More complex and interesting than it first seems

This is a documentary that can fool you. It starts as a seemingly rambling, shapeless portrait of the great photographer. It has dull sections, particularly early on, as we spend a lot of time watching Eggleston rambling around looking for images. Almereyda's somewhat sophomoric attempts to 'explain' the meaning of Eggleston's work via narration seem shallow and silly. But then, as the film goes along, and we see more of Eggleston's images, what seemed boring earlier becomes more interesting in retrospect. When we see the finished images, the process we watched first gathers meaning. And the director's inclusion of Eggleston's withering dismissal of Almerydea's philosophizing makes us realize the filmmaker knows and accepts his own inability to define 'art'. Not quite a great film, but an interestingly complicated one that's not only about a photographer, but also the process of art, the nature of trying to document that process, and the impossibility of putting a visual medium into words.

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William Eggleston in the Real World

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