• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: film

The Hungarian Photographer Who Stormed Omaha Beach

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, Photography, War

≈ Comments Off on The Hungarian Photographer Who Stormed Omaha Beach

Tags

Adolf Hitler, battle, combat, Combat Photography, D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower, English Channel, film, France, Invasion, Life Magazine, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Photography, Propaganda, Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, Soldiers, Spanish Civil War, Steven Spielberg, War, War Correspondent, World War Two

D-Day Invasion

“I would have to make up my mind and choose a barge to ride in… On the one hand, the objectives of Company B looked interesting, and to go along with them seemed a pretty safe bet. Then again, I used to know Company E very well and the story I had got with them in Sicily was one of my best in the war…

If at this point my son should interrupt me, and ask, ‘What is the difference between the war correspondent and any other man in uniform?’ I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay and greater freedom than the soldier… The war correspondent has his stake — his life — in his own hands and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.

I am a gambler. I decided to go with Company E in the first wave.

Once I decided to go in with the first assault troops I began to convince myself that the invasion would be a pushover and that all this talk about an ‘impregnable west wall’ was just German propaganda. I went up on deck and took a good look at the disappearing English coast. The pale green glow of the vanishing island hit my soft spot and I joined the legion of the last-letter-writers. My brother could have my ski boots and my mother could invite someone from England to stay with her. The idea was disgusting, and I never mailed the letter. I folded it up, and stuck it in my breast pocket…

They fixed a gas mask, and inflatable lifebelt, a shovel, and some other gadgets around me, and I placed my very expensive Burberry raincoat over my arm. I was the most elegant invader of them all… The coast of Normandy was still miles away when the first unmistakable popping reached our listening ears. We ducked down in the puky water at the bottom of the barge and ceased to watch the approaching coastline… It was now light enough to start taking pictures and I brought my first Contax camera out of its waterproof oilskin. The flat bottom of our barge hit the earth of France. The boatswain lowered the steel-covered barge front, and there, between the grotesque designs of steel obstacles sticking out of the water, was a thin line of land covered with smoke — our Europe, the “Easy Red” beach.

My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return. The men from my barge waded in the water. Waist deep, with rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking beach in the background — this was good enough for the photographer. I paused for a moment on the gangplank to take my first real picture of the invasion. The boatswain, who was in an understandable hurry to get the hell out of there, mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation, and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear. The water was cold, and the beach still more than a hundred yards away. The bullets tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the nearest steel obstacle.

A soldier got there at the same time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover. He took off the waterproofing of his rifle and began to shoot without much aiming at the smoke-hidden beach. The sound of his rifle gave him enough courage to to move forward and he left the obstacle to me. It was a foot larger now and I felt safe enough to take pictures of the other guys hiding just as I was. It was still very early and very gray for good pictures, but the gray water and the gray sky made the little men, dodging under the surrealistic designs of Hitler’s anti-invasion brain trust, very effective.

I finished my pictures, and the sea was cold in my trousers. Reluctantly, I tried to move away from my steel pole, but the bullets chased me back every time. Fifty yards ahead of me, one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks stuck out of the water and offered me my next cover. I sized up the moment. There was little future for the elegant raincoat heavy on my arm. I dropped it and made for the tank. Between floating bodies I reached it, paused for a few more pictures, and gathered my guts for the last jump to the beach.

Now the Germans played on all their instruments, and I could not find any hole between the shells and bullets that blocked the last twenty-five yards to the beach, I just stayed behind my tank, repeating a little sentence from my Spanish Civil War days, ‘Es una cosa muy seria. Es una cosa muy seria.’ This is a very serious business.

The tide was coming in and now the water reached the farewell letter to my family in my breast pocket. Behind the human cover of the last two guys, I reached the beach. I threw myself flat and my lips touched the earth of France. I had no desire to kiss it.”

Robert Capa

__________

A section from Robert Capa’s memoir of World War Two, Slightly Out of Focus.

70 years ago today, Capa trudged up the French coast to capture the first and only photographs of the opening assault on Omaha Beach. He used a pair of Contax II cameras mounted with 50mm lenses to snap a total of 106 pictures in the first two hours of the invasion. But only eleven frames would survive. No, they did not get lost in the skirmish, shot through by a German gunner, or sink to the bottom of the English Channel. They melted at the Life Magazine offices in London, after a fifteen-year-old lab assistant set the dryer too high, bleaching the emulsion in the negatives of three and a half of Capa’s four film rolls.

The surviving photos, which would soon come to be known as “The Magnificent Eleven,” are the sole visual record of the invasion and some of the most striking combat photography ever captured. They were printed in the July 19th Life Magazine article “The Beachheads of Normandy,” with a fitting caption, “slightly out of focus,” which Capa later came to think of as a metaphor for his memory of wartime — so it became the title of his book.

