Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

[MacGuffin]

Not a Pretty Picture
Director Steven Shainberg zooms in on Diane Arbus in an unconventional biopic.
Source; New York Magazine



There's no safer formula than the biopic. It worked for Ray, Walk the Line, and Capote—and it seemed as though it could work for Fur, too, especially since most audiences know Diane Arbus only through her haunting photographs. But director Steven Shainberg was sick of Behind the Music clichés.

"No matter how good Will Smith may be playing Ali, or Ed Harris playing Pollock, that straight-ahead, greatest-hits approach doesn't work for me," says Shainberg, who broke through with the kinky indie Secretary. "You already know everything that is going to happen."

So Shainberg decided to gamble. "This is not a biopic at all," he says. "It's an imaginary portrait that tries to capture the otherworldly, hallucinogenic, mythological quality of her photographs."

Not in any obvious way, mind you: There will be no restaged photo shoots of Arbus, played by Nicole Kidman, and Eddie Carmel, the Jewish Giant ("Hokey," says Shainberg). No answers to biographer Patricia Bos­worth's allegation that Arbus slept with her subjects. And, most shocking, no third-act suicide.

"I didn't want to just write a string of events," says screenwriter and playwright Erin Cressida Wilson, "with her taking photographs of freaks and then she kills herself: Snap, snap, snap, kill ... "

Instead, Fur narrows the depth of field, focusing on Arbus's life during just three months in 1958, long before her most influential work. "At the age of 35, with two children, having worked for fifteen years with her husband in their fashion-photography studio," says Shainberg, "she came home one day and said, 'I'm not going to work with you anymore. I'm going to take my own pictures.' "

In Fur, Arbus stews at home on the Upper West Side and fantasizes about a mysterious neighbor: Robert Downey Jr., who Shainberg says is a "metaphoric and literal freak—all the people she went out and photographed, rolled into one."

It's a juicy role for Downey, but Kidman will be the one in extreme close-up. "I wanted her stripped," Shainberg says, noting that she can be "too contrived" in some Hollywood films. "I didn't want Nicole to do Arbus, to walk like her—all that stuff actors do when they play real people." Of course, that's the stuff audiences (and Oscar voters) tend to like—a fact not lost on Shainberg: "I'm not sure that there's ever been a film that deals with a real person this way," he admits.

— Fur, Directed by Steven Shainberg, Picturehouse; opens November 10 (R).

[pete]

wow, steven soderburgh, speilberg, guttenberg, shainberg--I think Imma change my name to Steven Peteberg.  I'll get some movies made then.

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: November 10th, 2006 (limited)

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Jr., Ty Burrell, Jane Alexander, Harris Yulin
 
Directed by: Steven Shainberg (Secretary)

Premise: A biopic about the life of photographer Diane Arbus, considered one of the most mysterious, enigmatic, and frighteningly bold artists of the 20th century. Most known for her obsession with 'freak' subject-matter, her haunting work emerged from a deeply private place. Arbus' death was as mysteriously tragic as was the aura surrounding some of her most piercing portraits.

[noyes]

something about that trailer doesn't rub me right.
it seems too much like a suspense thriller or something.
but obviously there is some truth in it, how she started out learning through Allan
and the rule of the day was to be ladylike and kind and motherly and all that.
i'm curious to see how the film picks up from this, as i'm more interested in that side of Arbus' life. her side.
definitely seeing this though.

[Pubrick]

i'm curious to see how the film picks up from this

she gets naked.

[modage]

i think that looks really cool.  i didnt care much for secretary and didnt have any interest in this film prior to the trailer but it sold me.  i want to see it.  looks really different.  it's good to see nicole in not-shit again.

[Ghostboy]

I wasn't a huge fan of Secretary either...and after seeing the trailer, I'm a bit wary of this, although the untraditional biopic approach Shainberg speaks of gives me hope. I love Arbus' work, and I hope the film does it (and her) justice.

[w/o horse]

Hit Me had Elias Koteas and William H. Macy but only managed to be as slow and awkward as the movie's fat retarded brother.

[edison]

[MacGuffin]

'She was a personality exploding'
Nicole Kidman likes a challenge. So why does her film about artist Diane Arbus duck every possible controversy? By Geoffrey Macnab
Source: The Guardian
 
Sitting cross-legged on a stage in Rome earlier this month, Nicole Kidman fielded weighty questions such as what it required to get her to take her clothes off on camera. "You do it because you believe in yourself artistically," she said.

After the international premiere of her new film, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, she explained what it was like to "get inside the skin" of the American photographer. What you needed, she said, was an intense sense of identification - "an incredible deep, spiritual connection. The way a great photographer sees the world is fascinating. You have it in your blood in the same way you have acting."

