Excerpt from New York Times <BLOCKED::http://www.nytimes.com> Article: When Images Take on Lives of Their Own http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/movies/09icon.html <BLOCKED::http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/movies/09icon.html> This documentary by Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman about four World Press Photo contest winners defines icon to mean a still image so searing that it supplants memories of the event it was supposed to record. The selected pictures pass the test: a South Vietnamese brigadier general executing a Vietcong guerrilla in 1968; a 1973 image of President Salvador Allende of Chile, soon to be assassinated; the 1989 snapshot of a Chinese protestor blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square; and a 1991 Gulf War photograph of a United States soldier in a helicopter, weeping near the body of his best friend. The film offers vivid thumbnails of the stories behind the pictures. It notes, for example, that Eddie Adams, the Associated Press photographer whose execution image became an antiwar touchstone, supported intervention in Vietnam and regretted that his photograph made the killer - his friend Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then serving as the national police chief of South Vietnam - seem coldblooded. Mr. Adams believed he was a decent man who snapped under pressure. The movie also considers the tendency by news photographers to mimic the compositions of other famous images, as well as influential paintings that predate film. This aspect makes "The Day You'll Love Me," a short film appearing with "Looking for an Icon," a smart companion. It's Leandro Katz's examination of Freddy Alborta's 1967 picture of Che Guevara's corpse, which the art critic John Berger likened to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp." LOOKING FOR AN ICON Opens today in Manhattan. Directed by Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman; director of photography, Mr. Pool; edited by Mr. Pool and Mr. Krijgsman; produced by Frank de Jonge; released by First Run/Icarus Films. Running time: 55 minutes. Shown with "The Day You'll Love Me," a 30-minute Spanish- and English-language documentary directed by Leandro Katz, at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. These films are not rated. ”