Candid Camera

A Maier self-portrait from 1957, one of many photographs discovered in Chicago.Photograph by Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection / Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Tall, awkward, and heavily shod, Vivian Maier was a nanny. Born in 1926, she never married, and had no children. Much of her working life was spent in Chicago. Toward the end, alone and truculent, she lived in Rogers Park, on the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan. A neighbor recalls her eating cold corned beef hash out of a can. Maier had cared for many children, some of whom remembered her with fear, others—the majority—with gratitude and wonder. Once known, she was not easy to forget, but to the wider world she remained invisible. She died in 2009, and left no heirs.

She did, however, leave a legacy. A trove of her belongings—she hoarded almost every document, receipt, and tchotchke that came her way—was moved to a storage facility. Other boxes of stuff wound up at auction, even before her death, and it is here that “Finding Vivian Maier,” a documentary by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, picks up the thread. In 2007, Maloof bid, more or less at random, for a box of negatives, which he looked at, neglected for a while, returned to, scanned, and put on Flickr. He knew the photographer’s name, but that was all; a Google search had drawn a blank. Then, in 2009, he found her obituary in the Chicago Tribune, and learned that she had died a few days before. From there, his quest began, to spectacular effect. Google “Vivian Maier” today, and you will get more than a million results. For many people, the discovery of her work has been one of the great unearthings of the age, although what she would have made of the excavation is open to debate. She might have been appalled by the fuss, or quietly gratified, or both. Or she might just have told us to stop chattering, brush our teeth, and go straight to bed.

So, what does her work consist of? Well, Maloof ended up with a hundred thousand negatives; thousands of rolls of undeveloped film, in color and black-and-white; and a hundred and fifty 8-mm. and 16-mm. films. Maier also liked to interview local people about current affairs, and to record them on audiocassettes. We hear some poor guy being quizzed in a supermarket on the question of Richard Nixon. At this point, the image of Maier crosses the border into eccentricity and compulsion, and into the unfunny sadness that patrols those zones. One employer went up to her room (which was normally kept locked), and found shoulder-high piles of old newspapers. There was just enough space to squeeze between them, as if you were walking through the trees of a printed forest. Such obsessive conduct is no guarantee of artistry, still less of quality control. For every Joseph Cornell, confined to Flushing by shyness and by the need to care for a disabled brother, and constructing his boxes in that lonely redoubt, there are countless souls whose energy is frittered away, not brought to order or fruition, by the rage to amass.

Cornell built a reputation, along with the boxes; they were exhibited in galleries, and dealers represented him. Maier, though, made no effort to display her wares. It was the taking of pictures, not the showing of them, that consumed her. Had she been a zoologist, she would have captured wild animals, brought them home, installed them in cages, and never opened a zoo. In short, she meets the criteria of a genuine unknown—the creator in our midst whom we pass by, and whose story we then devour, as if to atone for missed opportunities and lost time. The closest recent equivalent is Irène Némirovsky, who died in Auschwitz, in 1942, and whose novel “Suite Française” was not published until 2004, by which time her name had faded away. But here’s the rub: the Némirovsky biography was so stark, and the emergence of her book so exciting, that she was hauled up to a pinnacle—as a kind of emergency classic—where she did not really belong.

Will that turn out to be the case with Maier, too? Have we been carried away? In the film, Mary Ellen Mark compares her to Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, and Diane Arbus, and the praise sounds comically high, yet the comparisons are well-grounded. I would even add a touch of Weegee. (Whether Maier ever saw the work of her peers is not something, sadly, into which the movie delves.) Maier’s eye was extraordinarily true—at once cool and sympathetic, with an instinctive sense of her subjects’ place within the frame, and of the dignity that such a place bestowed. The frame was square, because, for many years, she used a Rolleiflex, a beautiful twin-lens device that you focus at waist level, leaving your gaze free to meet that of others. She would tramp the streets with a camera around her neck, dragging her charges in tow. There were trips to slums and stockyards; a mother once reprimanded her for exposing the children to the wrong part of town, but, as far as Maier was concerned, there was no right part. There was just town, and the lives that it held and broke. Her finest shots were casual, unposed portraits of the wretched, the distracted, and the confused. In the memory of one woman whom she helped to raise, Maier was cruel and overbearing; but look at the images that she took of crying children, and ask yourself who, outside the realm of war photography, had such a clear, Dickensian grasp of young distress.