Casting Kidman as Arbus initially seems like a perverse decision. The photographer, whose pictures of dwarfs, giants and transvestites have assumed a near legendary status since her suicide at age 48 in 1971, looked nothing like Kidman. She was short, dark-haired, Jewish. Kidman, as we all know, is tall, pale, redheaded.
Director Steven Shainberg, who directed Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary, says he means Fur to act as a counter to the conventional, cradle-to-the-grave biopic, in which an audience gets a guided tour of the subject's life, loves and career. The result is a deeply odd film, which tells us next to nothing about Arbus's life, but instead tries to offer a snapshot of her psyche.

"I want to wrench the audience out of the literal and into the dream," Shainberg says. "First off, who better than Kidman, who doesn't look at all like Arbus. And from an internal point of view, the Arbus journey is not unlike that of Nicole - that willingness to cross the barriers of her own field, that desire to experience many different roles."

In the late 1950s, Arbus - the privileged daughter of a fur magnate, who lived a reasonably conventional life in Manhattan with her fashion photographer husband and two children - became one of the most inventive photographers of her generation. How did this happen? And where did her much-debated fixation with the bizarre come from? These are the questions the film tries to answer.

"Basically, she was a personality exploding at the age of 35," Shainberg says. "Until that point, she was encased in a kind of steel box. She had reached a point where she would either have retreated or struck out on her own, as the film portrays."

There are some obvious parallels between the photographer and the actor who plays her. In both cases, it was the break-up of a marriage that seems to have been the catalyst for artistic reinvention. What is intriguing about Fur is how well it sits with some of Kidman's other post-Cruise performances - Virginia Woolf in The Hours, the widow who sees the re-incarnation of her dead husband in a 10-year-old child in Birth. Kidman freely admits that the end of her first marriage liberated her as an actor. "When I was divorced, I was able to explore myself artistically, because I didn't feel I was betraying my relationship."

But already several critics, as well as Arbus's former friends and colleagues, have questioned Fur's deviations from the facts of the photographer's life. The film gives no sense of Arbus in the prime of her career, and the interesting questions as to whether she was exploitative or overly aggressive are left to one side. Certainly, the dreamy woman Kidman plays is nothing like the photographer whom Germaine Greer recalls meeting in 1971. In an article for the Guardian, Greer wrote: "Clutching the camera she climbed on the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest."

Arbus was a depressive (some said a schizophrenic) with an unhappy private life. But in Shainberg's films, the mood is surprisingly benign. You can't help but see its failure to take on Arbus's suicide as a major evasion. Shainberg and his screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson, make up large parts of their story, inventing a mysterious neighbour, Lionel (Robert Downey Jr), who has a condition that causes hair to grow all over his body. Somehow, Lionel awakens Arbus's sexual and artistic curiosity.

There have been many earlier attempts to make a film about Arbus, and all have stalled. Ironically, it was the sheer quirkiness of Shainberg's approach that enabled him to get his movie made. "By the time I got along, everything had been tried and they [the producers] were fans of my film Secretary. They thought, why not give me a shot? It's amazing they let me try with such a wild notion."

The film's premise is strikingly similar to that of Secretary: a young woman becomes obsessed with a powerful and strange man. There are S&M scenes and plenty of voyeurism, and this must surely be the first time Nicole Kidman has shared the screen with an actor called Delirium Tremens.

Shainberg's film doesn't judge Arbus. Its aims are more modest: simply to portray her as the director imagines her at a key creative moment in her life over a few weeks in 1958. "I've made the only film I could and it is totally personal," he sighs. "There are people who knew her and who are somewhat academic in their approach to what they feel are the facts of her life. The person I portray is not the person jumping on Germaine Greer".

[Ghostboy]

I'm not sure if I'd call this movie a success, but it's really, really interesting. People who have no idea who Arbus was aren't going to learn a thing about her, and people familiar with her work are likely going to be confounded by the name-only semblance to her life. The entire movie is an abstraction; it serves as a biographical portrait only in the most surreal (and, indeed, imaginary) sense. But as far as biopics go, I'll take this over crap like 'Ray' any day of the week. I do think the film would have been better had her photography been featured in it, though.

[modage]

oh, i saw this a while back (and sat next to Patti Smith!) and i agree with ghostboy. (thats 3!)  if it were a biopic i would've had no interest in it, but the fact it really has nothing to do with her and the trailer looked amazing(ly lynchy) i was really excited for it.  in the end, i found it very similar to secretary in that it was very weird the whole movie seemed to center around an odd sexual fetish.  which was a bit disappointing since i wasnt a big fan of secretary.  still, the concept here is an interesting one, but i could see how if the film were made about someone i cared more about it might upset me.  i guess it fits into the Shadow of the Vampire/new Hitchcock film thingy, bio/fantasy genre. 

