In some ways, obviously, all movies are about photography. But the main trick of storytelling is to make you forget how it’s being told. Still, the connection between story and how images are captured gets explicit during this year’s VIFF.

Within the motion-picture realm, camera veteran Vic Sarin’s Keepers of the Magic (October 14) looks at how top cinematographers do their things. And the plastic arts come under more scrutiny with 18 entries in the M/A/D program, two of which focus on phenomenal photographers, both born in the 1920s but still alive and busy.

Harry Benson: Shoot First (October 8 and 12) looks at the Scottish-born lensman best known for getting Muhammad Ali together with the Beatles during their first tour. He later did some pretty tough crime scenes and such, but this somewhat PBS–style doc spends more time with his cozy portrait subjects, including someone guaranteed to give us the DTs.

Robert Frank is a thornier subject, and filmmaker Laura Israel does the Swiss-born photog, who has long lived part-time in Nova Scotia, the service of giving him a spectacularly lively 82 minutes. Don’t Blink: Robert Frank (October 8 and 12) spends as much time with his offbeat movies—including the one famously narrated by Jack Kerouac—as with the still pictures that became famous after his 1958 book The Americans virtually invented the concept of freewheeling street photography.

Acclaimed as an astute editor of music-minded docs and videos, Israel finished the feature Windfall, about the effects of wind turbines on the small upstate New York community where she has a rural retreat, about six years ago.

“At the same time, I was getting to know Robert,” says Israel, calling from her home in Jersey City. “I was helping to organize his archives, and at one point I half jokingly asked if he wouldn’t mind if I made a film about him. He pretty much laughed off the idea. But then the next time I talked to him, he said, ‘When do you want to start?’ ”

Frank was a rather rugged, Philip Roth–type figure when younger. And his provocative outsider status is shared by other seemingly random shutterbugs like the recently discovered Vivian Maier. In fact, his attention to minority faces—the kind generally excluded from the country’s smiling self-portraiture of the era—contributed to the book’s bad reception in the U.S.

“I think some reviewers were uncomfortable just looking in any stranger’s eyes,” Israel continues, “and figuring out for themselves what’s going on. But it’s also the texture of the photographs. The rawness of what looked, at the time, like out-of-focus and stark imagery, regardless of content. But they also convey a lot of emotion, and people were kind of shocked.”

That’s one reason she sticks to quick cutting, with lots of antique footage supported by East Coast music from the likes of Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and pretty much skips the background most docs would provide.

“This is the scrappy version,” she insists. “A lot of people say they’re glad it’s so lively. And my main goal was to get across a sense of how much work he did in the past 50 years, and how he’s still at it.”

Indeed, when Frank finally saw the finished cut, he surprised the filmmaker again with his enthusiasm.

“I think he liked it because it moves quickly, gets his sarcastic sense of humour, and was shot from instinct, like his own work when he was more aggressive. In fact, now he’s almost too nice.”

For more info on the Vancouver International Film Festival series M/A/D, go to www.viff.org/.