- Andrew Sullivan in “When Reporters Die,” reflecting on the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya.
Sullivan also wrote:
Hetherington’s Restrepo is easily the finest film on the US intervention in Afghanistan. If you haven’t seen it, stream it, rent it, Netflix it. It was far too good to win an Oscar. And its magnificence comes from its directorial restraint. Somehow, Hetherington and Sebastian Junger managed to take themselves out of the picture altogether, and allowed the events, the faces, the human beings to tell their own story with the cumulative power that actual reality television or film-making requires.
I absolutely agree.
Full disclosure: Before seeing the film, I tweeted something harsh about Hetherington telling an interviewer that “we live in a post-photographic world.” It’s tacky to bring that up. It’s tackier, I think, to pretend now that I never criticized Hetherington. Even so, I’m going to link to the interview itself instead of my stale tweet about a single sentence from the interview. In the rest of the interview, Hetherington fleshed his idea out in various ways, including this:
… if the event is visually interesting enough, I will take a picture. If the event isn’t visually interesting enough on its own, then it’s probably significant for video, because it is contextualized with sound. So, usually, my default is video. I can be approaching something photographically, then know I’ve made the picture and pick up the video camera. It’s gotten pretty crazy; kind of like John Wayne. I used to attach the two cameras with carabiners to my jacket because then you can drop the camera and it won’t fall. So I would be hooked up and shooting. It’s pretty ridiculous.
