Bill Cunningham New York

Bill Cunningham is in his eighties and rides a bicycle through the streets of New York. He wears a blue workman's jacket with a camera round his neck. He has nobody pose; he photographs what people walking in the street are wearing and publishes it on a weekly newspaper page. He has done the same thing for forty years. He lives in a studio above Carnegie Hall; the room is full of filing cabinets, there is no kitchen, and he shares a bathroom in the corridor. There is work he does not take money for, deliberately. Richard Press directs. Along with Bill Cunningham, Tom Wolfe, Anna Wintour and Carmen Dell'Orefice speak in it. It is an American production. Cunningham refused to be filmed for a long time; persuading him took years. The matter it treats is independence; Cunningham refuses advertising and even a meal he has not paid for. The documentary shows the fashion world too but puts the street at its centre. The narrative touches his private life only at the end and that passage is very short. The film shows his working method in detail; he chooses the negatives and lays out the page himself. He is described as one of the last artists living in the building, and the eviction is inside the film. The documentary does not glorify its subject but does not fully establish a distance either. Its limit is depth; the narrative stays on the surface and the man's past is missing. Who it is for: viewers who like documentaries about fashion and photography. Who it is not for: the subject is narrow, bounded by admiration, and the ending sentimental.