Love, Cecil
Queer Cinema • 1h 39m
Lisa Immordino Vreeland • United States • 2017 • A stirring portrait of queer icon Cecil Beaton.
Cecil Beaton was an incandescent talent. Born to a well-to-do British family, Beaton charmed his way into the upper echelons of the elite, learning to photograph on his nanny’s camera before embarking to St. John’s College at Cambridge, where he immortalized his friends as The Bright Young Things. His insatiable aesthetic impulse brought him to New York, where he landed a job at Vogue. When a strange professional blunder rendered him a pariah, Beaton returned to Europe, commencing a second chapter of his career as a war photographer.
A stirring portrait of a queer icon, Love, Cecil combines archival footage and photographs with voice-over of Beaton’s diaries to evoke the spirit of a man whose searching, incisive gaze embodied many cultural and political changes of the twentieth century. Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s third documentary premiered at Telluride, Palm Springs, and the Hamptons International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award.
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