The Legend of Leigh Bowery
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Movie Reviews of The Legend of Leigh Bowery
Movie Review: The Best DVD I've Seen This Year
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this on a whim, really. I had very little knowledge of Leigh Bowery, only tidbits I picked up from other artists who were inspired by him. Watching this movie is at turns absolutely hilarious, diabolical, grotesquely fascinating, uplifting, and sad, but ultimately hugely entertaining. No need for me to go into details about the man here, it's the documentary that's in question. It is very well done. Lots of video and film from the era, new interviews with his associates, and the bonus features are incredible, almost an entire movie's worth alone. For anyone with a passing interest in fashion, performance art, or the club scene of the Eighties and early Ninties, this is required viewing. Leigh Bowery lived his life as Art. This documentary is an informative and entertaining testament to that. Recommended very highly. Movie Review: Engrossing film about a controversial artist
Summary: 4 Stars
Before watching this film, I had never heard of Leigh Bowery. Afterwards, I realized that I recognized Leigh Bowery's and Michael Clark's collaborative influence in a number of avant garde rock music videos coming out of the 1980's.
Growing up in a small town in Southern Australia, Bowery soon left his loving but ultraconservative religious family for the siren's call of London, where the gender bending '80's provided the perfect venue for Bowery's particular talents. Bowery's interests were in fashion, but not straightforward fashion - rather, fashion as a subversive art form. Frequently grotesque and always provocative, Leigh's costumes hid and distorted human proportions and features. His costumes are very hard to describe and really must be seen to be fully appreciated. Some look like animated doodle art, others like more extreme versions of the outfits Mexican wrestlers wear. Still others completely defy conventional description. Leigh frequently used his own body as a canvas to display his incredibly detailed costumes. Almost all have a strange alien beauty to them.
The documentary is a pastiche of still photographs, film and video footage of Bowery's performance art pieces, television interviews where Bowery was a guest and contemporary interviews with Boy George, Bella Freud, Sophie Fiennes, Michael Clark, and a variety of artist/performers, gallery owners, designers and family members.
It is harder to draw a bead on the man behind the masks. Leigh seems to have almost always been in performance mode. Even those closest to him seem unable to give a clear picture of who he was, and Leigh appears to have had very little interest in being understood. Rather, his whole raison d'etre seems to have been about getting in people's faces and pushing the social envelope. From the little I could glean of Bowery as a person, he seems to have been a mass of contradictions: A loving son and a world-class debaucher, a generous friend and a complete narcissist, a tireless party-enthusiast whose brief light was extinguished far too soon. Bowery appears his most human and humane in a series of nude oil paintings by Lucian Freud where he served as the artist's model. These paintings are quite extraordinary and revealing.
Whether or not you see Bowery's fashions as guerilla art or theatrical nonsense really comes down to personal taste. Be forewarned, most of Bowery's extreme performance art is truly shocking and offensive. I had to fast forward through any number of scenes that made my hair stand on end.
I found some of the most touching and accessible scenes in the film to be the interviews with Bowery's father and sister, who loved Leigh without judgment, and who never make excuses or apologies for him. I think this is the way families should function but seldom do.
Love him or hate him, Leigh Bowery was unique and original. When he expired from AIDS in 1994, he left a rich visual legacy which this film beautifully catalogs.
Movie Review: Riveting
Summary: 5 Stars
I knew only a little about Leigh Bowery going in, having seen some of Lucien Freud's large scale paintings of him, and also seeing WIGSTOCK the drag queen documentary in which Leigh Bowery makes an astonishing appearance, giving "birth" to Nicola, his assistant, through an amazing theatrical stunt. I couldn't believe my eyes in either case.
The film is terrifically exciting both as information and as entertainment. Atlas has an artist's eye and, or so it seems, a tremendously sympathetic, yet dispassionate, insight into the personality of the mysterious and enigmatic Leigh Bowery. Bowery emerged rapidly from what must have seemed in comparison the very outback of ustralia to the trendy, gender-bending nightclubs of 80s London, one of which he started himself--the infmaous TABOO. He wore a variety of wigs and costumes, but that's understating it, because the costumes took on a life on their own and indeed no other human could have worn them. Interviewees claim that, even though some of the costumes were painful in the extreme to wear for more than a few minutes, Bowery carried on for hours in them, having the time of his life.
One nice thing is that Atlas has footage from every period of Bowery's artistic life, from his challenging one-man show at Anthony D'Offay gallery, in which viewers could watch him through a one way mirror, preen and primp himself all day on a chaise longue to die for, all the way to his last performances with the rock group MINTY. His death from AIDS is treated very sparsely and, I thought, most movingly. One minute he was here, the next he was gone, poof! Like a dandelion. The speakers are all extremely cogent and it seems as though they wanted to put their best foot forward for their late chum, for all of them look fantastic, from Damien Hirst to Boy George. The painter Cerith Wyn Evans steals the show however--he is totally photogenic and, though no longer young, is the sexiest man in the movies right now. Sorry to add a lascivious note to this somber review, but I just have to. He's as riveting as the documentary he appears in.
Movie Review: ahead of his time
Summary: 3 Stars
Leigh Bowery was ahead of his time. All these new "shock" artists cannot live up to Leigh. The movie let me know more about him and his art.Movie Review: study of a freak
Summary: 3 Stars
Leigh Bowery was a genre-crossing conceptual entertainer who clearly has influenced club kids, Marilyn Manson, and many others.In one of the first scenes of the documentary, they show Leigh falling down as he walks onto a television talk show program. It's purposeful, but it signifies that he thought outside of the box and worked against the grain.
He designed clothes, but didn't want people to buy them. Though a gender bender, he couldn't be minimized as "just" a drag queen. He was also involved in (post?)modern dance, club ownership, music video, and much more. His outfits are so asymmetrical, blinding, and large that they are better described as costumes. He was the epitome of contradiction and boundary erasure.
I think in America we associate men desperate to push society's buttons with heterosexual radio shock jocks. Here, we have a gay man playing that same role in 1980s Britain. Those interviewed for this documentary are just as freaky as Leigh was. His biographer's cleavage is hanging all over the place. One woman looks JUST like Annie Lennox, but isn't. When Boy George is one of the normal people being interviewed, you know this work has some freeeeakkkss in it!
This film is not for the weak at heart. It was hard for me to eat my dinner and watch it as much bad fashion and obscenity as there is here. Not only are some thing gross, there are also things here that can be viewed as racist and anti-Semitic. Leigh was operating in a time before and a country outside of political correctness. The film includes some clips of interviews from him and he can barely be heard. I'm surprised that his voice was so butch when his actions were just the opposite. The documentary is meant to be abstract, when the makers want to edit an interviewee's comments, they just fast-forward over it. No, your VCR or DVD is not malfunctioning.
My big disappointment is that there is very little focus on AIDS here. Learning about the way artists create work but survive this disease is important for individuals of all statuses to hear, thus I feel like an opportunity was lost. Granted, Leigh himself was secretive about his positivity. However, I wish the filmmakers had delved deeper here.