Towards the end of Ran Tal’s powerful documentary 1341 Frames of Love and War, the director asks legendary photojournalist and Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am if he ever tried to take pictures from the other side’s point of view. Bar-Am, 91, refuses to answer, but his argumentative wife Orna chimes in: “You have to choose sides. You can’t shoot both sides of a situation. Since he’s Israeli he shoots the Israeli side.” Like much of what Orna says, those lines need to be interrogated side by side with his body of work, rife with disturbing images of military assaults and Israeli-led massacres that don’t answer Tal’s question so much as blows it up: when you honestly shoot atrocities, how does that put you on the side of the perpetrator?
It’s one of many telling moments in the film, composed entirely of still images from Bar-Am’s sixty-plus years photographing his fledgling nation and the events that have impacted its charged sense of self. The man who comes across is tortured and protective, unadorned in his communications and incapable of expressing physical affection. Yet as Tal reveals without comment, to interpret his character as misanthropic does him and his art a great disservice. For decades, the photographer’s sixth sense guided him to record some of the most disturbing moments from the region, and while he maintains an emotional distance now, they broke him. Whether his memory is truly haphazard or it’s a defensive mechanism is ultimately unknowable, but the man seen here, damaged goods and all, can’t be accused of choosing sides.
He was born Michael Anguli in Berlin, emigrating to Palestine when a child; on reaching adulthood he changed his surname to Bar-Am, Hebrew for “Son of the Nation.” Like a good Zionist he worked to build the new country of Israel, becoming a professional photographer in the 1950s and first making a name for himself shooting the 1956 war with Egypt in the Sinai. His big break came in 1961 when he was assigned to shoot the Adolf Eichmann trial; Orna claims the experience didn’t affect him at all, but then he talks about going to the Far East to shake off the aftereffects, which makes the viewer realize that Orna’s not simply the caretaker of her husband’s corpus but the tenacious guardian of his legacy.
Micha and Orna were sweethearts when she was still in high school, but then she had an unsuccessful first marriage before becoming Mrs. Bar-Am and her husband’s secretary, archivist and gatekeeper, rigorously keeping his papers in order and labelling the contact sheets with Dymo Tape. They contradict each other a lot in the voiceover commentary, her sharp interjections regularly slicing through the film, and yet clearly theirs is a symbiotic relationship, so deeply entwined that the two sons heard on the soundtrack talk about a homelife lacking paternal warmth and rife with tension. Bar-Am’s work came first, always: photos of the kids were afterthoughts, taken to finish up the tail ends of film rolls.
In 1968 he joined Magnum, a natural stable for his aesthetic which, like that of his friend Cornell Capa, melds the immediacy of photojournalism with an acute understanding of the way light and shadow contribute to a story’s potency. A celebrated example is an image he took in ’67 of a soldier at the Western Wall after Israel captured all of Jerusalem, his ammunition belt worn over his shoulders like a prayer shawl. Yes it’s a powerful composition that speaks of the struggle to conquer what the State considered its birthright, but the juxtaposition of bullets and religion leaves a queasiness that, as so often in Bar-Am’s work, destabilizes the viewer.
“Sometimes the most horrific things are aesthetic. Goya recognized the affinity between art and the atrocity of war,” states Bar-Am early on, proving that when he wants to he can articulate, at least intellectually, his approach to photojournalism. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War left a painful mental scar (Orna says that most of the images he took then are kept by the Israeli Defense Force under lock and key), compounded later on by the invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila Massacres; even his wife expresses surprised admiration that he managed to put his shattered psyche back together. An unaddressed yet very present theme in 1341 Frames is Micha’s relationship to Zionism and how that’s changed over the years, when fierce loyalty to the Jewish State slammed up against atrocities too disturbing to process – by refusing to discuss it he’s able to conceal his disillusionment, which remains unacknowledged but present in the work itself.
Many of Tal’s previous documentaries utilize offscreen voiceovers, but this is the first where it’s all asynchronous sound and the only moving footage is someone else’s. The photographs on screen flash by, sometimes every eight to ten seconds, sometimes more often, but somehow the rhythm works (kudos to editor Nili Feller). In general the director is respectful of Bar-Am’s images, but occasionally he zooms in, presumably to make the film feel more dynamic; in doing so he ignores the photographer’s careful compositions, treating them as historical objects rather than art. It’s a mistake, fortunately not repeated very often.
Director: Ran Tal
With: Micha Bar-Am, Orna Bar-Am, Barak Bar-Am, Nimrod Bar-Am
Producers: Ran Tal, Sarig Peker
Executive producers: Yael Melamede, Nancy Pomagrin, Guy Lavie, Keren Gleicher, Danna Stern
Editing: Nili Feller
Sound: Aviv Aldema
Production company: Grapevine Shoot Productions (UK), Salty Features (US), with the support of yesDOCU (Israel)
World sales: Reservoir Docs
Venue: Berlinale (Berlinale Special)
In Hebrew
89 minutes
