THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM: Not Much To Add

It’s reasonable to consider that film criticism’s evaluation of cinema is contingent on our abilities to compare and contrast it with other great works of art. It’s also reasonable to consider in some cases that this is unfair. If we can take for example a film like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) and say that because it doesn’t quite tackle the issues of class-based hierarchical systems under capitalism with the same dedication and force as something like Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) or Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), two monumental works of cinema, what we’re really doing is putting an unfair burden on a film which holds its main conceit to be disguising social critique in the traditional genre forms of cinema. We’re also erasing the cultural (Korean) uniqueness of its discussion of class hierarchy, which isn’t the same as Loach’s England or Renoir’s France.

Structural Annoyances

What comparing and contrasting should really do is to evaluate new arguments and additive ideas that hadn’t existed before in the same manner. With a documentary such as Mark Bozek’s The Times of Bill Cunningham, releasing nearly a decade after Richard Press’s Bill Cunningham New York (2011), the comparisons must be an evaluation of information as much as an evaluation of the documentary as art.

I’ll say first off that The Times of Bill Cunningham is a structurally off-putting work. It’s tonally inconsistent, with power-point presentation slides of pictures and photographs (some of them very rare and interesting) and old film reels (and some new ones with cheap digital imitation film grain filters on them), with pop-music and EDM beats played over them. It presents itself like a mix between an E! Entertainment profile and one of those educational videos you watch in high-school which recounts a timeline of an important historical person’s life (in this case, narrated by a bored-sounding Sarah Jessica Parker).

For those enamored with New York socialite culture, the parties, the Hollywood premiers, the Metropolitan galas, the charity auctions, all of the rich and famous gatherings which exist in a stratosphere above us, The Times of Bill Cunningham is fascinating transportation. It’s a more downplayed version of the types of celebrity-life exposés hosted by Robin Leach that premiered on TV. For those of us who are more interested in character, the reveal of Cunningham as a person, much of the documentary’s editing and presentation choices are more like annoyances.

The Mind of An Icon

The fluff interrupts and surrounds the jewel of this documentary, which is a never-before-seen interview with Bill Cunningham that was shot in 1994. A comprehensive telling of his life and work before becoming the famed photographer at the New York Times, with his own pair of columns, the interview is illuminating in the way it goes deeper into the person’s ideas and details of Cunningham’s life. A brilliantly entertaining set of stories surround his time living in the famed Carnegie Hall studios where Brando and other celebrity artists lived, and his crazy roommate situation living with and later, next-door to Norman Mailer and his third wife Lady Jeanne Campbell.

It’s these stories that turn The Times of Bill Cunningham into a documentary that means something and adds value to the story we heard a decade earlier. While Bill Cunningham New York functioned as a traditional documentary (and very well made), recounting the artistic philosophies of Cunningham, already a legend in New York, and his peculiarities as a person, living in a cramped studio on a bed held up by file cabinets, having no kitchen or bathroom, wearing nothing but a blue moleskin workman’s uniform every single day, and forgoing the fancy plates constantly offered to him at galas and dinners for a sausage egg and cheese for $2.50, the new documentary brings us a bit closer into the rise of an icon.

A Missing Piece of Bill Cunningham

Cunningham’s main draw is his ability to remain an extremely humble and closed figure in a world where he is surrounded by open books, open cameras, and the undivided attention of the rich and famous. The ambiguity of his sexual orientation and romantic life aside – something that he avoids talking about other than to say his conservative upbringing was at odds with his career choice – there is also a veneer that covers his political, religious and social remarks on the world.

For someone so militantly focused on the one thing he loves (“I don’t care about the celebrities, I care about the clothes!” he exclaims many times) Cunningham never touches on other subjects beyond either a passing fancy or a joking disdain for their effect on the greater society (like his absolute distrust of money). But most of these arguments were already made in Bill Cunningham New York, and if Bozek’s The Times of Bill Cunningham can stake a claim of importance, it’s more as something that fills in the gaps and gives us an unfiltered telling of Cunningham’s roots from the man himself – a missing piece of information that would serve better as an extras-feature on a Blu-Ray than as the stand-alone documentary it is.

The Times of Bill Cunningham was released on February 14th in New York and Los Angeles, with a national rollout to follow at an undisclosed date.