A DPReview film festival
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It’s Oscar Sunday, so we’ve put together a DPReview film festival that celebrates our favorite star – photography!
To keep it simple, we’ve excluded documentaries, and zeroed on narrative film starring the humble camera. We’ve also limited this lineup with the hypothetical scenario that if you were to do a one day film festival, what would be a nice mix of films that deliver variety, thrills and perhaps a few surprises.
These are only a few of the films out there, let us know if we missed your favorites in the comments.
Now, off to the movies!
Rear Window
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Start your at home film festival with this classic. Often parodied and poorly remade, Hitchcock’s tale of a wheelchair bound professional photographer has stood the test of time. With masterful set design, reminiscent of a stage play, and a perfectly manic performance from James Stewart, the suspense rises frame by frame.
With little to do, a homebound photographer with a broken leg takes to looking out his Manhattan apartment window, seeing the hustle of the city unfold through a mosaic of open windows and courtyards during an intense heat wave. Characters emerge the longer he looks, the photographic eye of the observer seeking the ‘moment,’ until ultimately he sees something that perhaps he was not meant to see, or did he?
The underlying question hinges on photo cliches: is a picture worth a thousand words? Is seeing believing? Is ‘pics for it didn’t happen’ always true?
I give it 5/5 stars.
City of God
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For photographers (and particularly photojournalists) who picked up a camera and started their love affair with photography in the early to mid-aughts, this film is often the first to jump to mind when asked about ‘photo’ films they love.
Set in the slums of 1960s Rio de Janeiro, the film brings us a coming of age tale that gracefully invites viewers into the deep underbelly of a life on the streets of Brazil.
We met a group of young people living amid violence, poverty and fear, but also joy, strength and friendship. Sure it’s a slum, but it’s also home. The film plays it straight and ‘normal’ with no sensationalism or ‘othering’ of the people we meet. The youth here aren’t to be pitied, they are presented here only because you’ve been invited in to live with them as they are.
The camera becomes a comfort. This is a rare film that shows why photography matters and why many of us pick up a camera, because we need to.
I give it 5/5 stars.
The Killing Fields
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Based on the horrific civil war in 1970s Cambodia and Pol Pot’s war atrocities, this heartbreaking film shadows New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran, a Cambodian journalist who aided Schanberg with translations and became an invaluable partner in reporting the fall of Phnom Penh to Khmer Rouge guerrillas in 1975.
I have a soft spot for this film, I briefly met Pran when I came in second place for a photo competition named in his honor and his commitment to journalism inspired me then as it continues to today.
Pran and Schanberg witness the madness of war and have an unbridled commitment to documenting what is happening to hold accountable the wrongs they see. When American forces leave, Schanberg helps Pran evacuate his family but Pran refuses to leave until he is finished reporting the entire story. At this moment, it’s not a given that Pran will have another chance to leave.
I give it 5/5 stars.
The Bridges of Madison County
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Our film festival takes a lighter turn with our next film. Playing against type, director and star Clint Eastwood delivered a nuanced and touching story of two people crossing paths in a small town, one which masterfully walks the line between being heartfelt and revealing truths about loss and yearning without slipping into the saccharine.
At the center is Meryl Streep’s Francesca Johnson, who joins Eastwood as the counterweight to his quiet pull. Johnson lives on a farm, is married with two kids and contemplates how this life came to be. She is not the cliche lonely housewife, but she has lived a lifetime and with age started to look back with melancholy. Her family is away for several days to see the Illinois State Fair, when a new stranger bumps into her.
Johnson meets Eastwood’s fictional National Geographic photojournalist Robert Kincaid when he comes to their Iowa town for an assignment in 1965. An offer of iced tea turns into an awkward dinner and then something more.
After four days their whirlwind romance is over, but a longing remains for a lifetime. We have seen this idea played out in many films over the years, certainly the ‘Before Trilogy’ comes to mind, but ‘Bridges’ plays it not as love lost, but as something more nuanced. Here, parting is the only thing that gives this love meaning, to have acted on it is to destroy it.
I give it 4/5 stars.
One Hour Photo
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We’re nearing the end of our one day film festival, and making another tonal shift.
Watching ‘One Hour Photo’ in 2023 may feel like a time capsule, the plot centers on Robin Williams’ Seymour ‘Sy’ Parrish working as a photo technician in a department store photo counter.
Part of Williams’ turn toward darker roles (‘One Hour Photo’ was released in the same year as ‘Death to Smoochy’ and ‘Insomnia’), we watch a man unravel under the weight of obsession and utter loneliness as he starts to become more and more consumed with every detail in the photos of a family that regularly drops off film rolls for development.
His attempts at banter with the family he has served for years are refused, he longs to connect but does not possess the ability, and so he retreats into his own fantasy world in which he has friends, a family who invites him over and is needed by others.
But he is always watching.
The tension simmers below the surface, we’re never quite sure what Parrish is thinking or why he is descending into madness, until finally the film hits its crescendo.
I give it 5/5 stars.
La Macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine to Kill Bad People)
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From the opening frame, Roberto Rossellini’s 1952 Italian fantasy proclaims itself a comedy and proceeds with an omnipotent hand descending from the heavens to arrange mountains, buildings and people as play things in a sandbox.
One of the few films with a plot point that completely hinges around a camera, the film centers on a humble photographer in post war Italy. Times are rough, the divide between the haves and the have-nots widens, outside investors from America are poised to pick at the meager things of value left in the photographer’s small village, and greed and wickedness seems to lurk around every corner.
Our hero is trying his best to make a living with his camera, but the deck seems stacked against him and he feels powerless. Well, powerless until the day an old man shows up at his door in need of aid. The kind photographer takes him in and the stranger rewards him with a magic camera with the power to kill anyone he takes a picture of.
Unfolding like an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ the photographer starts to use his new camera like a snapshot Grim Reaper, and the film prods us to consider what we would do with such power and at which point does the moral cross over into immoral.
I give it 4/5 stars.
Author:
This article comes from DP Review and can be read on the original site.
