Finding Vivian Maier (2014)

Very Cool!!!

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Blistering performances.

This is story about unknown photographer Vivian Maier who is discovered after her death which you probably already know since you're reading the reviews. I loved her life story and her work but documentary could have been less amateur. Maybe that guy Maloof could get a real director and writer to make documentary for him and not put himself into story. You should watch it just to see how amazing she was and to see her beautiful work but other than that documentary is poorly written and directed. Sad to see someone ruin such a good story and potentially good movie.

The purpose of a documentary film is to explore, or uncover something. To open the audience's eyes to something they've never seen and to leave them walking out while looking at the world around them in a different way. Finding Vivian Maier does this perfectly.This film is an exploration of a lonely, misunderstood soul and what art can come from that loneliness. Vivian Maier was a nanny in Chicago in the 1970s who was known for being a bit of an odd-ball. She would do various things such as collect newspapers, wear men's shirts, carry a camera around and snap various pictures as she went about her day. She died alone in 2009 and it was only until a few years later that her ingeniously astounding photographs were discovered and brought into the public eye.Now, during the first half of this movie, the main focus is on her art, and how it was kept so under wraps for years before coming to light, and the exploration of trying to fit all the pieces together (i.e. interviewing relatives from France, interviewing children she had cared for, going through census records, etc.) to figure out who she was on the outside.During the second half of the movie, the attention is drawn less to who she was on the outside and more to who she was on the inside. What caused her eccentric behavior? Why didn't she share her photographs? What prompted her to take them in the first place? This is where the film turns from a mystery of uncovering art to a study of a life completely hidden.Pardon me for dividing the movie into halves, but that's how I feel this movie is set up. This movie is bringing up the age-old question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it still make a sound?" Now, in Finding Vivian Maier, what is the tree, and what does it mean for the tree to fall? Surely falling refers to the creation of art, but what is the tree referring to? In the first half of the film, the movie is focusing on Maier's long-hidden photographs and how long it took for them to be revealed, so is the tree a metaphor for art itself? Is the movie begging the question: "Does art stop existing the moment we stop noticing it?" But as the film progresses into its second half, we start to observe Vivian herself, and how she ended up as the odd old lady who lived and an old apartment. This is where the movie gives us the same question, except in an even harder approach: "Do people stop existing the moment we stop noticing them?"The movie's themes don't stop there. It also has some very compelling subtext about legacy. During one scene near the end, we get a shot of the apartment Maier last lived in, and the camera pans down the building to the front door of it, which has a window in which we can see the cameraman's reflection. This could easily be excused as a mishap on the cameraman's part, but what struck me about this is that Vivian used to point her camera at anything that reflected, in order to take a self-portrait. Now, this is the subtle brilliance of influence and legacy that this entire movie has to offer. This movie not only captures Maier's works, which captured the world around her the way she wanted to see it, but the movie itself also captures the world the way she wanted to see it. And that's the art of biographical storytelling. The movie itself has to tell the story the way that the person would want it to be told, and Finding Vivian Maier achieves it greatly.This documentary definitely perfects the genre. It opens the audience's eyes and leaves them looking at the world and the people around them a little differently. And most importantly, it does justice to its source material.

Vivian Maier, living incognito as a nanny, led a mysterious double life – unbeknownst to all, she was a prodigious street photographer, taking more than 100,000 pictures in her lifetime. She died without resources – and without recognition. Enter John Maloof, who years later, bought a box of her negatives at an auction, and discovered what he had – spending countless hours devoted to bringing her work to the public. Thanks to his efforts, Vivian Maier is now considered one of the major photographic portraitists of the last century. Fiction, you ask? Nope, an Oscar-nominated documentary. Finding Vivian Maier is part mystery, part documentary, part biography, and never boring.O'Toole likes the story behind the work. Hollister is all about the genius of the work itself. While this is one podcast where imagery might have made it better, the descriptions of the work by Hollister and the story behind the artist by O'Toole more than make up for the fact that you will have to rush to your computer and look up the work long before the podcast is over.Podcast available at - http://screenthoughts.net/podcast/finding- vivian-maier/

I was so looking forward to watching this documentary. I love biographies and fell in love with her photography after watching a PBS special about her a couple of years ago. Instead of trying to capture what little is known of her life and work, this movie turned into a posthumous roast. So she was eccentric, big deal, so are a lot of other artists. Did the movie have to focus on that? Does it have to diminish her work? And the accounts from the children Maier cared for. Many of them seemed to be a little off themselves. I feel this part of her story was sensationalized just to make for a better story because there is very little that is known about her. I agree with a previous poster that stated Maloof should have kept himself out and just offered a narrative. At times I felt he was trying to make it more about him than anything else. I must say I did enjoy when he traveled to France in search of her relatives. That was was interesting and relative to the story. I wished they would have spoken to more people like the gentlemen in the beginning who talked about the type of camera she used and his theory on why she probably liked working with it. Fascinating stuff that was overshadowed by talk of how kookoo she was. Still definitely worth watching, but I think the PBS special they aired a while back was much better and talked about what really matters, her photography.