Category — Movie

Well I scrapped the video I put together the past couple of weeks.  It was hard to get the point across in just 2 minutes.  I decided to do something politically charged since all we’ve been seeing lately is political agendas and elections.  Hopefully it makes more sense then the last one I put together.

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The IFC Center premiered the showing of Blood Trails, directed by Richard Parry on Tuesday.  I and many others in my class viewed the movie with both the director and Robert King, the focus of the movie.  Recently we were reading “The Pain of Others,” by Susan Sontag.  This movie made her book come to life for me. 

“The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of images.”

Blood Trail was the documentary of Robert King’s life.  We watched his start as a war photographer in Bosnia, then onto Chechnya where he took war defining photos, and then most recently his time following the Iraq war.  We watched King’s personal and professional growth over the years.  At times it was hard to watch, but it was something I think every American and human being should watch. 

It started with King as a twenty four year covering the Bosnia war in 1993.  What I loved about King was his candidness.  Not once did you think he was acting or pretending to be someone he wasn’t.  He believed he would win the Pulitzer in five years at most.  This coming from a man that bought an auto focus camera because his clients didn’t like what his eye saw as in focus.  We saw him get fired from agencies and have photos picked up by acclaimed newspapers such as The Guardian and Time. 

The first scene that stuck out to me was when he was running around the backwoods of Bosnia with bullets whistling above his head.  While he chained smoked, you could see the fear in his eyes.  Making a mere 100 dollars a month in the beginning, and circulating between four shirts, one of which he lost cleaning a fire he accidently set in his room.  He is our eyes at war.  Risking his life to take photos that as his later wife says, “Why would you risk your life to take pictures that no one wants to see?”

”Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.”

~Susan Sontag

Richard Parry brilliantly included a disturbing video clip of a man lying on the ground with his legs having just been blown off.  Photographers were scrambling around him to get the photo, but no one was doing anything to help this man helplessly lying on the ground.  At the end of the film Richard said it’s a tough thing to decide.  “Did I make the right choice but not trying to call for an ambulance?  At the end of the day though I’m a journalist and I’m there to capture the news.  There was no where I could have taken this man, no one to help him. War photographers are driven to bear witness, but other motivations are part of the mix – like overcoming personal demons or seeking a perverse form of glory”

Sontag says that our eyes “indiscriminate lust, claiming ‘the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.”  Having no illustrations in her book I didn’t fully grasp this.  Not until I saw Blood Trails.  Her words literally took life in the form of King.  He didn’t earn a Pulitzer, but he laid it all on the line to do what he loved. 

We saw his ups and his many downs.  His father was an alcoholic most of his life, something that Robert later struggled with as well.  What he saw I couldn’t blame him.  He lived it up when he wasn’t filming the death around him.  Was he really living it up or just trying to forget what he had seen.  As he and other war photographers in the audience stated, they are all damaged goods.  If they started off not as damaged goods, they were by the time they were done.  Going back you can’t transition into another job as a photographer.  You’ll never be taken seriously in the fashion industry. 

The photos were amazing to see, and the way they were captured made them even more breathtaking.  I will never look at a newspaper picture or time magazine cover the same.  What is gone through to capture those images is hard to wrap you mind around. 

Sontag writes, “We feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent–if not an inappropriate–response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a consideration of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may - in ways that we prefer not to imagine–be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only the initial spark.”

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