Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures | |
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Directed by |
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Produced by | Katharina Otto-Bernstein |
Starring |
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Music by | David Benjamin Steinberg |
Production company | |
Distributed by | HBO |
Release date |
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Running time | 108 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures is a 2016 American documentary film about the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, directed and executive produced by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, and produced by Katharina Otto-Bernstein for Film Manufacturers Inc. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, received its premiere at Sundance Film Festival [9] in January 2016, followed by the international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival [10] in February, and a world television premiere on HBO in April. The film was released theatrically in the US and UK in April 2016.
Izy Radwanska Zhang, writing for the British Journal of Photography , stated "Aside from telling a gripping story, Bailey and Barbato have succeeded in capturing the overwhelming sense of adoration and emotional paralysis felt by all those who were influenced by Mapplethorpe." [11]
Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian , stated that it was an "interesting if flawed documentary study", that "the movie is, for me, a little uncritical on the subject of Mapplethorpe’s weaknesses: his lucrative celebrity portraits now look, frankly, uninteresting" and "for me, the problem with this film is that it doesn’t analyse Mapplethorpe’s much admired photographs of flowers. How seriously did the artist take these images – how seriously should we take them? Was it that pistels and stamens and petals resembled genitalia? Is that not the point? Or were the flowers simply there to deflect criticism, to underscore a spurious context and artistic good faith? It’s difficult to tell. This otherwise thorough study does justice to Mapplethorpe’s talent." [12]
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is an American documentary filmmaker and portrait photographer based in New York City. The majority of his work is shot in large format.
Lauren Greenfield is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She has published four photographic monographs, directed four documentary features, a documentary series, produced four traveling exhibitions, and published in magazines throughout the world.
Ondi Doane Timoner is an American filmmaker and the founder and chief executive officer of Interloper Films, a production company located in Pasadena, California.
World of Wonder Productions is an American production company founded in 1991 by filmmakers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. Based in Los Angeles, California, the company specializes in documentary television and film productions with a key focus on LGBTQ topics. Together, Barbato and Bailey have produced programming through World of Wonder for HBO, Bravo, HGTV, Showtime, BBC, Netflix, MTV and VH1, with credits including the Million Dollar Listing docuseries, RuPaul's Drag Race, and the documentary films The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000) and Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016).
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Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe is a 2007 American documentary film directed by James Crump. The film chronicles the symbiotic relationship between Sam Wagstaff, an American museum curator and collector of fine art, and Robert Mapplethorpe, the American fine art photographer whose controversial images were at the center of debate about public funding for the arts and the culture wars of the late 1980s. The film also explores the relationship both men shared with poet/musician Patti Smith in the New York art world of the 1970s.
Film Manufacturers Inc. (FMI) was founded by filmmaker Katharina Otto-Bernstein to create an international production company that develops, produces and co-produces fiction and non-fiction entertainment.
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