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Now on screens are two movies about the life-changing power
of photography. Christian Frei’s War Photographer
is about James Nachtwey, who, for the past 25 years,
has documented several lifetimes-worth of suffering in places
like Ramallah, Kosovo, and Rwanda. Paul Schrader’s
Auto Focus is about Bob Crane, of “Hogan’s Heroes”
fame, whose evolution from family man to sex addict and pornographer
ended with his 1978 murder in an Arizona motel.
Combat photographer Robert Capa said, “If your pictures
aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Frei accompanied
Nachtwey for two years as he documented horror and misery.
Nachtwey seems reluctant to be on camera. You sense that he
agreed to participate only to bring these stories of suffering
to a wider audience, so clearly does he prefer that attention
focus on the work. There’s not much to say about his artistry,
though some photographs are strikingly composed. This isn’t
about aesthetics. It’s about being in the moment, and Nachtwey
has been, in spades. In his few comments, Nachtwey tells us
that he couldn’t get Robert Capa-close without being accepted
by the people whose tragedies he photographs. This acceptance,
he says, comes from his respect for them and their situations.
He doesn’t shy away from admitting that he began partly for
a “… sense of adventure and facing danger and feeling other
people’s authentic emotions…” That’s given way to his sense
of mission. Nachtwey also now documents the lives of destitute
peoples. Though his images of war and its after-effects are
no picnic, the real shockers are his photographs of skeletal
famine victims in Africa, Indonesian children earning their
daily bread by gleaning in garbage dumps, and pared-down,
coughing sulfur miners of Kawah Ijen. Nachtwey balances concern
over making his money and his name as a “vampire with the
camera” against his subjects’ complicity. “… By allowing me
there to photograph it, they’re making their appeal to the
outside world and to everyone’s sense of right and wrong.”
He photographs conditions whose existence shames us all.
Nachtwey rightly says, “We must look at it. We’re required
to look at it. We’re required to do what we can about it.”
But all through this feel-bad movie I kept looking at the
clock, thinking, “I am so bored.” (I have long suspected Americans
can take anything except boredom.) War Photographer
fails to settle on a subject. It’s about Nachtwey, but not
really, since he takes a back seat to his work. That leaves
a documentary about world injustices, but not really, since
we get pictures without context or subjects to follow and
identify with or calls to action.
Frei uses nifty microcams to get us as close to the action
as Nachtwey’s camera, but there’s no techno-solution to get
us close to the photographer. Interviews with other journalists
provide few insights. Much of what they relate—he’s calm,
composed, never cynical—we can dope out for ourselves, just
from watching. Still, the film only lives and breathes during
these interviews, particularly during the segment with war
videographer Des Wright. This devastatingly candid
Brit expresses admiration for Nachtwey in one sentence and
in the next reveals that, unlike the mission-driven Nachtwey,
he has absolutely no idea why he does this work. Now there’s
a human.
Human nature can be messy. In the late 1960s, LA radio personality
Bob Crane took the lead role in a weekly TV comedy about a
WWII POW camp, and the rest is unbelievable history. Everything
the nuns and your parents told you about sex is true! Well,
the stuff they told you about the coarsening effects of over-indulgence
is true, anyway.
Crane was your average, Banlon-wearing, suburban father of
three with a couple of obsessions: playing drums and taking
pictures. The minor celebrity gained from playing Colonel
Hogan brought opportunities to indulge his obsessions. Always
a collector of girlie mags, Crane is introduced to the swinging
life by John Carpenter (Dafoe), a technophile
he meets on the studio lot. Carpenter invites him to strip
joints, and before you can say “Bob’s your uncle,” Crane is
sitting in as drummer with the strip-joint band. Soon it’s
a nightly diversion, and though his priest advises him to
remove himself from occasions of sin, Crane barely puts up
token resistance. With Carpenter as his Tonto, he makes a
new conquest every night. His marriage crumbles when his wife
Ann (Wilson) discovers the infidelities. In the midst
of all this shagging, he courts and marries co-star Patti
Olson (Bello), who accepts his extracurricular activities.
Eventually, that marriage dissolves, leaving Crane with only
his buddy Carpy, who’s in and out of favor like that lover
you just can’t make a clean break from, and a cast of thousands
of bedmates.
But it’s not just nookie. Carpenter also introduces Crane
to the brand new technology of video tape recording, leading
the boys to document their exploits. The one-two punch of
sex and photography formed a feedback loop that rendered Crane
insensible to all other concerns. The new video technology
fueled his licentiousness like gasoline on a fire.
Auto Focus fixes its lens on Crane and Carpy, two
buccaneers not that far removed from the Wild and Crazy Guys
of SNL fame (except they score. a lot.), giving the audience
no sense of the sexual revolution they were operating in.
Auto Focus begins with bright, sharp images and gradually
becomes as grainy and dark as Crane’s sex tapes as he descends
further and further into addiction. It’s a fascinating movie,
with a no-fear performance by likeable Greg Kinnear
that will provoke uncomfortable laughter as well as admiration.
He perfectly conveys cluelessness. Crane tells Patti that
he just “wants someone who gets me,” unaware that he doesn’t
get himself. His lack of self-awareness means he only sees
one perspective. He begins showing others his sex photos,
meticulously cataloged as to date and city. When his agent
(Leibman) tries to warn him that his lifestyle is imperiling
his Disney gig, Crane scoffs: “I’m normal. Sex is normal.
I’m normal.” Pretty soon people aren’t returning his calls,
and Crane is back on tour, doing dinner theater and anything
in a skirt, right up until that fatal night.
War Photographer and Auto Focus concern the
world evolving technologies make it possible for us to experience,
and two men’s uses of those technologies. Nachtwey’s images
bring it all home, comforting the afflicted and afflicting
the comfortable, as the saying goes, with the reminder that
every man’s death diminishes us because of our shared humanity.
Crane’s photography put blinders on him, whittling his worldview
down to that biological basic—the pursuit of sex. What, I
wonder, would Crane make of Chris Rock’s take on marriage:
“Want to cheat. Can’t cheat.” Were he alive today, one can
have no doubt that Crane, that ardent follower of technological
innovation, would be chafing his withered loins in front of
that porn paradise, the world wide web. One approaches a truer
definition of obscenity when weighing the unemotional sex
of Auto Focus against the sufferings depicted in War
Photographer. Too bad neither film succeeds in making
its subject known. A thousand pictures, not enough words.
—Roxanne Bogucka
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out
of 5
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
