Photographer Gregory Crewdson takes carefully staged pictures that contain entire narrative worlds: a woman floating in a flooded living room, a mother and daughter (or so we surmise) staring into space during a mutually sleepless night, a man pushing a grocery cart full of junk down a depressed-looking street.
Director Ben Shapiro followed Crewdson for about 10 years, much of that time as the artist created a series called “Beneath the Roses” — elaborate, magnificently eerie photographs. Some were staged in studios; others were taken on location, frequently in the economic Berkshires ghost-town of Pittsfield, Mass. All of them required an astonishing amount of labor and time. Such is Crewdson’s attention to detail that at one point we’re shown crew members carefully putting a large stack of retro jigsaw puzzles on a shelf near the bedside table. Later we realize the jigsaw puzzles aren’t visible in the shot.
Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters Trailer from Benjamin Shapiro on Vimeo.
Despite his obviously epic micromanagement, Crewdson is an affable sort, directing his subjects (often unemployed locals) with calm persistence. He maintains there is no “before and after” to his photos; in his mind, they’re solely about the moment they capture. Perhaps that’s why the background on Crewdson manages to fill in events — psychiatrist father, childhood in Park Slope, summers in the Berkshires — but not his feelings. And his present life is left almost entirely blank.
These elisions give an odd feeling to a film so long in the making. Crewdson’s work ultimately begins to seem less enigmatic than he is himself.
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