The Battle Photographer

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 2001)

Spoilers herein.
Since Vietnam, there have been a few competent films by Americans about Americans on the ground in battle. I think which one you like best (or appreciate the most) probably says a lot about you and how you look through the filmmaker's camera.
Ready? `Red Line,' `Metal Jacket.' `Catch-22,' `Apocalypse,' `3 Kings,' `Platoon,' `Private Ryan.' Seven types of people. How would you rank them? Who are you? How do you see?
I listed them according to my own ranking, which is heavily weighted on the degree to which the filmmaker mastered the art of filmmaking to do something to my soul that no one else could through any other art experience. Private Ryan was just a noisey Norman Rockwell. Platoon's war was somebody's fault, and we watch colorful and depictions as accusations. But Red Line weaved a mystical hypnotic internal narrative that put me in the mind (and incidentally the body) of a character swept by violent events. So very expert at understanding how to make us see war around us permanently on leaving the theater.
But I rank this film high as well. Less visceral, at least at first. But there is so much style in the manner of the storytelling that it alone has more power than the story itself.
The story is clever, however, concerned with framing the narrative. `Joker,' (an apt name if there ever was one) starts with a voiceover. We immediately know it is his story, but we don't know which character matches the voice for sure until the toilet murder scene. So we spend about half of the film, not in the story proper, but in a metastory which defines the narrator. And bingo, at the end, he is turned into a reporter.
Then flash to a whore's butt and the story begins with a stolen camera! Immediately thereafter we have a whole different stance from Kubric's camera. Before, it was sterile, `outside' the action like most other films. Now it turns into a camera that is part of the group. It's internal to the gathering and travels with the men as a member of the party. And the camera is now less apparently controlled by the reporter than by the sweep of fate.
We go through a middle section which sets up the `war story' proper, and this is framed once again by dickering with a whore. Then we are carried along with Rafterman's cameras. (And incidentally, Kubric's daughter with a camera at the burial pit.)
And now to battle, and the style takes on a new Dantesque hue at the third layer of Hell. Just one example: that trio of sounds leading up to final encounter with the sniper are three metallic grating/screeching sounds that transmute to nearly identical violin sounds leading up to Joker's decision to shoot. Another: the sets in this third are transforming. I invite you to compare them to Spielburg's for a literal eyeopener. `Enemy at the Gates' had a similar battle-sniper-set style, clearly derivative of Kubric, but more stagey. Here we have carefully composed primitive shapes and fractal textures that suggest more than mere war: the destruction of civilization but the preservation of a more basic order. Another: the action is interrupted by journalistic interviews where the characters look you right in the eye to underscore that you are there -- you are the narrator; you have to decide whether to shoot or not.
Kubric is a very personal filmmaker, and his personality is tied up in abstractions unique to the film narrative. I take war personally, so prefer this film above most of the others, except for Malick which is more personally abstract and therefore even more present.