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Matinee: 'Lee'
20 September 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 622nd in our series of Saturday matinees today: Lee.
A year after its release, Lee is now available on Kanopy, the streaming service many public libraries and universities provide at no charge.
The liner notes describe the feature film:
Lee, the directorial feature from award-winning Cinematographer Ellen Kuras, portrays a pivotal decade in the life of American war correspondent and photographer, Lee Miller (Kate Winslet). Miller's singular talent and unbridled tenacity resulted in some of the 20th century's most indelible images of war, including an iconic photo of Miller herself, posing defiantly in Hitler's private bathtub.
Miller had a profound understanding and empathy for women and the voiceless victims of war. Her images display both the fragility and ferocity of the human experience. Above all, the film shows how Miller lived her life at full-throttle in pursuit of truth, for which she paid a huge personal price, forcing her to confront a traumatic and deeply buried secret from her childhood.
Lee Miller was one of a kind.
Born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, she became a fashion model in the 1920s in Paris before returning to the U.S. to study at Vassar. She attended the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan shortly after to study drawing and painting.
In 1929 she returned to Paris to apprentice with Man Ray, where she explored the solarization process and surrealism. They had a falling out over who did what work in pieces attributed to them both.
She returned to New York in 1932 to set up her own photography studio. Her clients included BBDO, Henry Sell, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, Saks Fifth Avenue, I. Magnin and Co. and Jay Thorpe.
She married the Egyptian businessman and engineer Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934, closed her studio and moved to Egypt. By 1937 she became bored with Cairo and moved to Paris where she made peace with Man Ray.
During World War II, she became the official war photographer for Vogue. Spurned by the British army, she became accredited with the American army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942.
The movie picks it up there, but we have to salute her bravery in photographing the napalming of Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace and the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
She died of lung cancer in 1977 at the age of 70. And there has never been another like her.