He revealed the lower depths of what was out there. Yet even as Sontag condemned his work, you could make a case that in teasing out the culture’s darker undercurrents, Newton created images that were progressive in their very danger. There’s a clip of him appearing on a late-’70s French talk show along with Susan Sontag, who though clearly charmed by the man himself insists that his work is “misogynist.” At times (images of a woman wearing a saddle or being consumed by an alligator), there’s no question that it was. “Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful” is content, for much of its 89 minutes, to be a meditation on Newton’s work, and on that score it both reveals and celebrates him as an artist who hated “art” and “good taste,” and who pushed the envelope of a culture that was still reeling from the sexual revolution. The photographs, she says, are saying: “I like you, damn you! I shouldn’t like you, because you’re a weapon!” Grace Jones tells a story about how Newton posed her, naked, holding a knife, and how he waited until the sunlight hit her just so, silhouetting her with prison bars, and that what he was really doing was telling a story - and then we see the image, and indeed, as brutal as it is, it’s like a still from a movie that sets the imagination on fire.
In the documentary, Isabella Rossellini, who was captured by Newton in the ’80s in a haunting shot with her then-partner David Lynch (the one where he’s holding her head as if she were a puppet), describes the effect of his pictures perfectly when she says that they’re really touching the depths of a certain male fear. You might say that he pushed the allure of the femme fatale to the nth degree. He made his models into dominatrix vamp goddesses, diamond-hard and demonic in their icy surreal glamour, and in doing so he created one of the paradigmatic contemporary expressions of the male gaze.Įven as Newton controlled every aspect of his centerfold-from-hell visions, the true subject of his photographs, as rooted as they were in male fantasy, was the awesomeness of feminine power. In the ’70s, Newton, who started out as a fashion photographer (and never stopped being one), turned commercial magazine art into a form of rough trade. There’s an ambivalence - a fantastic double vision - that runs through the work of Helmut Newton, and “The Bad and the Beautiful” dives into it with captivating zeal. During a night photo shoot on the roof of the Chateau Marmont in L.A., he addresses a naked model by saying things like “There’s a kindness in your look…which is the last thing I want” and “Now don’t look poverty-stricken…look incredible!” The Newton we meet is casual, funny, and direct.
The documentary was shot when Newton was in his early 80s, and he’s disarmingly ageless, with floppy thick hair and circular glasses setting off a face that grins easily in a rubbery Teutonic Leslie Nielsen sort of way.
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