In fiction films, the journalist is almost always the hero. In Peter Weir’s YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, Mel Gibson is not only a journalist in Indonesia, he is a sex symbol. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are the reporters who bring down a sitting president in ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, and in Roger Spottiswode’s UNDER FIRE, Gene Hackman, Nick Nolte and Joanna Cassidy cover the last days of the war in Nicaragua. News reporting becomes positively seductive when invested with the star factor.

In Marcel Ophuls’ little-known documentary, THE TROUBLES WE’VE SEEN: A HISTORY OF JOURNALISM IN WARTIME, the heroes are often paper. Ophuls, best known for his landmark documentaries The Sorrow and the Pity and Memory of Justice went to wartime Bosnia in the early 1990’s during the siege of Sarajevo. His film doesn’t focus on the war, but on how the war is reported and how the war’s reality on the ground gets filtered. The issues he brings out serve like a template for the evolution of war reporting in the first and second invasions of Iraq.

War, says Ophuls, is almost always told from the perspective of the victors. The reporters’ isolation is the key factor. Journalists in Bosnia, says Ophuls, almost always travelled inside armored vehicles for their own personal safety. But this gave them little contact with the real situation on the ground or contact with the people of Sarajevo. Instead, they relied on briefings from the military. As television news coverage gained ground over print journalism, these briefings became more visual, giving the reporters the show-and-tell they needed for their broadcasts. In a moment which is almost comic, a TV reporter stands on top of a crate on the roof of his hotel for his stand-up report so that the image of Sarajevo can better frame the image. The manipulation of the image is not too distant from that of a TV weather man, who, in real life, points to a green screen rather than to the graphically-imaged map we are seeing on the TV screen.

In another episode, an American newspaper reporter in Sarajevo goes to the local market and peeks into the grocery bag of an old woman in order to report on the quality of her life. In another moment, the president of Serbia convincingly tells Ophuls that freedom of the press in Serbia is “unparalleled.”

What makes THE TROUBLES WE’VE SEEN so disconcerting is seeing the journalists isolated on the one hand and made into artificially-modeled television stars on the other. Ophuls’ point is that wartime reporting now revolves around the image of the reporter or the television anchor. This obsession is driven by ratings and the drive to have news produce profits. In what is almost a preview of what-was-to-come, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, a famous French television anchor, comes to Sarajevo for 24 hours fully decked out in a flak jacket and military gear.

The nearly four-hour THE TORUBLES WE’VE SEEN is riveting not only for Ophuls’ analysis of the issues, but for the personal way he injects himself inside the story. Ophuls is also the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, who worked both in Hollywood and in Europe, and is perhaps best known for his classics THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE…and LOLA MONTES. Marcel begins his documentary with a clip from his father’s feature FROM MAYERLING TO SARAJEVO, the last film Max Ophuls completed in France before fleeing the Nazis for America.  At the center of MAYERLING is the love affair between Countess Sophie and Archduke Ferdinand. The assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, where Marcel Ophuls now finds himself, precipitated World War I. For Ophuls, this represents the fate of history.

Finding for THE TROUBLES WE’VE SEEN was difficult to piece together, and we see Ophuls, out of Sarajevo, in a Vienna hotel room with a pretty young woman, on the phone with Bertrand Tavernier and the late actor Philippe Noiret, both of whom supported Ophuls’ production.

These small diversions from the grim reality of shell-shocked Sarajevo and Ophuls’ philosophical inquiry into the nature of wartime truth may seem off-putting at first. But on reflection they underscore just how death and the tragedy of war go on alongside our ordinary lives --- as if the news of wartime constitute a kind of parallel universe which enters and exits our everyday consciousness. 

“The first casualty of war is the truth,” represents Ophuls’ amplification of historian Philip Knightley’s dictum, but the loss of truth has been ratcheted up to a new level. Today’s wars are on two fronts: the real war on the ground, and the war we see, filtered through a system of corporate media

The lesson of THE TROUBLES WE”VE SEEN is this: who controls the image controls the universe.

The subject of Christian Frei’s WAR PHOTOGRAPHER, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature is veteran war photographer James Nachtwey. The film follows Nachtwey for two years into wars in Indonesia, Kosovo and Palestine. Many regard Nachtwey as the bravest war photographer ever. To capture Nachtwey in action, Frei equipped him with a special micro-camera that was attached to Nachtwey’s still camera. In this way, the point-of-view of the audience is the same as that of the war photographer himself.

On his website, Nachtwey says “I have been a witness and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.”

But despite Nachtwey’s unquestionable bravery in “getting” the wartime image and recording it, there is something troubling about capturing and crafting a beautiful image out of the horrific situations Nachtwey encounters. As the tragic beauty of Nachtwey’s image seduces us, the pain suffered by the photograph’s subject is crystallized into an abstraction. Like the corporate media shaping war into journalistic stardom, the art of the photograph obscures the pain of those on the other side of the camera…

Milos Stehlik’s commentaries reflect his own views and not necessarily those of Facets Multimedia, Worldview or Chicago Public Radio.