Christopher Bridges The purpose of a documentary film is to explore, or uncover something. To open the audience's eyes to something they've never seen and to leave them walking out while looking at the world around them in a different way. Finding Vivian Maier does this perfectly.This film is an exploration of a lonely, misunderstood soul and what art can come from that loneliness. Vivian Maier was a nanny in Chicago in the 1970s who was known for being a bit of an odd-ball. She would do various things such as collect newspapers, wear men's shirts, carry a camera around and snap various pictures as she went about her day. She died alone in 2009 and it was only until a few years later that her ingeniously astounding photographs were discovered and brought into the public eye.Now, during the first half of this movie, the main focus is on her art, and how it was kept so under wraps for years before coming to light, and the exploration of trying to fit all the pieces together (i.e. interviewing relatives from France, interviewing children she had cared for, going through census records, etc.) to figure out who she was on the outside.During the second half of the movie, the attention is drawn less to who she was on the outside and more to who she was on the inside. What caused her eccentric behavior? Why didn't she share her photographs? What prompted her to take them in the first place? This is where the film turns from a mystery of uncovering art to a study of a life completely hidden.Pardon me for dividing the movie into halves, but that's how I feel this movie is set up. This movie is bringing up the age-old question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it still make a sound?" Now, in Finding Vivian Maier, what is the tree, and what does it mean for the tree to fall? Surely falling refers to the creation of art, but what is the tree referring to? In the first half of the film, the movie is focusing on Maier's long-hidden photographs and how long it took for them to be revealed, so is the tree a metaphor for art itself? Is the movie begging the question: "Does art stop existing the moment we stop noticing it?" But as the film progresses into its second half, we start to observe Vivian herself, and how she ended up as the odd old lady who lived and an old apartment. This is where the movie gives us the same question, except in an even harder approach: "Do people stop existing the moment we stop noticing them?"The movie's themes don't stop there. It also has some very compelling subtext about legacy. During one scene near the end, we get a shot of the apartment Maier last lived in, and the camera pans down the building to the front door of it, which has a window in which we can see the cameraman's reflection. This could easily be excused as a mishap on the cameraman's part, but what struck me about this is that Vivian used to point her camera at anything that reflected, in order to take a self-portrait. Now, this is the subtle brilliance of influence and legacy that this entire movie has to offer. This movie not only captures Maier's works, which captured the world around her the way she wanted to see it, but the movie itself also captures the world the way she wanted to see it. And that's the art of biographical storytelling. The movie itself has to tell the story the way that the person would want it to be told, and Finding Vivian Maier achieves it greatly.This documentary definitely perfects the genre. It opens the audience's eyes and leaves them looking at the world and the people around them a little differently. And most importantly, it does justice to its source material.

intheaudience Thank you, John Maloof, for collecting Ms. Maier's work, making it available to the public, and compiling information about her for this documentary.With regards to her work itself, I would give it a 10 out of 10. In my opinion she was a better photographer than Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Steve McCurry, other photographers who took portraits. Just do a Google image search with her name. Wow. The things that make her work stand out are the purity of the art, the lack of self consciousness, the art for art's sake feel that immediately takes you to the subject and the story and does not draw attention to the artist herself, the prolificacy of the body of work. It spoke immediately to my heart. I have never encountered a better photographer. The fact that she remains relatively obscure is unfair, but I have a feeling she wouldn't mind. I think she did it all for the sake of the art itself and nothing more, not money, not fame, not attention or admiration from others. This approach to the work shows itself in the result. No other way to approach the art would have generated an equivalent result.The reason I give the film 7 out of 10 stars is that I feel that the film views her from a bit of a condescending point of view because of some of the ways in which she was eccentric and self effacing, but I won't go into details lest I generate spoilers. I wish everyone who is into photography would check her out. She deserves more credit than she is getting, not that I think she would have cared, but it is the world that loses out if it doesn't pay more attention to her work.

Tristan Li what I can be sure about Vivian is that she did live in a way that she decided to have. sure maybe she wanted more money, maybe she desired some other stuff. but within her capability, she did her best to live a life as she would love to. I admire this courage and freedom. another thing that this movie can tell you is that people with talent don't need to worry about all the techniques and so forth. of course you need to know about the basic staff of how to taking a photo. but If you got something that you wanna express, just find a way and do it. In Vivian's mind, photography was never about getting fame and rich, it's even not a career. it's just a way to express herself and communicate with the world. and this shocked me. nowadays people are desperate for recognition. whatever we do, we seem not to please ourselves. with all the social media this tend to get worse. sometimes we are doing things and in our mind we are planning how to post it online and how to make myself look good and superior.this is wrong. we are losing our lives to some superficial "like". we are losing who we are.

Red_Identity There is definitely an odd atmosphere that runs throughout the edges of this film, and it really does work in the context of what it's about. It's basically informative until it's just some kind of real mystery, with a woman that might've, most likely, had secrets of some kind. The real-life story is fascinating enough, and you wonder if some of the things could've even been set up. it sounds like the work of fiction, the dark shadow that is really built up with this woman at the core that's about ready to jump and lurch forward at you. It's intriguing, if maybe at times the film is too long to even warrant its short running time. Regardless, it mostly works so that's a small complaint.