Funny Face (1957)

Inspired by a real photographer: Fred Astaire's Dick Avery is loosely based on Richard Avedon, who designed the opening titles and supplied photographs for the film. Stanley Donen's 1957 musical is the joyful side of fashion photography. Avery spots Audrey Hepburn's bookish Jo Stockton and whisks her to Paris, and the best sequences are the Paris shoots themselves, with Avery freezing each pose into a finished frame. It is light as air, but it shows better than any drama how a photographer builds an image out of a person, a place and a split second.