’80

Charming short debut about a girl photog in Manhattan in 1980 and the scenes she covers.

In the late summer and fall of 1980, Mary Louise (ML) Weeks, 28, writes a diary, largely about her work and lack of work. The diary ends a week before New Year’s Eve—and soon thereafter ML disappears, to this day unfound. Twenty years after her disappearance, her estranged husband finds the diary in a mattress and a bigwig in Fine Arts publishes it just as she wrote it. It begins with ML having split from B, her English husband who wants a divorce she’ll not give. Readers who live in Manhattan will be delighted to come across familiar shops, such as Murray’s Cheese, and enjoy reliving the period atmosphere just as the Reagan years were about to begin. The possibilities of ML making money by her art are pretty much limited to editorial and commercial work, although she can’t find a place to “sell out” to (“there’s no point in giving these editors what they think they want, if what they think they want isn’t what I do”). ML envies the lady photogs of the Depression who didn’t sell out but climbed around on high girders and so on. She lands a stringer’s position with Murdoch’s Post and we follow her on various shoots—like when a punk band demolishes a Cadillac and drives it into the Hudson with dynamite blowing the roof off. As for the rest, ML attends a screening at the Whitney of Robert Frank’s movie about the sexual activities of the Rolling Stones; a rich woman hires her to follow her daughter about and take candids; John Bellushi offers Big Fun, and David Bowie does Broadway; she feels guilt when her best girlfriend attempts suicide; she’s attacked by skinheads; visits an S&M bar; and sees Mrs. John Lennon’s hired skywriter write “Love, Yoko” over Central Park. Then Lennon dies and darkness falls.

Clear candid shots that suck you in.