Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Maloof, Charlie Siskel
This would make a good companion piece to "Searching For Sugar Man", another documentary detective story about the quest to track down an artist whose self-imposed obscurity seems at odds with the astonishing quality of the artist's work. Vivian Maier worked for 40 years as a nanny, and for all of that time roamed the streets with a Rolleiflex camera, shooting what she saw. She took more than 100,000 pictures, in slums and stockyards, in New York and Chicago and around the world, often with her underaged charges (and occasional subjects) in tow. Her negatives turned up in boxes which were auctioned off when the money ran out to pay storage costs, and that's how she came to the attention of John Maloof, who bought some of them and became obsessed with finding out who took all those photographs. There's no last-act happy ending here, at least not for Vivian Maier, who died at 83, impoverished and mentally ill, in 2009. At the same time, you wonder whether in some way she got what she wanted. She knew her work was good, and she went to some trouble, as long as she was able, to insure its survival. Her compulsion was with making art, not showing or selling it. She never shared her pictures with anybody, and many of them she never saw herself. That they're being recognized and celebrated only after her death isn't necessarily a tragedy, and could be just the opposite. Brilliant, eccentric and willfully reclusive, Vivian Maier might not want it any other way.