Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe
Closed CaptioningJames Crump
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Plot Summary
Yale-educated and born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Sam Wagstaff's transformation from innovative museum curator to Robert Mapplethorpe's lover and patron is intensively probed in Black White + Gray. During the heady years of the 1970s and 1980s, the New York City art scene was abuzz with a new spirit, and Mapplethorpe would be at the center of it. Wagstaff pulled him from his suburban Queens existence, gave him a camera and brought him into this art world that seemed to be waiting for him, creating the man whose infamous images instilled emotions ranging from awe to anger. In turn, Mapplethorpe brought the formerly starched-shirt preppie to the world of drugs and gay S-and-M sex, well-documented in his still-startling photographs. Twenty five years separated the lovers, but their relationship was symbiotic to its core, and the two remained together forever. The film also explores the relationship both men had with musician/poet Patti Smith, whose 1975 debut album "Horses" catapulted her to fame.
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Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
84%- Reviews Counted: 19
- Fresh: 16
- Rotten: 3
- Average Rating: 6.5/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: A potent exercise in art-world mythography.
Rotten: Black White & Gray raises provocative questions but can't answer them, or even frame them with total clarity.
Fresh: A modest chronicle of an audacious life.
Fresh: The movie makes its main point. Wagstaff was an important, complex, fascinating figure, well worth remembering.
Customer Reviews
Frustrating doc
An inelegant documentary about sophisticated, complex Sam Wagstaff. Ostensibly about both Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe and their relationship, the doc gives short shrift to Mapplethorpe, reinforcing stale observations of the photog as "manipulative" and even courting libel by accusing him of infecting Wagstaff with HIV, a preposterous notion when one considers how both men were promiscuous.
Featuring a melodramatic and rather ridiculous voice-over narration by Joan Juliet Buck, the exploration of Wagstaff's life, career and passions is marred by uninsightful asides, distracting musical score, and non-sequiter editing. Only when the film focuses on Wagstaff's awe-inspiring and enormous photo collection does it delve deeper and achieves a "portrait"-like clarity of the man.
Best follow-up to Patti Smith
If you have read Patti Smith's New York Times Best Seller, this is pertinent viewing. Connecting the dots has never been so eye-opening and revealing. The New York that created Mapplethorpe parallel Montparnasse and Picasso just decades apart. While that New York may be forever altered in the new streets and avenues of today, this film brings it back to life. Wagstaff will be a name you can not forget after seeing his journey through discovering the art of the photograph.
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