his artistry and his love for fun and his kindness and courtesy toward them.
Singer-songwriter-actress Marianne Faithfull, who was raised by nuns, is incredulous that she agreed to be photographed by Newton, although not quite nude. To Newton, these spectacular looking women, including Charlotte Rampling, who describes Newton as a “provocateur,” and disco queen Grace Jones, whose photographs became sensations in the 1980s, were to him modern-day goddesses, and he usually shot his subjects emphasizing the sculptural beauty and erotic and mysterious power of their forms. Newton describes himself as “a professional voyeur.” His frequently big, blonde models were the forerunners of today’s superheroes, although sans cape and sans everything else, except high heels. Von Boehm makes fascinating connections between Newton and the bawdy and grotesque expressionism of Weimar Germany, an art form the Nazis labeled “degenerate,” and the worshipful gaze of body-sculpture aficionado Leni Riefenstahl’s lens in the landmark 1938 documentary “Olympiad.”
Newton admired Riefenstahl’s eye and contemporaries Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. He compares his nighttime shoots to that of Hungarian-French master Brassai. Yes, one might argue that Newton’s supersexy models, including 1990s icons Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford, were the children of the master race. Isabella Rossellini is perhaps the most articulate and analytical of Newton’s subjects, and also the funniest. Newton, who switches between English, German and French with the ease of a Cadillac transmission, also shot portraits of such luminaries as David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, Karl Lagerfeld and Yves St. Laurent. Newton’s career can be seen as one endless, erotic-fantasy scrapbook he made and kept for himself. Von Boehm succeeds so well in bringing Newton to life — his voiceover starts us out on this journey — that viewers might be surprised to learn that he is dead.
(“Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful” contains more nudity than you can imagine.)