Final Rating: 3/5
Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch’s Naked Ambition opens a window into the life and career of Bunny Yeager–-a model turned photographer. It follows the format of a traditional biographical documentary, shifting between various people who were involved in Yeager’s career and members of her family who survive her as the pivotal moments in her life are highlighted. Despite the conventional format, uncovering the history behind Yeager’s journey from pinup girl to revolutionary feminist is fascinating.
It’s not an exaggeration to describe Bunny Yeager as a trailblazer in multiple fields. She paved the way for countless women to succeed in photography and modeling. Her experience as a model allowed her to step behind the camera and relate to other models in a way that most, if not all, male photographers couldn’t. She had their trust and it enabled her to take countless risqué pictures of Playboy models like Bettie Page and Lisa Winters as well as Swiss actress Ursula Andress (Bond girl Honey Ryder from Dr. No). She worked closely with Hugh Hefner and Playboy in the ‘50s and ‘60s, even shaping the direction of the magazine.
In one archival interview shown in the documentary, she talks about the complexities and talents required to be a model as the many types of poses are rattled off in quick succession. If you’ve ever taken a selfie for social media or a photo ID, you’ll know how difficult it is to get the lighting just right or position your nose or change the perspective of the camera to achieve something flattering.
Bunny Yeager, anecdotally credited in the film with creating the ‘selfie’, showcases just how wide the gap is between a Facebook selfie and her stunning photography. In addition to talking head interviews and archival footage of Yeager, the film intersperses her photographs throughout. Most of her shoots were done in natural light outside, a setting that was very rare at the time. Each photograph is more dynamic than the last. Models pose on the beach or on the street corner with strategically positioned objects in the foreground to cover their nipples and privates. One of the more iconic photosets involved Bettie Page posing with two live cheetahs.
Naked Ambition is fairly short at just over 70 minutes, and the latter portion spends time with Yeager’s daughters and granddaughter as they share their experiences being descended from such a formative figure in pinup photography. It’s not purely positive. As the title implies, a lot of what Yeager was doing was incredibly ambitious. And ambition is often met with resistance.
Nudity took a long time to be viewed as artistic. Even today, there are many people who would label the photographs Bunny Yeager was taking as smut, rather than art. But she was a figurehead for people in that field to gain respect.
Yeager’s daughters, Lisa Irwin and Cherilu Duval, have very polarizing views on their mother’s work. Lisa says at one point how “overwhelming” it was “to be the only one responsible for the archives of my mother’s work.” Whereas Cherilu, compared her relationship with her mother’s work to Michael Corleone in The Godfather, saying, “he did not want to be part of the family business…and it drew him in. I have kind of felt like that.”
The friction within Bunny Yeager’s family is as compelling as her photographs are beautiful. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t dive beneath the surface of that friction. Documentaries can be fickle in that the filmmaker doesn’t have full control over the content. This often leads to missing out on more personal and affecting lines of questioning. Whether that’s what happened here or not, the film would probably have more of an impact if it scrutinized that element of Yeager’s legacy more intently.
For anyone who doesn’t know Bunny Yeager’s name, Naked Ambition does a solid job of showcasing why everyone should know who she is. It’s a straightforward documentary that mixes interviewee answers with archival footage and photographs to paint the picture of who she was. It does so effectively, if sometimes shallowly.
Thank you to Music Box Films for the screener.
