As reported on Wired.
BY JAKOB SCHILLER
Tim Hetherington. Photo: Courtesy of HBO
Tim Hetherington is trying to explain why he documents war. He launches into a cliché about violence and the “human experience” but quickly stops, laughs and says, “No, that sounds too fucking bullshit.”
It’s the opening scene from HBO’s new documentary about Hetherington called Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington. The film, which airs April 18, is a posthumous recounting of one of the most impressive photojournalism careers to date, directed by one of Hetherington’s close colleagues, Sebastian Junger.
In the scene, the camera stays on Hetherington as he stumbles a couple more times and then finally he relaxes and says, “I think the important thing for me is to connect with real people…. I hope that my work kind of shows that.”
Hetherington, who died in Misrata, Libya on April 20, 2011 in a mortar attack while covering the civil war, was well known for his creative and impassioned approach to documenting the human side of war, and it’s a theme that runs throughout the documentary.
Junger is a war reporter who spent a year with Hetherington in Afghanistan (starting in 2007) documenting a platoon of American troops stationed in the Korengal Valley. While living with the troops, the duo shot footage for the documentary they jointly directed called RESTREPO, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2011.
Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. Photo: Courtesy of HBO
“I think it is very easy in some ways for journalists to dehumanize other people, particularly people in third-world countries and war zones. I think it’s a self-protective mechanism because you don’t want to reconcile the suffering they’re going through,” Junger told Wired. “But Tim always refused to do that.”
Part remembrance, part biography, the film covers the three main episodes in Hetherington’s career. In 2003 he was one of only two foreign journalists who were behind rebel lines during the Liberian Civil War. Instead of leaving Liberia after the war ended, however, he stayed in West Africa for several more years, trying to tell related stories he cared about. Africa is where Hetherington cut his teeth as a war photographer and videographer and it’s also where he developed his particular style of war coverage.
“I have no desire to be a kind of war firefighter flying from war zone to war zone. I have no … really I don’t really care about photography. I have no interest in photography per se. I’m interested in reaching people with ideas and engaging them with views of the world,” Hetherington says in the film.
After Africa, the film moves to Afghanistan. During the year Hetherington spent with U.S. troops there he made several important pictures related to the violence, including the photo of an exhausted soldier that won the World Press Photo of the Year in 2007. But between the action, he also started documenting the camaraderie amongst the men. A camaraderie that shows through in one of his most famous sets of pictures that captures soldiers while they’re sleeping.
By highlighting these photos, Junger says the film tries to address a larger question Hetherington posed with his own work. Why are young men drawn to war? It’s something Hetherington first noticed in Liberia but was able to address more fully in Afghanistan.
“The war machine isn’t just technology and bombs and missiles and systems and this kind of CNN TV mediated world, the war machine is: Put a group of men together in extreme circumstances and get them to bond together and they will kill and be killed for each other,” Hetherington says about his attraction to the quieter moments of war.
Junger says Hetherington wanted to understand the relationship between men and violence because he knew it would help his viewers think more deeply about the human consequences of war. “I think that if you don’t understand what pulls young men toward war you don’t have a chance of ending it,” he told Wired.
Sections about Hetherington in Libya come at both at the beginning and the end of the film. As the film opens we see Hetherington and other photojournalists driving around Misrata and Hetherington asks, “Which way is the front line from here?” At the end of the film, the audience is led through the events on Hetherington’s final day.
Photojournalist Andre Liohn, who was with Hetherington for part of that day, raises questions about the decisions made by Hetherington and others that might have put them in unnecessary danger.
“I felt that they were not, you know, paying the proper attention and the proper respect to everything that was happening around. They were actually trying to get in front of the rebels,” he says.
According to the film, Hetherington and the group he was with had pushed into a building earlier in the day that felt unsafe to some of the photographers. When Hetherington was killed, the group he was with was on the front lines and were grouped together, instead of spread out, so when the mortar hit there were several casualties.
Junger says he included the interview with Liohn because the film, while accessible to a general audience, was made in some ways for other journalists. He hopes there are some lessons learned from Hetherington’s death.
“I can’t judge it because I wasn’t there,” Junger says. “All I can do is interview people who were there and get their take on what happened.”
It’s not addressed in the film, but Hetherington died from massive blood loss. Many people suspect that if the journalists he was with had better combat first aid training he might have lived. After learning Hetherington’s life might have been saved, Junger founded Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC), an organization that gives journalists combat medical training by simulating real war-injury scenarios.
Junger says he never set out to make a documentary about Hetherington, but after interviewing Hetherington’s friends at the memorial in New York he suddenly found himself with footage he wanted to use. Combined with the footage the duo shot in Afghanistan and the many interviews that other people shot of Hetherington, he knew he there was enough to make a film.
“I learned a lot from Tim,” Junger says. “Even though I was older than him he taught me a lot about life and helped me remember that I wasn’t just a journalist but also a human being.”