[Ghostboy]

I'm not sure if I'd call this movie a success, but it's really, really interesting.

Ultimately, it was too interesting not to write about at greater length. My full review.

[MacGuffin]

From Spanking a Secretary to Exposing a Photographer
By KAREN DURBIN; New York Times

WHEN "Secretary," written by Erin Cressida Wilson and directed by Steven Shainberg, opened four years ago, it felt like something new under the sun: a dark-edged yet buoyant romantic comedy starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader as an office temp and her lawyer boss who unleash each other's inner sadomasochist and live happily ever after. Among the honors the movie collected was an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay. But Ms. Wilson is hardly a tyro. A tenured professor at Brown University, where she teaches screenwriting and playwriting in the graduate program, Ms. Wilson turned to film after more than a dozen years of theater work, including plays like "Hurricane" and "The Trail of Her Inner Thigh." She also co-wrote "The Erotica Project," a radio series of women's monologues involving sex that became a stage production and a book.

The film critic Molly Haskell describes Ms. Wilson as a cartographer of the wilder reaches of female sexuality, mapping "the routes through the thicket of previously inadmissible appetites and fantasies." This describes "Secretary," but it also applies to "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," which opens on Friday. "Fur" is Ms. Wilson's second collaboration with Mr. Shainberg (a third is in the offing), and it bends the rules of genre even more audaciously than "Secretary."

The movie draws on Patricia Bosworth's biography of Arbus, the photographer (whose first name is pronounced Dee-ann), and pursues the possibility that the relationships she developed with her subjects were sometimes sexual. "Fur" isn't a biopic, but a vivid, fictional riff on the time in 1958 when a seemingly conventional upper-middle-class wife and mother glimpsed her creative future and never looked back. Evoking Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," that transformation plays out through a strange and delicate love story between Nicole Kidman's Arbus and Robert Downey Jr.'s extremely hirsute Lionel, an exemplar of the people who inspired her most famous work: those whose physical oddness put them forever beyond the bounds of convention.

Arbus's nakedly intimate portraits of the people she admiringly called freaks still inspire controversy, so it seems right that "Fur" should too. Speaking to Karen Durbin from the Los Angeles home where she and the actor J. C. MacKenzie live part of the year with their 2-year-old son, Ms. Wilson talked about the experience of one transgressive artist evoking another.

Q. The endless gossip around this film includes the theory that the only reason you and Steven Shainberg didn't make a conventional biopic is that you didn't get the rights to use Arbus's pictures. Is that true?

A. No. Doing a list of the events of Diane Arbus's life just wasn't going to turn us on. We wanted to focus on her birth as an artist, to take that moment and, while layering in facts from her life, create a story, a metaphor, that would capture the spirit in her work, the intimacy between subject and photographer. I saw it as that gasp of potential between two people before they become a couple, that magical time before the first kiss.

Q. Arbus committed suicide in 1971, when she was 48, supposedly when she was being treated for depression and was off her meds. Some of the early reviewers have complained that the movie should have foreshadowed that, even though it happened 13 years later.

A. Yes, she killed herself, but I didn't want to write another story of an artist who expressed herself and died tragically. I wanted to convey her incredible curiosity and the eroticism of meeting a stranger and becoming intimate. Her subjects were her objects of desire. The famous photo of the Jewish giant is the result of a 10-year relationship. I wanted to explore what happens before the photograph.

Q. How did you and Steven Shainberg first get together?

A. It was sort of an artistic blind date. A friend thought our sensibilities might be good together. So we started to talk on the phone a lot and became friends. Then in 1997 he sent me a package with some of his short films and Mary Gaitskill's story "Secretary" and asked me if I wanted to adapt it. I very much wanted to write a movie, but I was reluctant at first. The tone of the story was brilliant, but I told him I saw a different ending. I couldn't get into that punitive mind frame. In a film I didn't think it would be exciting for her to leave. It seemed to me that she would like what was happening with the lawyer and want to stay. And he was like, "Great, do it." So I turned it into a love story at the end. Taking that leap from literature to the screen is crucial. I've seen a lot of films that didn't make the leap, didn't turn the text into a new creature.

Q. I've seen scripts that were skeletal on the page but sprang to life on the screen.

A. I don't write that way. Because I come from playwriting, I try to create a full visual world so you see the film on the page. It's a thing that makes the film happen, that attracts stars and money. You can't be too skeletal or it won't attract Nicole Kidman.

