The Venice Film Festival opened this week with Danny Boyle’s Ink, which, while not strictly a documentary, deals with fundamental issues of truth in news reporting — is the news we consume always true, and is the truth necessarily always news? Alina Marazzi’s The Girl With The Leica, a jazzed-up, unconventional biopic of the late photojournalist Gerda Taro — who died while covering the Spanish Civil at the age of 26 — poses a slightly more specific question about war reporting, in particular the fine line between bravery and ego in the process of bringing back dispatches from the front line.
In that sense, there’s quite a lot of crossover with Ellen Kuras’s 2023 film Lee, which starred Kate Winslet as World War Two photojournalist Lee Miller, and while Marazzi has done her best to make her film stylistically different, the similarities will likely make it harder for her film to find an audience. Add to that the constant but often confusing zipping around between countries and time periods — the film only really covers five years in Taro’s life — and a trio of men kept dangling on string (Taro literally suggests in voiceover that her private life was also a battlefield) and you have a film that over-complicates a simple yet quite profound meditation on an artist’s identity and legacy.
The film starts in Paris but Taro’s story begins in her native Leipzig in 1932, where Gerta Pohorylle, as she is then known, is a young woman whose political conscience is awakened by the rise of fascism. Taro (Emilia Schüle) dances to manic jazz and attends rousing left-wing sermons in nicotine-stained coffee bars, plastering the streets with illegal anti-Nazi posters. The pressure is becoming too much to bear, and one by one her circle of friends decamp to the only slightly safer environs of pre-war Paris. The Leipzig scenes are both ephemeral and integral; later, Taro will speculate that if the Germans had had the same revolutionary zeal as the Spanish, Hitler might have been defeated.
In Paris, after living in near-poverty with her best friend Ruth, she meets Endre Friedmann (Aaron Altaras), a Hungarian photographer who takes Taro on as his assistant and eventually his protégé. It is Taro that devises a whole new identity not just for herself (as Taro) but for Friedmann, who is henceforth to be known as Robert Capa, a mysterious American playboy figure with Italian roots. Together, Taro and Capa blaze a trail in war reporting, documenting the Spanish Civil War with photographs depicting the ordinary the men and women who are fighting, the latter inspiring Taro to adopt the blue jumpsuit that became her signature.
Capa and Taro worked as one, with Capa taking most of the credit, but the film doesn’t seem very interested in that. Taro is not in it for the glory, she sees her job as “taking part in history”, but the inherent sexism of the wider world does not pass her by (“To photograph means I exist,” she muses, “but the world only sees Capa”). The duo’s work features heavily throughout, and Marazzi leans heavily on archive footage, even weaving in sections of then-contemporary avant-garde films such as the Bertolt Brecht-scripted Kuhle Wampe, Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante and Joris Ivans’ The Spanish Earth, narrated by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is a useful touchstone, it transpires, reflected Taro’s growing — and increasingly romantic — obsession with the Spanish cause.
There are, inevitably, lots of conversations about photography, “the instant of the gaze”, and “the miracle of the Leica”, which, due to its compact size, allowed Capa and Taro to work almost unnoticed in the middle of a warzone. More satisfying, though, is the film’s sense of irony about photography as an artform: though a great photograph can endure, it can just as easily be lost to history, as, indeed, was a significant chunk of Taro’s work. Nothing illustrates this better than a scene in which Capa finds out that the love of his life is dead, killed by a tank, and he realizes to his horror that he only has two pictures of the two of them together. In that single moment, all pretension flies out of the window and we see photography in its purest, most human form: the need to hold on to a moment.
Title: The Girl With The Leica
Festival: Venice (Orizzonti)
Director: Alina Marazzi
Screenwriters: Alina Marazzi, Valia Santella, from the novel by by Helena Janeczek
Cast: Emilia Schüle, Aaron Altaras, Luna Wedler, Lucas Englander, Thomas Schubert, Sebastian Schneider, Idan Weiss, Lia von Blarer, Hans-Christian Hegewald, Jeremy Mockridge, Joel Basman
Sales: Fandango Sales
Running time: 1 hr 59 mins
