Jacqui Morris (2012)
Don McCullin doesn’t smile much. At the start of this documentary, his seriousness is a bit alienating. After not very long, you understand, given what he’s seen as a photographer, why he’s solemn. McCullin, born in London in 1935, originally wanted to be an artist and his compositional sense is unfailing. Harold Evans, who, as editor of The Sunday Times, did much to promote McCullin’s work, rightly says it’s the combination of this sense and the ‘news’ quality of his photographs that makes them so remarkable. The framing doesn’t detract from their immediacy or make them artificial – it seems rather to capture the essence of the image more strongly. To take just two examples: shots of a dog in a jeep with Cypriot soldiers and of a frightened woman in Northern Ireland, caught in a doorway as paramilitaries lunge forward, both dramatise a situation and make McCullin’s record of it more natural and more powerfully individual. The quality is there from the very start of his career behind a camera – in 1959, when he photographed gangsters in Finsbury Park (where he was born and brought up – though you wouldn’t guess it from his accent).
Jacqui Morris concentrates mainly of course on McCullin’s work as a war photographer but there’s a delightful – and at the same time socially incisive – interlude of eccentric faces in England. The catalogue of wars between the early 1960s and the early 1980s is dismaying: I’d forgotten there were so many. Morris includes some powerful news film but McCullin’s pictures are the heart and the height and the depth of the film. Don McCullin comes across strongly as a man who has felt compelled to do this work – and often found it exciting – but who has also kept questioning the morality of his doing it. His descriptions of executions that he’s witnessed are gruelling. He talks eloquently about the anguished faces he’s captured which, moments away from death, seem to be asking for God’s help (the same help which McCullin, although he’s an atheist, admits that he too has sought in extremis).
The music by Alex Baranowski is too deliberately muted and melancholy. What you see and the rest of what you hear on the screen doesn’t need this underlining. And this documentary isn’t structurally ambitious – it’s essentially McCullin speaking to camera – even though it’s actually rather unusual in that Harold Evans is the only other talking head, and one who’s also well worth listening to (not least in his description of what happened to Times newspapers once Rupert Murdoch bought them). Jacqui Morris, whose husband David produced the film, also includes excerpts from an interview with McCullin on Parkinson. This is a reminder that, much as I disliked the programme, the guests, in the 1970s at least, did include people who weren’t stars and who had disquieting things to say. McCullin was shown in cinemas at the start of 2013 but we saw it as part of the latest series of Imagine this summer. (Alan Yentob referred in the introduction to McCullin’s recently going back to Aleppo – I assume after the Morrises’ film was completed.) The same Imagine season also included Robert B Weide’s documentary about Woody Allen (in its entirety – as originally screened on American television). Although it’s a pity the BBC aren’t prepared to commission entirely new programmes for Imagine, this is one way of getting good documentaries made for or about cinema onto television.
20 July 2013
