Who gets to tell a photographer's story: the man behind the camera, or the women who stood in front of it? Gero von Boehm's 2020 documentary Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful gives the floor to the second group, and the result is an 89-minute portrait assembled largely from the memories of the people he photographed.
What is Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful about?
Helmut Newton made his name with fashion editorials and portraits in which women filled the frame, and those images have been argued over ever since. Instead of letting critics or curators settle the matter, the documentary goes to the sitters. Isabella Rossellini, Charlotte Rampling, Grace Jones, Catherine Deneuve and others describe what it was like to pose for him, what they believed the pictures were saying, and how they read his life and work today. Their accounts do not have to agree, and the film is built around one question it never fully closes: were the women in Newton's photographs subjects with a voice of their own, or objects arranged for someone else's eye? Around these conversations von Boehm sketches the outline of a career that was called provocative, unconventional and subversive in equal measure.
About the cast
As a documentary, the film has no actors in the usual sense; the credited names are people appearing as themselves. The list is a roll call of famous faces: Isabella Rossellini, Charlotte Rampling, Grace Jones, Anna Wintour, Marianne Faithfull, Claudia Schiffer, Catherine Deneuve and Sylvia Gobbel. Direction is by Gero von Boehm, whose approach rests on these first-person testimonies rather than on an outside narrator's verdict.
Context & significance
A German production released in 2020, the film belongs to two genres at once, biography and documentary. Its guiding idea can be put in four words: a portrait by the portrayed. That choice matters because Newton's photography has long divided viewers, celebrated by some as the work of a genius and questioned by others for the way it presents women. A film about such a figure could easily turn into either a tribute or a prosecution. This one prefers to stage the debate and leave the answer with the audience, which makes it useful both for viewers who already know the pictures and for those meeting them for the first time. At under an hour and a half it is also a compact way into wider conversations about fashion imagery, authorship and who controls a photograph once it is published. Its reception has been generally favourable.
Watching Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful on Ktime
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