“Finding Vivian Maier” pays a faithful tribute. Maloof is a brisk and modest guide, though, in terms of self-effacement, no match for his heroine. (She took many self-portraits, but in half of them she appears as no more than a shadow.) As for her background, his sleuthing turns up a pile of surprising facts, which I will not disclose. But there are also lots of gaps. We are told, in passing, of children who grew up in Maier’s care and then, when she was elderly, paid for her accommodation; perhaps she was not quite the friendless loner that the film suggests. Moreover, when she was a child, she and her mother lived with a woman named Jeanne Bertrand, a portrait photographer of note, who may have inspired Vivian or taught her the rudiments of the trade. Yet Bertrand is not mentioned in the film. It is as though the refrain of Maier’s solitude must be strengthened at every point, rather than softened or undercut. Even as this fine documentary unveils the “mystery woman,” as she once described herself, it remains intent on the molding of her myth.

Most telling of all is the social attitude that the movie enshrines, and that you hear in the testimony of those who knew Maier in their youth. On the whole, they feel warmly disposed toward her, and all of them are pensive and polite, but none can quite believe that art, of a serious nature, was going on under their noses, and that the hired help, of all people, was responsible. They might almost be talking of a crime. The implication—and this was mid-twentieth-century America, not nineteenth-century Britain—is that Vivian Maier knew her mind, but somehow not her place. Near the start of the film, Maloof himself asks, “Why is a nanny”—he pauses for a brief laugh—“taking all these photos?” To which the only possible reply should be: Why not?

The title of the new Bertrand Tavernier film, “The French Minister,” does not deceive. Most of it is set in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Paris: a noble institution, where all manner of ignoble activity unfolds. Arthur Vlaminck (Raphaël Personnaz), a tyro with unpolished shoes, becomes a speechwriter to the Foreign Minister—the majestic Alexandre Taillard de Vorms (Thierry Lhermitte), who hails him with the words, “Comment ça va, Camarade?” Anybody who treasures the Gallic weakness for abstract nouns will find much to feast on in the Minister’s harangues, with their distant flavor of revolution: “Legitimacy! Unity! Efficiency!” he cries. Lhermitte, with his sapphire eyes, used to be a whippy young fellow, but he has swelled into middle age, and he falls on this succulent, puffed-up role as if it were a chocolate éclair.

The plot revolves around Arthur’s attempt to write a speech that will be delivered by his boss at the United Nations. This simple task is enriched by the Minister’s whim for recruiting friends and supporters—a poet, a philosopher, even his own father—to add their improvements. The movie feels uneasy whenever it leaves the office for high-level trips to Africa and New York; Tavernier is at his happiest and most nimble in the jungle of the ministry, where the doomy, door-slamming approach of Vorms is made to sound like the T. rex in “Jurassic Park,” and where every back is asking to be stabbed. Wickedest of all is the casting of the in-house temptress, who praises Arthur’s work to his face and then destroys it in front of other people. (A colleague excuses her fickleness as “an amorous gesture.”) Her governing principles are clear: Treachery! Disunity! Lingerie! She is played by Julie Gayet, who was in the news recently as the woman to whom the real French President, François Hollande, was paying regular visits on his little scooter. And her character is called Valérie, which is the name of the partner whom Hollande was allegedly spurning for Mme. Gayet. This is not life imitating art. This is art going to bed with life and staying there for the rest of the afternoon. ♦