"Every minute I was there, I wanted to flee. I did not want to see this. Would I cut and run, or would I deal with the responsibility of being there with a camera?", James Nachtwey wonders. In one of the world’s countless crisis zones, surrounded by death, violence and chaos, war photographer James Nachtwey makes use of the power of the image to tell his story. This calm, thoughtful man is remarkably candid about his fears and struggles.

Director Christian Frei spent two years following him at work in Kosovo, Indonesia and Palestine. Frei attached a miniature film camera to Nachtwey’s single-lens reflex camera, allowing us to watch and think while Nachtwey is taking his photographs; a direct, first-person perspective that lets us hear every breath the photographer takes.

Garrett Bradley

This film was selected by American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley, subject of an exhibition in Eye. About her film selection she says:

There exists in this constellation of films, something that shaped me as I emerged in the world, a terrible and beautiful symmetry—a series of visions that reflect not only the abyss of human ignorance and the convulsions of violent power, but also the quiet, stubborn radiance of resistance.

These sacred dispatches from the edges of human consciousness, are a bulwark against the erasure of memory. When art is silenced, the past is sterilized, the present flattened into obedience, and the future, a barren repetition of sanctioned myths. A singular narrative emerges, one that dares not confront its own ugliness, nor the courage to imagine beyond it.

These works are not mere entertainment (although some were commissioned as such); they are fever-dreams of our shared condition, how we stagger beneath the weight of history and yet still raise our heads to dream. I return to them again and again as a reminder that though the world is often cruel, our collective capacity to endure, to fight, and to imagine something better is a defiance so profound it borders on the sublime.

Lovely Rita

Jessica Hausner / AT, 2001 / 79 min.

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Nuri Bilge Ceylan

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