Commentary: The Bang Bang Club – A great picture is one that asks a question

         The film, The Bang Bang Club, made its US premier at the TriBeCa festival last night. The film is a fictionalized portrayal of the real “Bang Bang Club”, a group of photographers who captured the violence and poverty within the townships of Apartheid South Africa. Highly cinematic, The Bang Bang Club captures the hyperbolic passions and existential angst of the men whose camera lenses recorded endless suffering and senseless death. Opening with a jovial, and almost superficial representation of the competitive camaraderie between the members of the Bang Bang Club, the beginning of the film is almost light-hearted. Ballsy photographers Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillipe), Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach), and Joao Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld), wake up early, drive through dust covered streets into the heartbreaking violence and penury of the South African townships, force their lenses into the depths of the action, then return home to sell their photos and recount their adventures -- all in a day’s work.

After hours their lives foil the depravity of their work. To their coworkers and other aspiring photographers, they are heroes. They share their “war” stories, congratulate one another, and prepare to do it all over again. In white South Africa’s bars and clubs, they drink, dance, screw, and indulge in every glorious hedonistic pleasure their safety provides. And they do it with the same embroiled beauty they harness in their work.

The initially surface portrayal of the men and their relationship to one another and to their occupation morphs into a serious exploration of their roles as photographers, and on a certain level, the role of media in capturing wars and conflicts. Are the individual photographers responsible for intervening? Do the photographs they take rub salt into the wounds of suffering people, or do they shed light on injustices that are begging for attention? Through the lenses of both their cameras, and their personal lives, the audience is invited into the questioning, and the film, like the photographs it features, leaves us wondering about the significance and role of pictures, both still and moving.

Perhaps the one (and fairly significant) fault of this epic and beautifully shot film is the lack of clear character development. The beginning of the movie shows the men as boys and the women as girls. In the end, they are grown and philosophical. Yet, the film was clearly not intended to be a character exploration. It is an epic portrayal of the larger than life realities of men who lived bigger and bolder than most. Willingness to take risks enmeshed them in situations they did not necessarily predict. Once removed, they became involved. Entwined with what they once looked at as voyeurs, they matured, as did the film itself. The question that lingers is whether we as humans can create anything worthwhile – a great picture, for example - if we are not personally involved, whether that involvement is physical or emotional. The film does not explicitly answer this, but the content of the prize-winning photos does.