Super-8 Re-enactment.


Volume 15, Issue 43
Published February 27th, 2008
Picture Perfect
Eloquent Nude Documents The Life Of An Iconic Model
By Charles Cassady Jr.
Leave hipsters to their ironic crush on Bettie Page. In fine arts, Charis Wilson is the nude, the model and, for a time, wife of esteemed photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958). They met when she was 19, he 48. During their dozen years together he photographed her, clothed and unclad, with the same rigorous eye and appreciation he brought to pictorial studies of peppers and landscapes. Their nude studies - so mainstream that you beheld a naked Charis with every mass mailing from the Time/Life Series of Photography - are iconic.

A few years ago Oregon independent documentary filmmaker Ian McCluskey read Charis' memoirs, Through Another Lens, then he heard that she, turning 90, was receiving hospice care. Weston and Wilson's cohort Ansel Adams had just gotten a deluxe Ric Burns documentary treatment. "The main thing was to get her story before it was too late. The main impetus was to get her story right away."

The result is the nostalgic short feature Eloquent Nude, which blends DV interview footage with a nonagenarian Wilson and input from family and historians with pilgrimages to Westonian landmarks, shooting locations such as the California sand dunes and the couple's storied retreat at Wildcat Hill (still standing, and now the site of photographic workshops operated by Weston's grandson).

But the "money shots," to use a multiply inappropriate expression (NW Documentary is a low-budget outfit that relied on donations, right down to $20 in the jar at the coffeehouse, to continue production) are silent Charis/Edward reenactments filmed not in high-definition video edited through a Microsoft Moviemaker f/x filter, but shot on actual Super 8mm, on a variety of soft-focus, amateur-grade cine cameras McCluskey salvaged from garage sales.

"Using digital effects to make digital footage look old is one of the reasons the word "reenactment' makes so many people cringe," says McCluskey in a phone interview. "I felt that if we were going to cross into the territory of reenactment, we needed to go as absolutely far as we could. That meant shooting actual black-and-white film in vintage cameras, and using real props - a running 1937 Ford V-8 standard sedan, a wooden Kodak 8x10 camera, a Graflex Reflex camera, authentic vintage dresses from the 1920s and '30s, the LC Smith and Corona typewriter that Charis used, as well as her portable Royal Signet typewriter.

"And even though only one shot in the entire documentary shows this, we asked the woman [the wife of McCluskey's sound man] portraying Charis to go without shaving for the entire duration of shooting," he continues. "So every detail, down to thin blonde leg hairs, was as genuine as we could possibly obtain."

Scholars who have seen Eloquent Nude have difficulty distinguishing the new footage from archival imagery of Weston and old Carmel, says McCluskey. "When Charis saw the reenactments for the first time, she said, "That's not acting at all; that's living.' She said she'd like a DVD copy to watch parts of each night before bed, to help take her back to those memories. She called the reenactment scenes the "home movies' she never had."

Like Eloquent Nude itself, the celluloid fills in a gap in the records. McCluskey thinks Charis, despite her inextricable ties to Weston, has been a somewhat marginalized figure. "Charis was so much in his life and so dominated by him that some of the people around Weston kind of saw her as a nuisance, as a hanger-on. "Oh, she wouldn't last.'"

The documentary makes the case that Wilson developed a gift for writing, whereas her husband sweated bullets over every word. Her prose helped get Edward Weston his crucial Guggenheim grants and she even polished his published articles and Daybooks. It is, alas, part of the Weston-Wilson mystique that the marriage between the creatives did not endure (though Charis and Edward remained friendly until his death from Parkinson's disease). Interpreters have read downtrending domestic angst into the evolution of their photo expeditions and sittings together - perhaps as much so as today's craphounds follow the descent of Britney or Lindsay through Internet paparazzi snaps.

"I wanted to know the story of an artistic genius and his muse, and the story of a man and a woman who fell in love and the relationship changed them, and in the changing pushed them apart, and yet the love that remains indelible," McCluskey says. "How do you live and love so deeply, and then lose it? And then still love, beyond even death? Those are the deeper questions of Eloquent Nude, ones we can all relate to."

And there is an epilogue: Despite the hospice treatment, Charis not only lived long enough to see Eloquent Nude completed and screened at museums and photographic societies nationwide, but she also lives still.

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Eloquent Nude: The Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson: 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 29 and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, March 2, at Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall.
Eloquent nude: New footage is hard to distinguish from old footage.

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