According to Black White + Gray, Samuel Jones Wagstaff (1921-1987), son of Polish mother Olga, and his sister Judith, grew up in America's upper class. He was a US navy officer in World War Two (1939 - 1945) and took a career in advertising in the 1950s, escorting debutante women to parties and partially concealing his homosexuality. Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) came from a working-class family. He met (later American singer) Patti Smith (b 1946) at art college. They met Sam Wagstaff in New York when they were 26 and he was 51. Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe became business, sexual, and emotional partners, and died from AIDS, aged 66 and 43.

The film has a documentary format. It uses still photographs from the beginnings of photography to modern times, in sepia, black and white and colour; and film and TV clips from the Second World War onwards. There are interviews slotted in from people who knew the two men, some recent. Colour and image quality reflect the age of the clips, giving the film a sense of a story progressing through the years of their lives, but told now. The present is emphasised by a linking narration from Joan Juliet Buck, and frequent interview cuts with Patti Smith - striking in her now later years, her facial elegance oddly enhanced by a substantial moustache shadow. 'The three of us had a beautiful uncomplicated relationship' she says.

Director James Crump makes the point that Robert Mapplethorpe is well-known, as photographer and scandalous celebrity, but that Sam Wagstaff is not. He presents people who knew both giving views that show many facets of Robert Mapplethorpe - some suggesting him to be a leech on his friend. Sam Wagstaff is shown by the commentary and friends' views in a generous, complimentary way. The overall feeling from the film is warm towards Sam Wagstaff, and variable toward Robert Mapplethorpe - in personal terms. The personal is stitched into the story-telling, but the film has a strong emphasis on the artistic achievements of both men. A director of art auctioneer Christie's uses the term fin de siècle to sketch them, adding: 'They seemed to cast themselves as 1890s dandies'.

Sam Wagstaff's career evolves in the film in a full and intriguing way, with 4 key stages. As a young man in the 1950s, he has a career in advertising, which he perceives as shallow. After study he becomes an art curator, at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum. He is curator at Detroit Institute of Arts. His exhibition Black, White and Gray is, he says, 'the first minimalist show in a museum'. His third area, and the main interest of this film, is photography. He inherits a fortune when his mother dies - in her rooms at the Saint Regis - in 1973, and buys and assembles with enthusiasm and artistic vision, a remarkable collection ('Photography got his money' says Patti Smith), which he sells in 1984 to the J Paul Getty Museum. 'He wanted to experience a kind of ecstasy in front of photographs' says the Christie's director. In the last few years of his life, in the penthouse of No 1, Fifth Avenue, New York, he switches again, to collecting American silverware.

Robert Mapplethorpe's career develops briskly when he meets Sam Wagstaff, who finances him. The two develop their interests in photography together, with Robert Mapplethorpe principally as artist, and Sam Wagstaff principally as curator, but each informing the other's evolution. The film shows a lot of Robert Mapplethorpe's well-known published work ('My sly pornographer', Sam Wagstaff calls him), and photographs of both men in their sexual exploration of their selves and of each other. It shows many of the photographs from Sam Wagstaff's fabulous collection, with his own words explaining the scope and ideas behind his curation.

It's an intriguing film, a subtly put together story. The musical score, by Joshua Ralph, is elegant and gorgeously-written, but features a lot of foreboding most of the way through, with sometimes fairly ordinary verbal comments offset by quietly menacing chords. This may be to lead towards the early deaths of both men, but if the accounts of their lives given in the film are true, they had a great time. They both enjoyed a lot of drugs, they had a tremendous amount of sex, they both had vast amounts of money, they were both immensely admired and they each had lots of friends. And now this film.

Credits: www.imdb.com/title/tt1003113/

END

John Park

reviewed Tuesday 2 October 07 / National Film Theatre - NFT3 - Press Preview - 12:30

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008