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The hard-hitting documentary director has turned his unflinching eye on his photographer father Maurice Broomfield in My Father and Me, to fascinating effect
Some documentaries are so vivid, so heartfelt, that you almost feel you’re somehow involved yourself. And for a very interesting reason, this is how I felt watching My Father and Me, the new BBC Two film from the Bafta-winning director Nick Broomfield, whose past work includes Kurt & Courtney, Whitney: Can I Be Me and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, the piercingly intimate death-row study of Aileen Wuornos, which inspired the Hollywood feature Monster, starring Charlize Theron. Broomfield’s new film is, to paraphrase John Mortimer, a voyage round his father, the photographer Maurice Broomfield, who died 10 years ago at the age of 94.
Maurice Broomfield’s beautiful, dreamlike and utterly unique images captured British industry in its postwar heyday. His images have come to be treasured even more now that the factories he shot have largely vanished. Broomfield would take stunningly composed pictures of factory floors, industrial buildings, nuclear cooling towers and production lines, with their smartly alert human attendants picked out with painterly care and detail. He would often curate and even fabricate his images like a cinematographer or production designer on a movie set, with fierce key lighting, and often demanded the entire space was repainted and reorganised to his specifications to create the dramatic effect he wanted – to show the spiritual truth behind the literal truth, perhaps: the dignity of labour and the heroism of industry. Continue reading...