Jeff Nichols’ latest film, The Bikeridersdoes something strange: it is not based on a novel, a short story or a graphic novel – but is inspired by a photo reportage; pretending to be backstage for this report, follows Mike Faist in the role of Danny Lyona photography student armed with a tape recorder, who in the 1960s followed and documented the lives of members of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club – the oldest outlaw biker club in the world.
Although this is perhaps the first “fiction documentary” inspired by a catalogue of images, cinema in general has always been indebted to photography – and it is no coincidence that certain directors, such as Stanley Kubrickbegan their careers as photographers. Kubrick, for example, was a big fan of the photojournalist Weegeeborn Arthur Felling, who in the 30s and 40s documented the street life – including criminal life – of New York City: he wanted him on the set of Dr. Strangelove in 1964, both as a consultant and as a still photographer.
Weegee is said to have slept in his clothes so he could rush to the crime scene at the sound of the police siren: he was also the inspiration for director Dan Gilroy’s debut film, The Jackal – Nightcrawlerin which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a freelance crime reporter always ready to film accidents, fires, murders and other disasters.
And even a visionary like Steven Spielberg he consulted archive photographic material: for his war epic Saving Private Ryanthe director from Cincinnati took as a model the images of the Normandy landings of Robert Capa. Capa was an expert photojournalist of conflicts, capable of capturing images of soldiers from very close up, even during the so-called D-Day – June 6, 1944: and there is a phrase that influenced Spielberg during the shooting of that film: «if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough».
It is impossible not to mention Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni, who perhaps wrote a testament in this sense – or Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock: two films in which the means is as important as the end, but in which the photographers and their photographs are fictitious. Other times, real photographers have entered the screen together with their works: from imaginary portrait Of Diane Arbus to the documentary on Sebastian Salgado (directed by his son), here are ten films that tell the story of these authors and their careers.