Title: Under Fire: Journalists in Combat
Director: Martyn Burke
The drums of war, whatever the specific conflicts, almost always create an opportunity for much in the way of collateral damage. Director Martyn Burke’s “Under Fire: Journalists in Combat” takes the psychological temperature of those who would devote their lives to taking the sort of extraordinary risks that modern day war reportage entails. It’s an involving documentary look at a razor’s-edge occupation, as well as the coping mechanisms of the human brain under stress.
Burke, himself a veteran of various warfields around the globe, unfurls his movie in a manner that is judiciously crafted to avoid imparting any sense of swaggering glory. In straightfoward fashion, he mixes the standard nonfiction ingredients — sit-down subject interviews and all sorts of layered, B-reel accompaniment — with some of the by-telephone therapeutic work of Dr. Anthony Feinstein, a University of Toronto psychiatrist and behavioral scientist who has taken to working with journalists like Reuter’s photographer Finbarr O’Reilly. Burke also nicely layers and cross-cuts images, asking former West African AP Bureau Chief Ian Stewart to recreate a haunting watercolor image as he tells an anecdote about his own psychological recovery.
Still, this isn’t a movie where style matters much. The subjects themselves are the focus, and they’re an interesting lot. CBC correspondent Susan Ormiston belies traditional notions of occuptional machismo, while Stewart showcases a lucite-encased AK-47 bullet that penetrated his skull in a point-blank shooting that left his colleagues dead. The shared stories are darkly engaging, as are some of the heart-stopping images (including an award-winning photo of a malnourished child prostrate on the ground, with a vulture waiting ominously behind him).
With the war in Afghanistan still ongoing, Burke’s film seems unfortunately topical (there’s even footage from the Libyan conflict worked in), and in glancing fashion it assays the depressing absurdity of these war journalists’ jobs. “Oh, I think I know you from Kandahar,” says one photographer to another as they survey the devestation and dead bodies of Libyan fighters after a United Nations air strike. “You were there last August, right?” It’s another conflict for them, and some more pictures for the rest of us. The cost, the emotional toll? Combat reporters are like first-responders, but they help deliver a dark cloud that stretches out across the entire human horizon.
Technical: B+
Story: B
Overall: B
Written by: Brent Simon
