| 19 June 2011
Just as actors love playing actors, and Stephen King can’t resist writing about writers, documentary director Steven Silver has taken image-makers as the subject of his first feature film.
The Bang Bang Club is the true story of the titular four photojournalists, who lived and worked in South Africa during the Apartheid years and through the conclusion of Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom. The real-life unofficial club, who were famous for endangering themselves to get to the heart of the hidden conflicts within the townships, witnessed incredible violence, hardship and horror in their pursuit of capturing the perfect shot.
The essential question at the heart of the film is how to reconcile standing by and snapping photos with the reality of someone being beaten and possibly even murdered in front of you. The members of the Bang Bang Club struggle with this to different extents throughout, with Guy Marinovich (Ryan Phillippe) having the most difficulty. In one fraught scene he tries to stop a man being burned to death, then wins a Pulitzer for his picture of the man dying.
While the violence the four witness is graphic, real and gritty, it sometimes feels as though Silver has tried too hard to shock. It’s difficult to make an emotional connection with the horrors going on, because the audience is observing them through the detached eyes of the club’s members, who are all hunting for that prize-winning, money-spinning picture. It’s only as we listen to the story of a grieving father whose wife and son have both been murdered – an almost unbearable scene that Silver drives home with aplomb in a long shot of dizzying intensity – that the truth of the human tragedies going on beneath the gang violence hits home.
Meanwhile, the dialogue is occasionally clunky and the characters, just as real people are wont to do, compete with each other to dominate. Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), for example, is brilliantly conflicted, but somehow seems disjointed from the other, more professional, photographers.
The casting of Hollywood actors will certainly help the film tell its important story around the world, but it does seem a shame that this drop of gloss also prevents viewers from burrowing too far below the surface of these extraordinarily brave and complicated individuals. The Bang Bang Club is an affecting and graphic look at the realities of the lives of war journalists, but at the same time fails to go far enough in finding the emotional heart of the story.
Filmhouse 3, 21 June 10.10pm, 25 June 7.50pm
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