Robert Mapplethorpe
Actor · 1946 – 1989 · Queens, New York, USA
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images.
Movies8
Movie6.9DocumentaryNude men in rubber suits, close-ups of erections, objects shoved in the most intimate of places—these are photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, known by many as the most controversial photographer of the twentieth century. Openly gay, Mapplethorpe took images of male sex, nudity, and fetish to extremes that resulted in his work still being labelled by some as pornography masquerading as art. But less talked about are the more serene, yet striking portraits of flowers, sculptures, and perfectly framed human forms that are equally pioneering and powerful.
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures
2016 · 43 votes
Movie3.7DocumentaryFrom this "inexorable disease", Hervé Guibert did not recover. The miracle he had so much hoped for did not happen. But, before his death in 1991, three years after learning of his HIV-positive status, he engraved in his literary and photographic work "the places of [his] suffering", "the stations of [his] way of the cross". With his thin body and sunken cheeks, the handsome man with curly hair that he was, the one whose clear gaze radiated from the seaside photos, fought a fierce battle against AIDS. A fight of every moment against the decay of the body, observed and commented with a methodical care in his autobiographical novels, in particular "To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life" (1990) and "The Compassionate Protocol" (1991), and of which he testified on television on the set of "Apostrophes"...
Hervé Guibert, la mort propagande
2021 · 3 votes
Movie6.1DramaTV MovieA Cincinnati museum director goes on trial in 1990 for exhibiting sadomasochistic photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Dirty Pictures
2000 · 14 votes
Movie5.0DocumentaryCrump directed the feature-length documentary film Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff + Robert Mapplethorpe, which premiered in North America at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and in Europe at Art Basel. It explores the influence curator Sam Wagstaff, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and musician/poet Patti Smith had on the 1970s art scene in New York City.
- Movie6.0Drama
Harry Smith’s final film; an epic four-screen projection. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929) for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. The film was shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years. The “program” of the film is meticulous, with a complex structure and order. The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into categories— portraits, animation, symbols and nature— to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P. The film contains invaluable cameos of important avant-garde figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Jonas Mekas, intercut with installation pieces from Robert Mapplethorpe’s studio, New York City landmarks of the era, and Smith’s visionary animation.
No. 18: Mahagonny
1980 · 3 votes
- Movie3.0Documentary
Robert Mapplethorpe gets his nipple pierced while his boyfriend lends his support in person. Patti Smith lends her support via voice over as she rambles on about her childhood, her transvestite brother, her breasts and Bob Dylan?
Robert Having His Nipple Pierced
1971 · 4 votes
Movie7.0DocumentaryShort film by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. A portrait of Patti Smith.
Still Moving/Patti Smith
1978 · 1 votes
MovieA look at at the life and work of Robert Mapplethorpe, a world renowned and controversial photographer, who died of AIDS in 1989. It explores his photography, his relationship to the downtown New York art world, and the gay S&M club scene prevalent in the eighties. His infamously explicit pictures of the gay, leather, New York Underground were considered groundbreaking and made him a cause celebre. Mapplethorpe’s portraits, flowers, erotic subject matter and artistic presentation, elevated the photograph to serious art, worthy of exhibition in galleries and museums.