Jerry Schatzberg

Born in the Bronx, New York, he attend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi, worked as assis­tant to Bill Hel­burn (1954−1956), then start­ed his career as a free­lance pho­tog­ra­ph­er. His Fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy has been pub­lished in mag­a­zines such as Vogue, McCalls, Esquire, Glam­our, Town and Coun­try, and Life. After direct­ing some TV com­mer­cials, he made his debut as a film direc­tor in 1970 with Puz­zle of a Down­fall Child, the sto­ry of a fash­ion mod­el. Schatzberg scored with his sec­ond direc­to­r­i­al effort, the grip­ping, fine­ly act­ed The Pan­ic in Nee­dle Park (1971), a bleak study of hero­in addic­tion star­ring Al Paci­no. Paci­no costarred with Gene hack­man in his next film, Scare­crow (1973), a moody tale of two drifters which in many ways is an apoth­e­o­sis of 70’s alien­ation and con­fu­sion. Per­haps sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Schatzberg’s crit­i­cal fol­low­ing in the Unit­ed States rose and fell with the 70’s; after 1979’s Seduc­tion of Joe Tynan, the trend in Hol­ly­wood shift­ed from small intro­spec­tive films to the Spielberg/Lucas block­buster men­tal­i­ty. But Jer­ry Schatzberg nev­er lost his Euro­pean devo­tees, as wit­ness the inter­na­tion­al suc­cess of 1989’s Reunion. Schatzberg won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val with Scare­crow.

Jer­ry Schatzberg was one of the lead­ing pro­tag­o­nists in the Hol­ly­wood Renais­sance that struck crit­ics and film­go­ers alike at the begin­ning of the 70’s. He did not belong to any group, not the Ital­ian-Amer­i­cans (Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, De Pal­ma, Cimi­no) nor the won­der kids of tech­no­log­i­cal effi­cien­cy (Spiel­berg, Lucas). In fact, he is very much of a lon­er, com­pa­ra­ble in his fierce inde­pen­dence to a Ter­rence Mal­ick. This does not help to get wide recog­ni­tion, the media being more attract­ed by groups, schools, clubs with cozy tags attached to them. Schatzberg is also very much a New York­er and his home-base has always remained Man­hat­tan, far away from the cir­cle of Hol­ly­wood. Though very Amer­i­can in spir­it and cul­ture, he is much attract­ed to inter­na­tion­al cin­e­ma and it’s often more dar­ing styl­is­tic approach. Noth­ing shows this more than his first fea­ture Puz­zle of a Down­fall Child with its frac­tured nar­ra­tion, its com­plex sound­track and its mix­ture of present, flash­backs and fan­ta­sy shots. The film cen­ters on the world he knew best, fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy and the woman who at the time was clos­est to him, Faye Dun­away, who plays the lead. Based on a com­plex script by Adri­an Joyce (Car­ol East­man), it is the study of a top mod­el who has had her glo­ry days but is now pro­gres­sive­ly shunned. The sto­ry comes from a con­fes­sion made to him by his favorite mod­el Anne St. Marie. His detrac­tors thought that the choice of sub­ject lacked imag­i­na­tion but the film was the reflec­tion of his per­son­al com­mit­ment and the expres­sion of the true autho­r­i­al voice. His twen­ty years work­ing as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er is reflect­ed in the daz­zling visu­al flair of the movie, and the cin­e­mat­ic con­trol of frame, light and edit­ing is excep­tion­al for a begin­ner. Puz­zle of a Down­fall Child, with its por­tray­al of a cov­er Girl in the midst of a men­tal break­down also shows Schatzberg’s sen­si­tiv­i­ty to deeply wound­ed char­ac­ters. This is also evi­dent in his sec­ond film with the drug addicts in The Pan­ic in Nee­dle Park and the drifters in Scare­crow, his third. His sub­se­quent films demon­strat­ed a breadth of inter­est and a capac­i­ty to alter­nate very dif­fer­ent moods from the car thief in Sweet Revenge, the Politi­cian of The Seduc­tion of Joe Tynan to the coun­try singers of Hon­ey­suck­le Rose, and the hook­er and pimp of Street Smart.

