Gregory Crewdson's Brief Encounters

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 20 November 2012 14:17

Written by Laura Blum

Gregory Crewdson’s photography isn’t like sausage: it’s best to see it being made. To watch Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters – now playing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in Manhattan – is to crave a closer look at his haunting Beneath the Roses series. How the Park Slope native created it over nearly a decade supplies the meat of this riveting documentary by Ben Shapiro.

Voyeurism has rarely been so delicious. We’re privy to Crewdson’s thoughts and actions as he painstakingly reworks interiors and landscapes into a single narrative shot. Surprisingly – or perhaps unsurprisingly -- some of his productions rival those of movies in budget and scale. Small-town Massachusetts provides the setting for many of them, which in turn lends the film a poetic mystique that both gnaws and intrigues.

In the film, Crewdson names Cindy Sherman and Edward Hopper as inspirations, though he credits the moody, staged work of Diane Arbus as his true epiphany, at age 10. And given his penchant for the lost and the eerie, it comes as no surprise that David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Hitchcock's Psycho provided further sparks.

Digging a layer deeper, Crewdson recalls his boyhood fascination with the secrets of his father’s psychoanalytic practice. It’s Shapiro’s feat to sprinkle such insights without a heavy hand. He gives us a pepper shake with Crewdson’s comment, “Every artist has one central story to tell. The struggle is to tell and retell that story over again – and to challenge that story.”

FilmFestivalTraveler.com reached Shapiro for some storytelling of his own.

Q: Your film makes us want to see Crewdson’s original photographs. What would surprise us about them?

BS: What's particular about seeing the prints is that they're big: 3 x 5 feet. They're so detailed and so sharp. There's no grain. Nothing is out of focus. You can get within inches away from them and they don't fall apart. I could have gone in 20 times the zoom and not have lost anything.

He shot all that stuff on 8 x 10 negatives and then they did high-resolution scans. So the pictures had far more detailed information than could be done then [2002 – 2005] or still can be done with digital cameras. The final files for each picture are in the gigabytes, just gigantic.

Q: Do you think Crewdson’s shots suggest freeze frames from cinema?

BS: The fundamental thing is that these are isolated moments for him. I don´t think he imagines what led up to this moment and what follows, whereas cinema is all about the before and after as much as the present since there's this constant flow of narrative.

Q: And you? Do you see them as part of a fuller story?

BS: It’s not clear whether the visual information implies a past and future. It think it does, but it´s left very ambiguous. That's how the viewer enters into the pictures, by wondering and imagining what that past and present might be.

Q: How did his photography evolve over the decade that you followed him?

BS: The first shoot that I did with him was the Twilight series, with the flowered beanstalk. The production wasn´t as elaborate. There were 10 people working and not 60. So the scale grew. Also the narrative became less fantastical, more real world.

Q: In a recent interview with cinematographer Lol Crawley, he cited Crewdson as an inspiration for the fairytale look he was going for with Hyde Park on Hudson. I’ve heard other DPs -- and directors -- mention him as well.

BS: Gregory has a whole following among filmmakers. You see filmmakers talk about him as a key influence.

Q: And visa-versa, apparently.

BS: He has a genuine fascination with the sense of border. He sees the frames and he wants to place them in a certain structure. It's like documentary.

Q: In a certain sense, isn’t documentary filmmaking, where you have to go with the unfolding story, the opposite of Crewdson´s hyper-controlled compositions and impostions?

BS: I see a lot of commonality with documentary filmmaking, especially in terms of his exterior pictures. Those towns allow you to look in a full way. There’s so much of image information that you can really absorb the places, in addition to the people. With documentaries, you're also trying to find the form that works and that realizes your vision. His method for doing that is super large scale and cinematic, but trying to find order.

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
the Film Society of Lincoln Center
New York 

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