Peruvian Roast Chicken with Avocado SaladCapturing

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(His signature piece is the same royal blue workman’s jacket worn by Parisian street sweepers, which sells for about $20 and comes in a plastic bag.) He favors $3 lunches. Until he moved, when Carnegie Hall reclaimed the artists’ residences there for other uses, he lived in a tiny studio with no kitchen and with a bathroom down the hall. He gets around on an old bicycle and sleeps on a cot surrounded by filing cabinets containing every negative of every shot he has ever taken. And yet somehow the patrician image is further burnished by the radical lifestyle. He’s an aesthete and an ascetic, a member of the establishment and a bohemian, and among the last of his kind.
In an essay in The New York Review of Books shortly after J. D. Salinger’s death, Michael Greenberg described Salinger’s characters as being what Tolstoy called “aristocrats of the spirit” whose “quest is for an almost impossible purity that drives them away from the workaday world, toward a dangerous,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], self-burying seclusion.” Mr. Cunningham could easily be the eighth Glass sibling, and the other seven would be glad to have him. He loves taking pictures of people in the rain because they “forget about you,” he says. “If they see you, they don’t go putting on airs, people are who they are.” When France names him a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, he spends the time up to when he is about to receive the award snapping photos of the guests in attendance.
If the film suggests that there’s something bittersweet about a life dedicated to a single pursuit cultivated with an almost religious fervor,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], it also stands in awe of its subject’s seemingly inexhaustible, self-abnegating capacity to remain attuned to the expression of others.
“I’ve said many times that we all get dressed for Bill,” Anna Wintour, editor in chief of American Vogue, says in the film.[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]
By staying at a distance from the objects of his obsession, Mr. Cunningham has molded himself into the designated noticer and interpreter of the city, a kind of Lorax of New York fashion.
“I don’t decide anything,” he says. “I let the street speak to me, and in order for the street to speak to you, you’ve got to stay out there and see what it is.”
Bill Cunningham New York[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan. Directed by Richard Press; director of photography, Tony Cenicola and Mr.Press; edited by Ryan Denmark; produced by Philip Gefter; released by Zeitgeist Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village.
Running time: 1hour 24 minutes. This film is not rated.
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