The Movie:

The documentary Duane Michals: The Man Who Invented Himself gets well-acquainted with its title subject, a conceptual artist, poet and photographer looking mighty spry and playful in his '80s. Recently released on DVD from Alive Mind Cinema and Kino Lorber, the film winds up being too deliberately obtuse to recommend - even for those who enjoy photography and/or lively octogenarians.

Despite the rich, varied impression of Duane Michals' life and career that emerges in The Man Who Invented Himself, the overly deliberate, oddball approach taken by director Camille Guchard lets him (and us) down. It begs the question, then, as to why someone as eccentric and likable as Michals would end up being the subject of such a silly, myopic film? Instead of doing a straightforward, talking-heads and expert testimony setup, Guchard (perhaps with Michals' input) decided to make it as a series of surreal, beautifully photographed yet painfully "cute" episodes. The movie is literally 90% Michals and Michals alone, goofing on himself in a way that suggests he's the art world equivalent of Being There's Chance the Gardener.

In bits and pieces throughout The Man Who Invented Himself, we get glimpses of Michals' working methods, his past shooting enigmatic portraits of actors and other notables (the most interesting segment, by far), his inspirations and how being gay informs his work, and his provincial childhood in a Pennsylvania industrial town. He also spends a good amount of time sharing his carefully composed black-and-white photos while reading their accompanying poetic, hand-written descriptions - text and imagery of people in various states of flux informed by a whimsical, dreamlike sensibility (the influence of French surrealist painter Rene Magritte looms large). The photo series themselves are darkly humorous and pretty fascinating, although in order to get to them one must wade through scene after scene of Michals acting spontaneous in varied settings, mugging for the camera, etc. Part of the film's disappointment stems from the director's choices, but I also think a good component of the film's dishonest feel comes from Michals' constantly "on" personality. A few peeks at a real person emerge (mostly in the parts where he's busy staging and photographing), but mostly one gets the impression that Michals' life is a series of carefully constructed façades.

Without presuming the age/experience of the director, Duane Michals: The Man Who Invented Himself plays like a well-intentioned, respectful yet vaguely conceived student film. One of its several misbegotten segments has Michals animatedly describing various past photographs to a rapt younger man, who is never identified and not seen elsewhere in the film. While most viewers would logically wonder Who is this guy?, this film is content to move on and presume that nobody should care about the ancillary figures in Michals' life. That's the problem - for a documentary purporting to offer a glimpse into a great photographer's mind, its message is littered with too many Who is this guy? moments.