2010 | USA | Directed by Richard Press
Logline: A portrait of the octogenarian professional photographer for The New York Times who has dedicated most of his life to capturing the trends of fashion.
“We all get dressed for Bill,” says Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Indeed, Bill Cunningham, an unassuming elderly man with a cheeky grin, habitually attired in a blue work jacket and frequently seen peddling with conviction uptown and downtown Manhattan on a vintage Schwinn bicycle (he’s been through a few of those!), is a cultural anthropologist extraordinaire with his steely eye fixed firmly on the changing fashion of (mostly) womens’ wear.
This is Press’s debut feature-length movie, having made several award-winning shorts, and his tenacity and savvy have combined and paid off; it took, according to Press to took ten years to make this documentary, “Eight to convince Bill to be filmed and two to shoot and edit the film.” But the result is an affectionate and poignant portrait that is essential viewing for anyone even remotely interested in pop culture and the history of fashion.
With no real crew and utilising only small handheld consumer cameras Press and New Yor Times photographer Tony Cenicola (making his first motion picture) was able to document Bill without intruding. They had to be ready and waiting for any quick movement Bill made, as the man was out and about all the time. In fact Bill Cunningham really has no life outside the two online columns he maintains for the newspaper; “On The Street”, which features strangers and randoms often photographed on the sly wearing all kinds of sartorial splendour and provocation, and “Evening Hours” where Bill attends A-list events and snaps the elegant celebrities and social butterflys donning something worth noting.
Bill Cunningham remains an enigma. He is elusive at the best of times, but he’s fascinating and he sports a devilish charm. New York, the city, plays off of Bill like a dance. He loves the glamour but he never eats in fancy restaurants preferring an egg and bacon sarnie from a diner. The doco works like a tango and a romp that Richard Press follows with fervour. It’s essentially New York City, but Bill also pays visit to Paris, and he’s frank about how important the City of Lights is to the world of fashion in comparison to NYC. He prefers to sit alongside the catwalks, rather than be hustled in with all the other phallic-lensed paparazzi at the end of the runway, that way he can get a variety of angles rather than the standard head-on shot. Bill maintains the edge.
Things get a little more curious near the end of the documentary when Richard Press probes into the question everyone has been wondering; is Bill gay? Does he even have time for a relationship? Bill answers coyly, cleverly avoiding the answer directly, yet providing just enough information. Most of the men he regularly photographs (on his film camera no less; nothing digital for Bill, except when it comes to posting his column) are the veteran drag queens, but the belle du jours, not the ones loitering around the lower Eastside.
I do hope The New York Times decides to publish a book on the complete work of Bill Cunningham after he dies (or when he finally throws in the lens cap), it will make a fabulous pictorial history of the last fifty years of Big Apple’s fashion, and will place Bill in the pantheon of the great social documenteurs of the second half of the 20th and into the early 21st Century.
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