Culture

Director: Steven Silver (3/5)

Based on the real-life experiences of four South African photojournalists who achieved international notoriety and recognition for their documentation of the turbulent lead-up to the Republic’s first free election in 1994, The Bang Bang Club really should make for compelling viewing. Disappointingly, the many holes in the narrative and the film’s apparent identity crisis does little justice to the representation of either the key players or the political events.
 
Written and directed by documentary filmmaker Steven Silver, the film is an adaptation of the book authored by the club’s two surviving members, Greg Marinovich and João Silva. Silver takes his audience right into the combat zones of townships at war, using handheld cameras to capture the raw action of daily tribal violence between the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and ANC supporters between 1990 and 1994. The images of bloodshed are harrowing but without context, meaning that the narrative becomes subordinated to unexplicated scenes of slaughter.
 
While the political conflict is backgrounded, Silver partially explores the relationships and motivations of the four members of The Bang Bang Club - Greg Marinovich, João Silva, and the late Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbroek, who were all photojournalists for the Johannesburg Star. They challenged each other daily to capture the brutality of the war unfolding and to reveal what had largely been an inaccessible tribal world. Their actual photographs are cleverly revealed onscreen; stills are edited into moving action to create a sense of history in motion. The images, as graphically disturbing as they are, can best be described as truly astonishing and deserving of their Pulitzers.
 
The film raises questions about journalistic ethics, such as when to put the camera down and whether journalists should ever intervene with their subjects. Moral dilemmas take a toll on the men both physically and psychologically. Silver would have done well to delve deeper with this but instead the film loses its way by bizarrely introducing an adrenaline-fuelled action-adventure slant on the subject, which really detracts from what could have been a poignant portrait of conflict within conflict.
 
Perhaps The Bang Bang Club can be viewed as an introduction to a pivotal time in South Africa’s political history, and used to open up discussion about the ethical and moral challenges faced by photojournalists in their quest to reveal the remarkable.