The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
| 02 June 2017 (USA)
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Portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman found her medium in 1980: the larger-than-life Polaroid Land 20x24 camera. For the next thirty-five years, she captured the “surfaces” of those who visited her studio: families, Beat poets, rock stars, and Harvard notables. As pictures begin to fade and her retirement looms, Dorfman gives Errol Morris an inside tour of her backyard archive.

Reviews
Solemplex

To me, this movie is perfection.

Borserie

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

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Quiet Muffin

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

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Billy Ollie

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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Larry Silverstein

Normally I'm an avid fan of acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Gates of Heaven), but, to be honest, I was rather disappointed in this movie. It centers on the life and work of Elsa Dorfman, whose photographs using the large-format Polaroid technique have been praised for decades.Dorfman recounts in her own words her history and her artistry, and I did find her honesty and sense of humor engaging. However, we only get a glimpse of her striking photographs of writers, poets, and celebrities and I felt the movie would have been better served with her relating her personal experience with these photos and the people in them. Also, it's only towards the last third of the doc that we see her work with ordinary folk , and it seemed to me there was more of a story to be told there, as well.Although the film is only 1 hr. and 16 min. in length, the pacing was way too deliberate for my tastes, even getting tedious at times. Overall. I though there was a better tale to be told than what was presented in this doc unfortunately.

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Movie Watcher

A peacefully satisfying and nicely edited off-camera interview which reveals the life and life's work of a portrait photographer, most of whose work was uniquely captured using one of the 5 (or so) huge 20x24 inch Polaroid cameras. Her portrait sittings consisted of two poses, and having lovingly saved the print not chosen/purchased by each client, she reflects on these 'b- side' but powerful images beginning in the early 70's of everyday people, a few of the famous, and many of herself and her family.

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