Love, Cecil
Director: Lisa
Immordino Vreeland
Stars: Cecil Beaton, Hamish Bowles, Leslie Caron, Rupert
Everett, David Hockney
Love, Cecil review – intelligent tribute to fashion's Bright
Young Thing
3 / 5 stars 3 out of 5 stars.
Rupert Everett narrates designer Cecil Beaton’s diaries in
Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s sympathetic study of his life and influence on
British style
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Fri 1 Dec 2017 13.00 GMT Last modified on Mon 2 Jul 2018
14.51 BST
Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s previous documentary was a
portrait of art patron Peggy Guggenheim, and this study of Cecil Beaton is in
the same celebratory mode. This was the British designer, photographer, social
alpinist and Bright Young Thing who suffered a scandal after making an
antisemitic slur in the 1930s, but after his craven, miserable (and sincere)
apology for this silly shock tactic, he enjoyed royal patronage from the then
Queen Elizabeth and was rehabilitated with the approach of war, during which he
took valuable reportage pictures for Life magazine. He went on to create the
look for the movie version of My Fair Lady, and maintained his own slightly
quaint neo-Edwardian aesthetic for fashion magazines well into the swinging
60s. The film is intelligent, thorough and sympathetic, with Rupert Everett
narrating Beaton’s diaries. But it never quite persuades you that Beaton really
deserves to be considered a substantial artist. I found myself thinking of FR
Leavis’s wisecrack about the Sitwells belonging to the history of publicity
rather than of poetry. There is a touch of satirist Craig Brown in Beaton’s
icily haughty pronouncements such as: “The call saying that the Queen wants me
to take her coronation photographs comes as an enormous relief.” A moderately
interesting study.
A Film Digs Beneath the Dandy Persona of Cecil Beaton
A new film explores the visual legacy of Cecil Beaton, who
was inspired by a range of art movements and carefully curated scenes that
throbbed with sensuality, drama, and romance.
Bedatri D. ChoudhuryJuly 4, 2018
“The Queen wonders if you’ll photograph her tomorrow
afternoon?”
Cecil Beaton, after being fired from American Vogue in 1938,
on charges of anti-Semitism, was living in England when his phone rang. Queen
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who would go on to be his favorite royal subject,
wanted to be photographed by him. For Beaton, the artist, photographer, costume
and set designer, and diarist, this was the resurrection. Years later, he would
sit in Westminster Abbey, high up near the organ pipes, taking photos of Queen
Elizabeth II’s coronation with his top hat stuffed with sandwiches.
Beaton, the eponymous protagonist of Lisa Immordino
Vreeland’s documentary, Love, Cecil was guided by the strength of his visual
acuity. He sought to find a certain kind of beauty in the things that he saw
and chose to express this beauty in as many ways as possible — in his drawings
for Vogue, photographs, collages, diaries, Broadway sets and costumes. His
obsession with beauty, as the documentary reveals, stemmed from theatre: the
suspension of disbelief and the evocative power of beautiful sets, costumes and
make-up overpowered him during his days at Cambridge University. In what is
retrospectively one of the earliest instances of queering the campus, Beaton
would attend classes in drag — his face adorned with feathers and done up with
heavy make-up, wearing clothes that no one had ever seen before — least of all,
on a man.
His relentless search for beauty essentially emerges from a
constant feeling of not belonging and dissatisfaction that can perhaps be
traced back to his family. His father was a timber merchant and the Beaton
children, Cecil and his three siblings, grew up in comfortable abundance:
attending the esteemed Harrow School, and later Cambridge. But he was never satisfied.
This was not the life he wanted — this life of studying, rote learning, growing
up to run a business. Beaton wanted to be free, open, living a life of careless
luxury. When he finally left Cambridge without finishing his degree, he became
a part of Bright Young Things, group of young, carefree, rich youngsters who
dressed up, posed for pictures, threw parties, drank copiously and were
everything Cecil Beaton wanted to be. The pictures that he took of Stephen
Tennant and his other bohemian friends not only mark the beginnings of his
formal photography career, but also exist as invaluable documents of this
sub-culture of young men and women who in 1920s London lived a life of grandeur
and decadence typical of the 1890s — the decade that shocked the rigid
Victorian morality with its hubristic aestheticism, sensuality, and
transgressive openness to sexual and political experimentation. For Beaton, who
never completely belonged to his own time and society, this turning back of
time was euphoric.
