The Legend of Leigh Bowery
by Charles Atlas
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DVD details
Actor: Leigh BoweryDirector: Charles Atlas
Brand: Trinity Home Entertainment
Editor: Jens Tang
Producer: Lucy Sexton
Producer: Sylvie Blum
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 60 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-19
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Palm Pictures / Umvd
Product features:
- The Legend of Leigh Bowery is an exploration of Bowery's outrageous life-a life he lived as a performance. Bowery was a costume-clothing designer, nightclub impresario (TABOO on Broadway, produced by Rosie O'Donnell), performer of today's important artists. He became known to the world as the muse and subject of preeminent painter Lucien Freud. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: MISCEL
DVD Reviews of The Legend of Leigh Bowery
DVD 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.
Description of The Legend of Leigh Bowery
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