Robert Capa and Gerda Taro Robert Capa - D-Day Normandy Robert Capa - D-Day Normandy Robert Capa - Soldier - Spanish Civil WarRobert Capa

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

‘Addiction Is No Respecter of Persons’: Will Self on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Demise

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Film, Interview

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Acting, Actor, Addiction, BBC, Drug Use, Drugs, film, Heroin, interview, Jeremy Paxman, movies, Narcotics, Newsnight, Opiates, Overdose, Philip Seymour Hoffman, tragedy, Will Self

Will Self


Jeremy Paxman: Do you understand [Philip Seymour Hoffman’s] involvement with drugs?

Will Self: Well addiction’s no respecter of persons. You know there’s hardly anywhere you can point a finger, high or low in our society, and not hit somebody who’s got addiction issues. Heroin is a drug that we associate most strongly with addiction, but people can be addicted to all sorts of things. I think the fact that heroin was involved with his death is what people find very shocking, largely because of the image that heroin has in our culture…

The old sawhorse of whether the fact he was such an amazing actor was in some way connected to his drug use – or the pressures of his life led to his drug use – I dare say that’s in the mix, but you know, you can go to any poor or deprived part of our country, and throw a stick and you’ll hit somebody who’s got a heroin habit.

JP: It’s interesting, it’s often represented as a sort of loser’s drug, which is the environment that you are talking about there. By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser.

WS: No, and as I say, you will find heroin addicts in every walk of life. But I think in America, in particular, there’s a very strange culture surrounding opiate drugs, which is the broader family of drugs of which heroin is one.

JP: What’s heroin like?

WS: You’re asking me personally?

I think that for people who don’t have a kind of need to be anesthetized, it probably is experienced as, yes, euphoric, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel a pull towards taking it again.

One of the strange things is that most of the people watching us now, at some time or other, will take medical diamorphine, which is heroin. And if they’re in pain, they’ll experience simply the removal of the pain.

JP: But it’s not instantly addictive though.

WS: No, it takes a fairly concerted effort to get addicted to opiate drugs, so you can say that people who do become addicted, maybe they’ve got a predisposition to it, but they have to make some decisions. They have to kind of decide to take it…

JP: But apparently he spent 20 years clean.

WS: Yes, that may well be true. Of course we don’t know whether he had other addictive behaviors that, so to speak, kept the addiction dormant.

I think that the way this story is being reported suggests this idea that addiction’s like a kind of ugly spirit that was cowed and pushed into the background, and then it reared up again in that way. I’m not sure that’s a very useful approach; it seems a rather medieval perception of it. But we don’t know what lead to him being in that situation. Again, very sadly, and this is only supposition, often with people who return to using heroin after a long period of abstinence, they can’t judge the dose. This happens quite frequently…

Philip Seymour Hoffman

__________

Will Self and Jeremy Paxman, talking last week on BBC Newsnight about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I recommend watching the remainder of this five minute interview for two primary reasons. First, Self is one of the more naturally expressive cultural commentators out there — and not only that, he’s a former heroin addict. Because of this, we must be extremely careful when weighing his words on this topic, especially those on the question of whether Hoffman’s creative genius was tied to his drug use, given that this riff could be a thinly veiled absolution of Self’s own related sins.

While I understand those who may take it this way — as a bit of self-justification designed to soften any critiques of his parallel personal history — I am inclined to take Self’s analysis as instructive, if also with a large grain of salt. His experience with the stuff colors his perception of it, sure, but it also means he knows more about it than I do. This is why the testimonies of sinners are always more powerful than those of saints: only they can say “I’ve been there” with a straight face.

I think it is also worth commending both Self and Paxman for the sobriety and gravity which they lend to this topic. So often, untimely celebrity deaths mark occasions for saccharine tributes and tabloid prying. So rarely do we recognize what we’ve lost and what we can learn. Yet notice how Paxman says “By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser”; his voice registers the brilliance of Hoffman, the brutality of his demise, and how these two facts combine to cast a piteous shadow over the entire event. Hoffman’s death is devastating because he was a father, a son, and one of the most incandescently brilliant actors of our time. But it is also a moment for reflection because tragedies, unlike happy endings, are also the most dramatic lessons.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

It’s Like You Go To the Beach

01 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Film

≈ Comments Off on It’s Like You Go To the Beach

Tags

Changing Lanes, film, Roger Michell

Kildare Beach

“It’s like you go to the beach. You go down to the water. It’s a little cold. You’re not sure you want to go in. There’s a pretty girl standing next to you. She doesn’t want to go in either. She sees you, and you know that if you just asked her her name, you would leave with her. Forget your life, whoever you came with, and leave the beach with her. And after that day, you remember. Not every day, every week… she comes back to you. It’s the memory of another life you could have had. Today is that girl.”

__________

From an underrated and unfairly ignored movie, Roger Michell’s Changing Lanes.

The picture was taken on a stretch of roadside beach in County Kildare, Ireland.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Top Pages

  • "Every Day" by Tom Clark
    "Every Day" by Tom Clark
  • Einstein, Newton, Sagan: Science As Child's Play
    Einstein, Newton, Sagan: Science As Child's Play
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin
  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • 'Your Leaders Are Crazy': The Leaflet We Dropped on Nazi Germany
    'Your Leaders Are Crazy': The Leaflet We Dropped on Nazi Germany

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: