Errol Morris’s new film, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, isn’t a great documentary, and that’s okay. It’s less about opening our eyes to new worlds and more about celebrating the considerable achievements of a single life. In many ways—both structurally and content-wise—the film resembles sitting down and listening to an interesting grandparent for an hour or so. It doesn’t aim for revolution; it’s a human-interest piece, stripped of even the most modest embellishment. Morris does well to simply let his subject speak, with a journalist’s nose for subtext and poignancy.
It doesn’t hurt that his subject is so damned endearing. Elsa Dorfman, a now-80-year-old photographer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the sort of character novelists wish they could dream up. Everything about her seems curated, vivid, almost unfairly wonderful. She’s a small-framed Good Jewish Girl from New England who considers her formidable photographic achievements fairly run-of-the-mill, but without a hint of false modesty. She manages to be both unflappable and wholly approachable. Her voice is ready-made for telling you about the Good Ol’ Days, and her bluntness and resilience inject the proceedings with humor.
Essentially, the film follows Dorfman as she looks through the archives in her Cambridge home and reminisces about what she sees. We get stories about Allen Ginsberg (a close personal friend), Joni Mitchell, “the folks at Polaroid,” the various bosses who dismissed her work as “too sunny.” Morris splices in stock footage and the occasional exterior shot to keep things from becoming too claustrophobic, but we mostly just get those stories and the prints that support them.
Which, by the way, are truly wonderful, to the point that it elicits major pause when we find out that Dorfman’s work was ridiculed for most of her early career. She rose to (and retained) prominence for her use of one of only six total 20×24-inch Polaroid cameras in the entire world, which she stored at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Many of her stories end with her exalting the format. The detail on the camera’s images is undeniably exquisite; at one point, Dorfman casually says that she’s “not at all interested in photographing people’s souls,” that she prefers to think of her subjects as a collection of surfaces.
There are a number of times over the course of the film where Dorfman tosses off a line like this, of throwaway brilliance, and it’s here that The B-Side is most compelling. Morris and Dorfman are old friends, and that level of warmth radiates throughout, coming through especially strong when Morris catches Dorfman arriving at some profound meditative thought as if by accident. It feels like he’s taking pride in her eloquence, nudging us and saying, “Isn’t she brilliant?” with the solemn smile of a blown-away peer.
Equally compelling are some of the graver moments, as when Dorfman recounts Ginsberg’s death and pulls out the last photo she ever took of him. She tells the story pragmatically and follows it up with a gentle reproach of people who complain too much, and especially the people who attempt to wallow in sadness with their work. Photography is for joy, she thinks, and the thought is doubly poignant: there’s a pitiable aspect of emotional repression, but then her genuine belief in the power of the image supersedes it.
When she’s not being sneakily brilliant or tugging at the heartstrings, though, Dorfman is pretty much just talking, and that’s what keeps The B-Side from becoming a classic. It is lovingly made, a clear passion project for all involved, but the whole enterprise feels designed to linger in the memory for as long as one of those pleasant conversations with Grandma: enough to recall it if you really want to, but not long enough to tell someone else about it. Its modesty is charming, certainly, but it keeps the film just a smidge light.
By the end, we’re glad we’ve taken the trip, perhaps spurred to read a bit more about Polaroid or Joni Mitchell, but we’re not changed. We’re left smiling, not necessarily knowing something we didn’t already know, but certainly learning a thing or two about someone who could use a little more of the spotlight.
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