There’s no denying that Beaton brought to fashion
photography a certain intellectual gravitas that was hitherto unseen. Inspired
by a range of art movements — from German Expressionism to French Romanticism,
he incorporated shadows and sets to carefully curate mise-en-scènes that
throbbed with sensuality, drama, and romance. The flair and meticulousness with
which he captured people is the same flair with which he wrote out his diaries,
and the same meticulousness with which he did up his house in Ashcombe, and with
which he hosted intellectual and cultural giants. Salvador Dali holds a fencing
mask and stares to his right; Mona von Bismarck peeps through a torn screen of
paper; Charles Henry Ford places his chin on Pavel Tchelitchew’s neck; Lady
Diana Cooper wears an ornate headdress and wraps a velvet shawl around herself.
In Beaton’s photographs, it’s never just the person who is the subject of the
photograph but always the persona and the idea of the thousand different
characters they might be. Beauty, for Beaton, is a dynamic ever-changing
entity, a force so intent on expressing itself that it defies the established
norms of expression and anonymity.
Vreeland makes a concerted effort to probe beyond the Cecil
Beaton the world knows — the Oscar-winning unabashedly dapper, flamboyant,
self-confessed “dandy” Cecil Beaton who through his costumes for Gigi, My Fair
Lady, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, lent to Hollywood some of that
charismatic flamboyance and chicness. She uncovers the deeply hurt Beaton who could
never really forgive himself for the anti-Semitic Vogue illustration, the tiny
but legible word “Kike” peeking out of a drawing. Almost as a way of redeeming
himself, he joined the British Ministry of Information during the Second World
War and travelled across Burma, China, and Egypt — photographing the deadly
aftermath but at the same time, celebrating the beauty that survives war and
the culture of aesthetics that outlives destruction. During the Blitz he
photographed three-year-old Eileen Dunne, her head bandaged, arms clutching a
teddy and her eyes set in a piercing gaze — the photograph that would finally
appear on the cover of Life and convince the Americans to aid Britain in the
war. This is a Beaton who gets seldom talked about: the Beaton who documented a
devastating war with as much dedication and skill as he documented the crème de
la crème of Hollywood and the British royalty.
The documentary also highlights the frankness with which
Beaton lived his life. It is peppered with anecdotes about people he hated. He
famously said that Elizabeth Taylor combined the worst of American and English
tastes, and that Katharine Hepburn was as graceless as a “dried out boot.” It
also underscores the inherent duality of his life — the unabashed, frank side and
the contradictory, private, secretive side. As Truman Capote notes in the film,
“He was both very vain and very modest at the same time.” For him almost
everything was about style and self-fashioning — so much so that he was often
labelled a vain narcissist. “I am not vain,” he said, “I’m at worst, pretty.”
“I’m a terrible homosexualist,” Beaton wrote in his diary.
Underlining all of his creative pursuits, is the deep discomfort of never being
able to live freely as a homosexual, of living a life of endless discretion.
The documentary uncovers the deep love he felt for British art collector Peter
Watson and then later, the American fencer Kinmont Hoitsma (whom he calls him
“ceaselessly beautiful”)— both affairs left him heartbroken and sad. The film
also explores his deep relationship with Greta Garbo, who was the most
beautiful woman in his eyes. In this segment, the camera fleets from one
portrait to another — in one she gazes obliquely sitting among flowers; in
another she lays down wearing a white turtle neck as her hair frames her face;
and in another, she gazes out a window.
When Beaton passed away in 1980, in the Reddish House in the
village of Broad Chalke in Wiltshire, England — an 18th-century manor he bought
and renovated — his room only had three portraits that he had taken: of Watson,
Hoitsma, and Garbo. The self-created man who saw the life he wanted to live and
built it for himself, who bought much beauty into the world, passed away in
solitude, forever in pursuit of unattainable beauty, never in surrender.
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