Movies |
A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuscinski
directed by Gabrielle Pfeiffer
By
Published: Dec 14, 2011
Category:
Documentary
Over 40 years, he covered 27 revolutions and coups, mostly in Africa.
He was sentenced to death four times.
John Le Carre: “He is the conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage.”
This can only be Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist sometimes known as "Indiana Jones with a notepad.”
I was about to write “popularly known,” but the thing is, few real journalists are well known and Kapuscinski is, in this country, almost completely unknown. His books are, mercifully, still in print — I’d start with Shah of Shahs and The Emperor — but maybe the best place to start is not his writing but a terrific, hour-long documentary film. (To buy “A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuscinski” from Amazon, click here.)
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Gabrielle Pfeiffer’s film is a love letter to a rare heroic figure — a journalist who spent his life in hotel rooms. An action junkie? So not. As he confesses in this film, the high point of most of his days was the 9 PM telex from Warsaw; for at least a few moments, he had someone from home on the line.
Home. That’s a heavy thing for Kapuscinski, born in Pinsk in the early 1930s. He was 7 when the Germans invaded. He saw men executed. He knew what it was to hide, to flee.
And thus, for him, war was normal. It’s what life is. Death. Child soldiers. Refugees.
Reality: “A billion people capable of work with nothing to do — for the rest of their lives. They’re idle spectators of their own misfortunes.”
Challenge: "We who went through the war know how difficult it is to convey the truth about it to those for whom that experience is, happily, unfamiliar. We know how language fails us, how often we feel helpless, how the experience is, finally, incommunicable."
Triumph: Kapuscinski may have written about, say, an oppressive government, but everyone who read him in Poland knew his writing worked even better as an indictment of their Communist masters. How amazing is that: Under the guise of journalism, a writer commits allegory — and there’s nothing the censors can do about it.
Kapuscinski’s method was to keep two notebooks. One was for the articles he would send off nightly to the Polish news agency. (It’s like a Polish joke: For decades, he was Poland’s only foreign correspondent.) The other he filled with impressions and phrases for the books he’d write. Like the man in Ethiopia who, every morning, painted over the blood on the walls of the torture cells. “They kill millions of people,” Kapuscinski notes, “and no visible traces are left.”
He talks about collage, about piecing stories together, and Pfeiffer builds her film in that form. She starts in Poland, as Kapuscinski revisits his childhood. But soon enough we are in a hotel room, watching cigarette smoke curl toward the ceiling. Why did he smoke? “Because it means I’m not alone in an empty room. Something is moving.”
Kapuscinski was a genial man. No, he says, he does not love risks; every time he takes one, he tells God he will never do it again. Yes, he insists, he’s optimistic; tyrants fall. Being sentenced to death? “I do not talk about this. Ever.” A smile. “Next question, please.”
A good reason to see this film is as a primer to Kapuscinski’s writing. the best reason is to see what you can take away from it. I wrote this down: “Poetry is a defense against tyranny. Living together is a defense against tyranny.”
Great writer. Fascinating man. Powerful film.
