Gregory Crewdson, whose life and work is the subject of the documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters.

On my short list of personality traits that are typical of a successful artist, obsessive perfectionism and a penchant for melancholy are contenders for first place. Possessed of both these traits in spades is photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose creative process in the making of production-intensive still pictures is captured in the documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, which played at the Detroit Film Theater (DFT) over Jan 11-13. Their application to his medium of choice results in photographic output that is as richly detailed as it is deeply steeped in a sense of tragedy. The moments he freezes in time embody his fascination with the juxtaposition of “beauty and sadness” and explore everyday Americans in small-town Massachusetts posed in fictionalized and intensively staged tableaux capturing imagined (but conceivable)  “lives of quiet desperation.”

The effect is the creation of images very like those of painter Edward Hopper: dark, quiet, centered around people trapped in private moments that radiate intensity despite being entirely run-of-the-mill in their content. The difference, of course, is that Hopper, like any painter, has only to adhere to laws of imagination, whereas Crewdson literally installs these images into reality before capturing them on film. His process entails the kind of production crew and collective effort you might see on the set of a small indie film, and the production budget of a given image might well match the $125,000 price tag that one of his massive prints sells for.

Brief Encounters documents Crewdson at work through the creation of a series called “Beneath the Roses,” which took him over 6 years to complete and comprises his most in-depth efforts to stage reality. The insight into his process, not to mention the projection of his cinematic final images onto a movie screen, cannot help but leave the viewer inspired and impressed by the fanatical scope and execution of his artistic vision. While his imagery seems to indicate a darker side than his general conviviality as the subject of the documentary, it may be concluded that Gregory Crewdson has truly excelled at harnessing obsession and melancholy into images that reach out of the darkness and illuminate our reality.

Detroit Film Theater, 5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313-833-7887; www.dia.org/detroitfilmtheatre/14/DFT.aspx.