Notes from Sundance, Part 4: On respecting your elder statesmen and women

It used to be, Isabella Rossellini notes in About Face, Timothy Greenfield-Sander’s annotated history of the early supermodel era, that the aging process was tied to the accrual of social status. The older one got, the more respect one earned. Today it’s her daughter who gets invited around town, Rossellini laughs, while she and her hard-earned experience sit at home.



A handful of docs screening at Sundance this year concerned with career reflection and retrospection—including About Face—offer a correction to that kind of oversight. Rossellini, Carol Alt, Beverly Johnson, Paulina Porizkova, Christie Brinkley and many others are gathered in About Face to discuss their entry into the modeling world and how it helped and/or hindered their development. I mean, that’s partly what the film is about—in truth it seems to be about whatever the director wants it to be about from moment to moment. Made up of archival photographic and video images interspersed with present-day interviews, some interesting anecdotal ground is covered and the odd satisfying sound bite is drawn out, but ultimately the doc is too unfocused to amount to much.

Some of the women make old-school modeling sound like the greatest thing that could have happened to a young girl; others remember the days when “model” was code for “hooker.” Some never dieted or fell into drugs or worried about growing old: “We lived the greatest adventure of all in those days,” says Marisa Berenson, talking about the Seventies of Studio 54. Others, like Porizkova—who is somehow only 45, by the way—were skeptical from the start: “Working off your looks makes you the opposite of confident,” she says.

Porizkova also describes the poignancy of looking at her ravishing former self and remembering how unspecial she felt at the time. That’s about as close as About Face gets to investigating the tangled relationship between models and female self-image—even those we might think of as part of the problem are not immune. Still, it is bitterly satisfying to here a former Vogue fashion director admit that she exploited vulnerable models and helped create a troubling aesthetic standard of beauty.

Where About Face is a fairly boilerplate reflection on a few familiar careers, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present takes a longer and more intimate view of a singular artist. Abramovic also spent much of her performance art career in front of a camera, though instead of selling mascara and hairspray she was carving satanic stars into her belly and mounting her own naked body in a museum, like a work of art. Director Matthew Akers uses Abramovic’s 2011 Museum of Modern Art retrospective as the occasion to reflect on her life and its closely intertwined body of work. “It took me forty years to be taken seriously,” Abramovic says with chagrin. “Forty years of people saying you’re insane.”



It might surprise those familiar with Abramovic mainly through her three months spent in silent staring matches at MoMA this past spring, she is a hugely charismatic presence—a chronic seductress, even, one curator suggests. She doesn’t lack for ego, somewhat refreshingly, and relishes her mainstream success, though a reunion with her former lover and longtime collaborator Ulay casts the shadow of the rather more dependent girl who didn’t know how to manage her own finances when they broke up. The Artist Is Present follows the old “putting on a show” structure pretty closely, but it’s a fascinating ride, and offers its own suggestions in answer to the questions that have animated Abramovic’s career: How much of life is performance? How much of performance is life?

Paul Simon’s 1986 performance on Saturday Night Live backed by the South African acapella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo forms a dividing point in Under African Skies, Joe Berlinger’s wonderfully engrossing telling of the recording of Graceland, the album Simon calls “the most significant achievement of my career.” The story of that achievement encompasses one of the greatest scourges of the late-twentieth century—South African apartheid—and the controversy that surrounded Simon’s attempt to transcend politics through artistic collaboration.



Berlinger hangs the story on Simon’s return to South Africa in the summer of 2011 to celebrate Graceland’s 25th anniversary with the musicians who helped write and record it. It’s also an opportunity, in the terms of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for a little truth and reconciliation. Simon is filmed talking with some of the resistance and revolutionary leaders who opposed his presence in the country—against a UN boycott. As the album that went on to sell five million copies is revealed to be more derivative than might be commonly known, one can’t help wondering what the men and women who supplied all of those beats and melodies got out of the bargain.

Berlinger remains cognizant of those questions, and leaves the viewer enough room to form her own conclusions. There is a wealth of footage from the jam and recording sessions that led to Graceland and talking head testimony from people like Quincy Jones, Paul McCartney, and members of Vampire Weekend to put the album’s impact into historical perspective. But little of this fascinating look into the creative process is more compelling than watching Simon and the South African musicians, then and now, creating and recreating history.