The B‑Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Por­trait Photography

In his lat­est char­ac­ter sketch, The B‑Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Por­trait Pho­tog­ra­phy, ground­break­ing doc­u­men­tar­i­an Errol Mor­ris has trained his sophis­ti­cat­ed cin­e­mat­ic eye on Elsa Dorf­man, the well-known if not exceed­ing­ly famous Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er who came to fame for her giant Polaroid por­traits of peo­ple both not­ed and normal.

At an incred­i­bly fleet 76 min­utes, The B‑Side is an unmis­tak­ably minor work from a film­mak­er who rejig­gered the entire non­fic­tion­al medi­um near­ly 30 years ago with his true-crime land­mark The Thin Blue Line, which remains an emo­tion­al, rev­e­la­to­ry mas­ter­piece even amid a del­uge of real-life pro­ce­du­rals that like­ly wouldn’t exist with­out Mor­ris’ daz­zling­ly thor­ough template.

Con­verse­ly, The B‑Side doesn’t deal in any big emo­tions, rev­e­la­tions, or set pieces. There’s noth­ing decep­tive­ly grand about the sim­ple straight­for­ward­ness of Mor­ris’ struc­tur­al con­ceit, which places Dorf­man front and cen­tre, cap­tur­ing her as she rum­mages through her seem­ing­ly end­less archives, dig­ging up pho­tos and rem­i­nisc­ing accord­ing­ly. In fact, the only thing big about the film is Dorfman’s blown-up, 20-by-24 inch pho­tog­ra­phy, tak­en with a mas­sive Polaroid cam­era that makes for a tru­ly impos­ing set-up, at one point described, quite accu­rate­ly, as ​“a room with a lens”.

The ini­tial incli­na­tion might be to dis­miss The B‑Side as a tra­di­tion­al, throw­away effort from a doc­u­men­tary leg­end who has sim­ply put his feet up and direct­ed the thing on mus­cle mem­o­ry alone. But to do that would be to ignore the lumi­nous, feel-good charm that radi­ates from every angle of Mor­ris’ film, which is a feat that can only be attained by a film­mak­er whose expert crafts­man­ship nev­er comes at the expense of imbu­ing his sto­ries with a dis­tinc­tive mood and per­son­al­i­ty. The B‑Side is indeed a minor work, if only in mat­ters of size and scope, but there’s noth­ing minor about the insights that sur­face from this ten­der and touch­ing ode to the humane pow­er of per­son­al art.

It helps, of course, that Dorf­man her­self is such a cap­ti­vat­ing sub­ject and a most dis­arm­ing sto­ry­teller, with her chow­der-thick Boston accent casu­al­ly slip­ping the ​“r”s out of words so that a name like ​“Har­vey” (her hus­band, seen most­ly in home movies inter­spersed through­out the film) becomes, adorably, ​“Ha-vee.” Describ­ing her­self ear­ly on as ​“one lucky lit­tle Jew­ish girl who escaped by the skin of her teeth,” the now 80-year-old Dorf­man was a late bloomer who stud­ied teach­ing at Tufts, flocked to New York, toiled away as a sec­re­tary, and didn’t pick up a cam­era until she moved back home to Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts at the age of 28.

She began with direct, black-and-white self-por­traits that were emo­tion­al­ly and phys­i­cal­ly reveal­ing before ulti­mate­ly turn­ing her lens on oth­er sub­jects, rang­ing from music icons like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell to lead­ing coun­ter­cul­ture fig­ures like Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, and Allen Gins­berg, the lat­ter of whom befriend­ed Dorf­man in the ​’60s and remained a close com­pan­ion until his death in 1997.

In one art­ful­ly-com­posed pas­sage, Dorf­man describes the expe­ri­ences of shoot­ing Gins­berg and lat­er bid­ding him farewell, a love­ly but nev­er maudlin tes­ta­ment to the ways in which pho­tos can trig­ger cer­tain emo­tions and lived moments. This isn’t a new insight by any means, but rarely has it been applied so mov­ing­ly to the per­son behind the cam­era, allow­ing this bio­graph­i­cal doc­u­men­tary to unfold with the beau­ti­ful, thought­ful unpre­dictabil­i­ty of a mem­o­ry piece.

Dorfman’s real artis­tic tri­umphs are arguably those large-for­mat Polaroid por­traits of reg­u­lar peo­ple, who are cap­tured raw and unguard­ed, attempt­ing to be no one oth­er than their every­day selves. Dorf­man takes the most pal­pa­bly infec­tious plea­sure in these works, mak­ing it easy to savor her endear­ing, detail-filled rec­ol­lec­tions of the quirks and par­tic­u­lars of the thou­sands of faces that have stopped, how­ev­er briefly, to pose in front of her cam­era. And that brevi­ty, for Dorf­man, is the key. ​“I’m not inter­est­ed in cap­tur­ing their souls,” Dorf­man says at one point, shrug­ging off the pre­cious­ness that usu­al­ly accom­pa­nies fawn­ing, fea­ture-length impres­sions of artists.

What sets The B‑Side apart from oth­er pro­files of this ilk is Mor­ris’ will­ing­ness to let Dorfman’s char­ac­ter infect the char­ac­ter of the film. We’re not just watch­ing a misty remem­brance about the mak­ing of an artist but a film defined by an artist’s cen­tral tenets, for­ev­er evi­dent in the relaxed, loose­ly-com­posed snap­shots that make up the bulk of her out­put. ​“It doesn’t mat­ter how much you try to nail the down the now,” Dorf­man opines at one point. The now is real­ly beyond you.” In one archived inter­view from the 1970s, Dorf­man denies that the cam­era tells the truth with the same firm prin­ci­pal­i­ty that she will lat­er exhib­it in the present-day when she rebukes – and even dri­ly mocks – the idea of impos­ing a nar­ra­tive struc­ture on her career.

A struc­ture nonethe­less man­i­fests in The B‑Side, if only because of the bit­ter­sweet occa­sion on which the project was made: Dorfman’s retire­ment, which itself has coin­cid­ed with the steady death of the Polaroid that was set into motion by the company’s 2001 bank­rupt­cy. The B‑Side, then, is much more than a cin­e­mat­ic valen­tine gift­ed from one friend to anoth­er but a col­lab­o­ra­tive, mul­ti­me­dia swan song, a mod­est embrace between images both still and mov­ing. In achiev­ing this, Mor­ris has adopt­ed Dorfman’s own trade­mark affec­tion, suf­fus­ing his film with the same deci­sive opti­mism that has defined her life and work, which are ren­dered here as exquis­ite­ly and stir­ring­ly synonymous.