Excerpt from
New York Times
Article:
When Images Take on Lives of Their Ownhttp://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.
”