War Photographer

It's nearly impossible to know how to react to this film. On the one hand, the current military ramp-up renders this documentary about James Nachtwey -- quite possibly the greatest living war photographer ever -- excruciatingly topical in its single-minded depiction of what, exactly, goes on behind the bullets. On the other hand, it's a vague indictment of the war correspondent's vulture-like hovering over the bleak, black battlefield. Everyone is weeping, all the time. Nachtwey, working for the German magazine Stern, is portrayed as the lone link between the doomed and the rest of us. It's almost too much to watch, and, frankly, I dare anyone to sit through this movie without having to leave the theatre. That Nachtwey's a genius with a pristine and unflinching eye isn't in question, and his relentless pursuit of the truth -- in Kosovo, an entire land seemingly made up of mass graves and dead children, or by the mangled limbs of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda's million-corpse nightmare that just plain never ends -- is something to be simultaneously amazed and horrified by. Here is a guy who has a terrific artistic skill and has used it to shock the world into a sorry semblance of action. “If they didn't trust me and accept me, as one of them, I could never do what I do,” says the preternaturally hushed Nachtwey. “They know that this stranger with the camera is the only voice they have.” Swedish documentarian Frei's film is remarkable in several ways. It captures the simple ease of Nachtwey's work, with his award-winning black-and-white still shots of some of the most repellent human actions ever caught on film. Then again, War Photographer is full of footage of CNN superstar Christiane Amanpour -- who declines a face mask while surrounded by piles of corpses (and then wisely gives in) -- and her crew shooting the dead and the dying with a zealot's grim opportunism. You can't blame her one little bit, or Nachtwey, not really -- they've both been instrumental in if not turning the tide of war then at least revealing its freakish insanity to the greater world, beyond the grieving family members and sobbing, toothless grandmothers (of which there are many, and whom Nachtwey focuses on and shoots with his camera again and again). War Photographer is more a portrait of the reality of war than it is of Nachtwey himself, although the film delves fairly deeply into his clearly battered psyche. Frei has uniquely mounted a micro-DV cam on the photographer's own camera -- the better to see what Nachtwey's eyes see -- and rarely interrupts with asides or polemics. Interviews are interspersed with mass-graveside footage that rivals those old Holocaust reels in terms of sheer massive horror. Again, it's almost too much to watch, crisp and clear in BetaCam digital. But as Nachtwey proves time and again, this is the very definition of war: a guy and his Nikon and some old woman shrieking in a dark, wet corner. The images this war photographer shoots are beyond awful, but there's just no looking away.