Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was among the greatest photographers of the 20th century; he also sketched, painted and made short reality films. The DVD “Henri Cartier-Bresson: Collector’s Edition” gathers a handful of his own documentaries spanning 1937-1971 plus a half-dozen documentaries on him that display his accomplishments in many fields. Curiously, most of the material is neither overdubbed nor subtitled, diminishing the informational value for non-French speakers. One can easily argue, however, that Cartier-Bresson’s wealth of stark black and white images speak for themselves.
A segment with English overdubbing, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye” (2003), offers revealing thoughts from the photographer himself as well as such admirers as Arthur Miller and Isabelle Huppert. Some commentators stressed the political nature of his photojournalism. After all, Cartier-Bresson traveled through the segregated American South and was present for the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, the assassination of Gandhi, the fall of China to the Communists and the rise of the Berlin Wall. Miller interprets Cartier-Bresson’s American photos as depicting the country’s “painful irony,” its spiritual poverty and naked greed, in ways that would become unacceptable in the post-Reagan climate of jingoism.
“The Impassioned Eye” shows Cartier-Bresson puttering around his studio and paging through albums of his own photos, including the album that won him a job as assistant to film director Jean Renoir. Most of his pictures catch a sense of motion and mystery. His portrait of a young Truman Capote, utterly unlike the corpulent image of the celebrity years, captures a lean, feral young punk in a white T-shirt. “You have to seize the moment,” Cartier-Bresson explains, adding that his primary interest is the geometry of reality in that moment. “You see what you see and the surprised eye responds,” he says.