Reunion, writ­ten by Harold Pin­ter from Fred Ulman’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Novel­la, is set in Stuttgart in 1932. It tells of the friend­ship of two six­teen-year-old boys: Hans, the son of a jew­ish doc­tor, and Kon­radin, a mem­ber of an old Ger­man aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly. Years lat­er, after the war, the old­er Hans (Jason Robards) on a trip back home remem­bers his youth and Kon­radin who betrayed his friend and chose to enter the Nazi par­ty while Hans took the road of exile. 

In many ways, the cin­e­mat­ic world of Schatzberg shows a strik­ing con­ti­nu­ity with his pho­tog­ra­phy which leads, as we have seen, to Puz­zle of a Down­fall Child but also his land­scapes, which are to be found in Scare­crow and Hon­ey­suck­le Rose, his street scenes which lead up to The Pan­ic in Nee­dle Park and Street Smart. 

It was his por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy that taught him how to deal with actors. He real­ized that most peo­ple feared the photographer’s lens. To relax them, he would spend as much time with them as pos­si­ble. Not only to know them bet­ter but to see beyond the sur­face and dis­cov­er their true self, the one they hid from the out­side world. Most of his great por­traits of the six­ties — Bob Dylan, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, Andy Warhol, Arlow Guthrie, Roman Polan­s­ki, Fidel Cas­tro, Miloš For­man, Jimi Hen­drix, Frank Zap­pa, The Rolling Stones and many more, reveal these moments of truth.

By not giv­ing spe­cif­ic direc­tions to his pho­to­graph­ic mod­els, Schatzberg gave them rein to find the moment. It is the same way he gets actors to reach inside. In many ways, his pho­to­graph­ic style is much clos­er to that of André Kertész or Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son, then to the con­tem­po­rary Irv­ing Penn or Richard Ave­don. Instead of the self-con­tained space of the frame, he looks for the space beyond. His pho­tographs are nar­ra­tive; they tell a sto­ry. In an instant, they rec­og­nize an action, a ges­ture, an emo­tion while at the same time they have a rig­or­ous for­mal pat­tern that express­es their mean­ing. The style how­ev­er, nev­er man­i­fests itself osten­ta­tious­ly and nev­er encroach­es the flu­id­i­ty of life.

All these qual­i­ties may be found in Schatzberg’s films. His focus has always remained on human rela­tion­ships which made it more dif­fi­cult for him to work in an indus­try devot­ed in the late sev­en­ties, the eight­ies and the nineties to spe­cial effects, car chas­es and ado­les­cent come­dies. His acute sense of peo­ple and places lend authen­tic­i­ty to the back­ground in his films, as his actors work to cre­ate char­ac­ters you think you know. Alan Alda has nev­er been as good as in The Seduc­tion of Joe Tynan, near-begin­ners like Stockard Chan­ning in Sweet Revenge and Kit­ty Winn in The Pan­ic in Nee­dle Park did not find roles again of the same dimen­sion. Faye Dun­away, Al Paci­no, Meryl Streep and Mor­gan Free­man have been at the top of their form in his films. Asked about his favorite per­for­mance, Gene Hack­man answered in Film Com­ment: “Scare­crow, it’s the only film I’ve ever made in absolute con­ti­nu­ity and I was allowed to take all kinds of chances and real­ly build my character”.

In more than fifty years of pho­tog­ra­phy and cin­e­ma, Schatzberg has achieved a del­i­cate bal­ance between refined form of mise-en-scene and the ren­der­ing of true moments. He has a par­tic­u­lar gift to restrain the emo­tions only to make their release more pow­er­ful and to avoid the obvi­ous by sug­gest­ing rather than by under­lin­ing. He makes us feel, some­thing that is too often miss­ing in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cin­e­ma: an adult and mature artist, deal­ing with adult and mature themes and characters.

Michel Ciment