Film Review: War Photographer

There may be a lot of film reviews in these early days of the blog. I'm currently taking, for graduate school, a class about film, representation, and identity. We are studying both documentary and fiction films, and talking about how those films portray cultures and people. We've watched a number of films that are relevant to this blog--hence the propensity of film reviews!

Today I'm recommending to you the film War Photographer. This film follows one of the most famous war photographers of our time, James Nachtwey, who is an impressive human being with an almost-unbelievable commitment to making people aware of what war looks like. Here's the trailer:



This is not an easy film to watch. Through the use of a video camera attached to the top of Nachtwey's camera, we see what he sees. We hear his breath, and the clicking of the camera. Interspersed with this, the film features still shots of Nachtwey's photographs, which are often breathtaking and sometimes so horrendous it's hard to look. After all, Nachtwey has photographed some of the great atrocities of our time: The Rwandan genocide, the war in Bosnia, famine in Somalia. He has taken pictures in the West Bank, South Africa, Chechnya, Sudan, Nicaragua. You can see some of his photographs on his website.

Nachtwey's photos have put the global horrors of war onto the glossy pages of magazines, and have forced people to deal with the reality of atrocities. Despite the fact that I cried through half the film and could hardly look at the screen sometimes, I'm grateful I watched it. Without that camera and that photograph, I would never have seen, for example, that one particular mourning Bosnian woman. I would not have had the opportunity to participate, even if it is vicariously, in her grief and her agony. And I do believe that it is possible to participate, to engage, through a photograph. When I look at James Nachtwey’s photographs, I feel closer to a reality that I haven’t experienced personally; I’m forced to confront humanity in a way I don’t typically have to in my everyday life. And I believe that it’s important to confront humanity like that. I really believe that films and photographs give us a shot at developing compassion, which is a kind of stepping stone to empathy. And I think I've made this clear before on this blog: I personally believe that the development of an abiding empathy is one of the central purposes of life.