FILM ON PAPER

Most picture books about the movies remind me of nothing so much as big, dopey, epic movies. They are full of pretty people doing silly things. They are overlong, overproduced and under-thought. They are all imagery -- mostly of half-forgotten stars hanging around on locations, proving that fame is no defense against boredom, or caught like deer in the headlights by an old-fashioned paparazzo’s flashbulb -- unattended by even the most primitive ideas. They are, in their way, the perfect symbols of a popular culture that devotes too much of its time and treasure to wretched excess and idle nostalgia, all the while avoiding anything that resembles critical thought about itself.

Except, of course, for the exceptions, about which we may risk this generalization: the best illustrated books about film -- or perhaps any other subject -- either devote themselves to wide-ranging study of a single figure or topic or they represent the collected work of a singular and passionate photographic artist. In either case, something obsessive energizes the work and rescues it from the more typical life of the picture book: two hours in the lap on Christmas afternoon, two lonely decades on the lower shelves of the guest bedroom.

This year there are three excellent examples -- and alas, only three -- of what I’m talking about, of which my favorite is Christiane Kubrick’s wonderful picture book about her late husband, Stanley. It achieves a nice balance between his family life and his professional life, but, of course, everything revolves around Kubrick himself. The book’s first photo of the director-to-be shows him, about age 5, on a family outing in the country. He’s a cute little tyke wearing shorts, shirt, white shoes and socks and -- odd note here -- a necktie. But those are not the first elements you read in this simple, fatherly composition. What transfixes you are his eyes: round and large and focused on something up and to the left, out of frame. They will be the dominant element in virtually every picture of Kubrick this book reproduces.

They are, very occasionally, reposeful but, even then, fully alert. Mostly they seem to be thirstily drinking things in -- the scene he’s shaping, the actor or technician (or child) he’s talking to, certainly -- but something more, as well, something he could not quite anticipate or describe, but which, should it occur, he would recognize.

Kubrick was, of course, a nut about lenses -- those artificial eyes that could, when properly deployed, reveal things beyond human vision. You get the feeling as you page through this book that his bug-eyed stare was an attempt to turn himself into an optical system that could peer into a soul or, alternatively, the universe, and search out its secrets. I don’t suppose he very often managed to do that. For he also knew that most of the souls he encountered were bent and that the cosmos was ruled by chance. But, yes, he was a camera, and the images he recorded -- so beautiful, so disturbing -- haunt us as no other director’s do. And this picture book satisfies my curiosity about him as, I suspect, no biography ever will.

“Charlie Chaplin: A Photo Diary” is like the Kubrick book in that it stresses only one element of a complex man’s character; in Chaplin’s case, it is his loneliness. I don’t mean to imply that he is seen alone in these beautifully reproduced photos. Sometimes he is surrounded by vast crowds. Sometimes he is caught in smaller groups -- typically the casts and crews of his films. Sometimes he simply greets a lone celebrity visiting his studio. But often these are gag photos, staged merriment, revealing nothing to us but his eagerness to satisfy his innocent audience’s belief that funny men must lead funny lives.

Chaplin gives himself fully to this conceit. He seems, in fact, happy to hide himself within it. And why not? He was, for a very long time, the most famous man in the world. Better for him to provide an easily assimilated image than complicated explanations. But yet there is something tense in these poses -- something very different from the heedless, dancing grace he achieved on the screen with his Little Tramp character. Only when he is with his third wife -- bright, pretty, sexy Paulette Goddard -- does he seem fully relaxed, fully human, and there are more pictures of Chaplin with her than with anyone else -- even his last wife, the beloved Oona, with whom he passed many more years. Interestingly, even in his late years, when most of the pictures of Chaplin were taken by friends and family, he was still imagining, and striking, funny poses -- there’s a great snap of him playing Napoleon -- still hiding in plain sight.

We are left with this irony: Kubrick, widely, erroneously thought to be reclusive, opened a significant aspect of himself to the camera; Chaplin, a much more public man, revealed little of himself to it. Which does not make this book, drawn from his family’s archives, any less fascinating to ponder. This was an artist who, perhaps uniquely among the great figures of the 20th century, used himself as a canvas, coolly creating what was surely a misleading self-portrait yet one that for a long time fully satisfied the world’s curiosity. You can spend hours peering at this handsome record of his duplicity and never fully solve the mystery of Charles Spencer Chaplin.

To a lesser degree, all actors try their hand at Chaplin’s game. And it is the usual business of their portraitists to penetrate their fictions, to give us the “real” man or woman behind the image. That, however, is not Brigitte Lacombe’s business. This first collection of the French photographer’s work is much more interesting and, in a certain sense, enigmatic. No captions accompany her pictures; her subjects are identified only at the back of her book. No problem, you say. These actors, directors and writers are, after all, very famous people. But you would be wrong. Only the very strongest faces are instantly recognizable in these pages. The rest you have to study for a while before you can put a name to them. And sometimes, frankly, you scramble for the cheat sheets.

Occasionally this is because they have adopted a disguising hairstyle for a role. Once or twice sunglasses come into play. But mostly Lacombe plays to their desire for anonymity. They are caught with their eyes closed or their hands to their faces or with their faces slightly averted. Even when they stare straight at her camera, their very intensity sometimes transforms them into only vaguely recognizable individuals. The effect is, finally, quite wondrous, for at her best Lacombe restores to these celebrities their common humanity. We would be drawn to them even if they were not famous.

These pictures are, of course, influenced by the Stanislavskian system of self-presentation -- with its sober insistence on psychological reality, on not being openly glamorous, on submerging the actor’s personality in his or her role. But many of them go further. What a lot of these portraits do, I think, is take their subjects back beyond the myths and misunderstandings that accumulate around performers when they start appearing in public and we start adoring them. They return their subjects to their essences, even to a kind of innocence.

What we’re talking here is a form of postmodernism, in that it banishes “image” and embraces the ambiguities, the mysteries, that are anonymity’s largest reward -- not to mention the hostility that is often hinted at in celebrity portraiture. The intimacy Lancombe achieves does not feel intrusive; it feels more like a friendly, passing moment. One thinks Charlie Chaplin might have enjoyed posing for her, allowing his guard to drop, his genius for misdirection to take a brief timeout.