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Robert Capa: In Love
and War
review by Carrie
Gorringe, 20 June 2003
Seattle International Film Festival
2003
If
70, 000 negatives is the measure of a person's life, then
photographer Robert Capa lived his beyond anyone's expectations, and
the documentary Robert Capa:
In Love and War meticulously details the life of this
extraordinary artist. Capa,
born André Friedman in Hungary, was already noteworthy in France
when the Spanish Civil War exposed his talents to the world. Capa's
photograph of a Republican solider, caught at the precise moment
when a bullet ended his life, is perhaps the best-known of his
output from that struggle. The
film conscientiously details Capa's personal struggles, from the
loss of his greatest love during the Spanish conflict, to his brief
affair with actress Ingrid Bergman, to his co-founding of the Magnum
photo agency, to his tragic death while recording the French defeat
at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The portrait that emerges is one of
restlessness driving his ambition and talent, a person who was,
quite likely, never really comfortable either in his own skin or on
the planet. What the
film lacks is a in-depth critical analysis of Capa's work.
From where did the intuition come?
Perhaps the best estimation of Capa's talents came from one
of the Gibbs sisters, a British family whom Capa made the subject of
one of his photo essays concerning the struggles during the Blitz of
World War Two: "He
had it in him."
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