Q. It's hard to imagine "Fur" on the page partly because Lionel's world is such a visual Aladdin's cave, and Arbus's transformation as she enters it gave me chills. You see the thrill of recognition in Kidman's eyes, and you somehow know that what she's recognizing is herself.

A. That's right. It's the muse in her that she's waking up to. The experience of falling in love partly has to do with the other person, but it's also the thrill of falling in love with the mysterious parts of yourself that you never quite knew were there. The film isn't just about art or an artist awakening, it's about a person. All human beings have that muse inside that's gnawing at them to wake up and know themselves. And we can go through our lives not waking up. That muse can be erotic, but it's also much more than that. It's who you are and how you're going to live your life.

Q. Was it your idea to give Lionel beautiful head and facial hair and scraggly, faintly repulsive hair on his body?

A. Yes, I wanted Lionel not to just be silky and exotic but also a bit scary.

Q. You could be describing sex itself, a subject that runs through all your work. Why do you think you're drawn to it?

A. The way I think of it is that I write through a sensual lens. I don't even know that "The Erotica Project" is about sex. It's about a lot of things that are told through the lens of sex. And it all goes back to the mother and the upbringing. I grew up in San Francisco in the '70s, and I have a sexy mother. She still is. It's in her face. My parents were academics. I saw "Last Tango in Paris" when I was little and Lina Wertmüller's "Swept Away" ——

Q. Your mom took you to see "Last Tango"?

A. Yes, and also the original "Hair" and Peter Brook's "Midsummer Night's Dream," all these visually erotic, gorgeous pieces. I learned early on that watching is not just about the eyes but the whole body, that it's a sensual experience. I try to create film that touches different parts of people, different levels. Like Diane Arbus, her photographs touch one on so many levels. Writing about her and how she made her work felt good. It felt like a good marriage.

[MacGuffin]

Reeler Exclusive: Fur Director Shainberg Fires Back at Critics

The Reeler snagged a few minutes Monday with Fur director Steven Shainberg, whose kinda-sorta biopic of photographer Diane Arbus opens Nov. 10 in New York. As alluded to from the trenches of Sunday's premiere, Shainberg's film has withstood a double-fisted offensive from gossips and critics who seem particularly eager to bring it down, whether addressing Nicole Kidman's absence from publicity duties (she did indulge the Daily News in a fluffy interlude Sunday) or the film's eschewing of biopic conventions for a more fantastic, fairy-tale reimagining of a pivotal point in Arbus' life.

This all seems a little overboard to me; while I go back and forth on the film, I would say I liked most of it and would (and have had to) gladly defend it on its own embattled terms. But one particular review seemed so personal -- so irretrievably brutal -- that you almost need safety goggles to read it. I'm speaking, of course, about the work of one Richard Schickel:

What we must not ignore is the gross ineptitude of this film. As he previously demonstrated with Secretary, the director, Steven Shainberg, has a thoroughly nasty desire to degrade and humiliate female characters. This is combined with a truly tasteless eye for settings and decor, a staggering ignorance of nuance in performance and an apparent belief that the business of art is to repel rather than to seduce. Or rather to repel and then tack on a little spurious uplift as he finally does here. Another way of putting that is that he is precisely the opposite of Diane Arbus, hopelessly enthralled and self-endangered by her obsession, yet somehow finding in her art the means of controlling it -- at least for a time. Shainberg, in contrast, wishes only to lie about her life. And exploit it.

Um, Mr. Shainberg? Response?

"I haven't read his review simply because I don't read Richard Schickel -- because I don't think he's a good critic," Shainberg told me. "I find him to be simplisitc and foolish. So I don't read him. But having said that, you cannot make a daring, unusual, completely risky film about amazing, outrageous subject matter, and not expect people to be polarized. When I made Secretary, there were people who thought it was a dirty movie. And there were people who were very moved by it. Those are the only kinds of films I'm going to make anyway, so am I troubled by it? Not in the least. I know the game I'm in; I'm not capable of -- nor am I interested in -- making a film that is attempting to appeal to everyone. That would be ridiculous. I mean, I'm interested in making the most personal films I can. My own internal life has enough complexity to it -- and I'm in touch with it enough -- that I'm going to put people off. And I'm also going to attract people. To me, those are the most interesting kinds of films. What's the point in trying to make a movie that is trying to be all things to all people?

"Having said that," he continued, "I think that one of the things that the subtitle of the movie [An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus] and the two cards at the beginning of the film are asking the audience to do is open their mind: Open your mind to a new kind of approach to a real person. Somebody like Richard Schickel is incapable of that, you know? And if you are incapable of that, then you don't even have access to what the movie has to offer. You've missed it entirely."