Helmut Newton, seen by his women: provocative, macho or portraitist of female strength?

• Exhibition in Berlin The Alpha Female

In

(whose original title is

), Kirk Douglas played an egocentric, narcissistic and manipulative producer, but with a clinical eye capable of recognizing and appreciating talent.

His job was basically to lead other people to fame.

It is no coincidence that the original title of the film directed by Vicente Minelli coincides with that of the documentary dedicated to the figure of photographer Helmut Newton (1920-2004), which opens in theaters

after the centenary of his birth

Grace Jones, Claudia Schiffer, Isabella Rossellini, Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Gobbel ... each posed for

as well as his wife June, and they all appear before the camera of documentary filmmaker Gero von Boehm, who composes a multifaceted vision of who saw himself as a "

professional. "Was he a born provocateur, an unrepentant macho or an artist obsessed with showing the strength of women in the midst of the sexual revolution? According to his own statements and those of those he immortalized with his camera, a little of each. It is fragmentary and incomplete, but enough to form a very contrasted puzzle, as his black and white photographs used to be. If Grace Jones says of him that he was "a little perverted", Finnish actress and model Arja Toyryla describes him as "very respectful. "For the model Sylvia Gobbel, her first job with him was fundamental to empower her." When you are 20 years old and you are a blonde of 80 meters, you are like a fawn being chased by hunters.

His photos made me stronger, I learned to dominate the situation. "He never cared much.

about his person or his work.

Or that's what he said when asked about his style: "I love to oppose two opposing themes. And if people don't like it, I don't care."

In fact, according to Anne Wintour, the editor of

With whom he worked the longest, before the avalanche of letters they received protesting his photos, he endorsed a quote from Kaiser Wilhelm II: "More enemies, more honor."

Among those enemies was Susan Sontag, whom we see in action in an awkward run-in with the photographer on a television show.

the writer snaps at him.

"I love women. There is nothing I love more in the world," Newton replies.

"He can love women a lot, but he represents them with humiliating images," ditch Sontag. In these images strong and dominant women, but also devoid of personality, are often seen as lifeless sexual objects.

"If you entrusted something to Helmut, he wouldn't give you a pretty girl on a pretty beach," sums up Wintour.

No, what I was giving you was a girl with her head and torso covered by a garbage bag

to highlight some high-heeled shoes.

Who best explains it is Isabella Rosselini: "Helmut largely exposed the feeling of men. His observation was not so much about women as about his own feelings.

Newton's life path is somewhat blurred by the succession of testimonies and the power of the images, but it is just as fascinating.

His youth as a Jew who with 13 years sees how Hitler comes to power and the influence of

yes they are there, even in passing.

"I fled during the day and hid at night", Newton recalls in one of the most emotional moments of the documentary.

In 1938 he got on a train bound for Trieste and there he embarked for China.

He ended up first in Singapore and then in Australia, where he met June Brown, then a model and actress.

"I want to marry you, but we will never have money," Helmut told her.

He did not know how wrong he was. In his later years, health ailments took hold of both of them, but the camera continued to be there, as a faithful witness of surgeries, illness and old age, a kind of membrane that served as protection against to what was happening.

And with a persistent command since his beginnings as an image hunter: "For me there are two words forbidden in photography. The first is 'art', the second 'good taste'".

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