A film about war photographer Lee Miller: She wants to document horror

In “The Photographer,” Ellen Kuras portrays the colorful life of Lee Miller, with Kate Winslet leading the film with passion.

A Woman’s View of War: Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in ‘The Photographer’ Photo: Studio Canal

There is a difference between ‘gaze’ and ‘seeing’. ‘Gaze’ means not only looking, but also looking. He describes the ‘male gaze’ as the way (heterosexual) men perceive the female body and portray it as artists, directors, and cameramen. The ‘male gaze’ is sometimes characterized by male selfish desires and objectifies the female body. On the other hand, ‘seeing’ raises questions about the viewer’s intentions. It describes attitudes as well as appearances. A different “point of view”, a different perspective can broaden your perspective, especially if it is the “female point of view” that has long played a secondary role in explaining our world.

It is true that our society urgently needs to become more aware of these differences and their importance, because when we report, publish, and tell stories, the sovereignty of interpretation is always important. What is conveyed is important. The choice itself is a subjective decision.

The World War II photographs taken in the so-called Territorial Auxiliary Women’s Quarters, with women’s underwear, stockings, underpants, and bras strewn across the barracks windows, are a great way to broaden your horizons. They prove how universal and everyday the horrors of war can sometimes be. And how deeply they penetrate the intimacy of the “losers” as well as the “winners.”

This photo is also ‘evidence’. It is one of the photos that made former model Lee Miller world-famous as a (war) photographer. Ellen Kuras’ biopic “Lee” (German title “The Photographer”) is based on an interview Miller (Kate Winslet) gives to a young man named Tony (Josh O’Connor) decades after the war.

Boredom with “beauty”.

The story begins with Miller, an established photographer who is now tired of “beauty”, indulging in a bohemian life in the Cornish mountains with his free-spirited friends, the Surrealist artists Paul and Nouch Eluard (Vincent Colombe, Noémie Merlant). It is the eve of Hitler, but the artists of the time were particularly unaware of the danger. Half-naked people gather around long wine and cheese tables in picturesque gardens, chatting slyly, watching newsreels while smoking cigarettes, and never believing that “ugly Nazis” would develop such power.

When British art collector and artist Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) completes his illustrious group, Lee, disillusioned despite his hedonism and having married another man, comes to realize this. A great love develops between the two, which becomes the greatest love of both their lives.

But World War II begins with Germany’s invasion of Poland, in violation of international law. And the more Europe becomes involved and suffers in this war, the more Film-Miller feels the need to put his skills to the service of the Allies. English One popularity After some initial setbacks in the form of feminist editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), Miller prints images of women wearing protective masks influenced by Surrealism, or elegant models standing before maps of war theaters.

In 1940, the Blitz turned Britain into a battlefield, but the British government, considering the “inherent journalism” as well, did not allow the photographer, who now lives in London with Penrose, to travel to the front lines for security reasons. It’s dangerous for women. The US government is different. It provides identity through an American passport. With her close friend, American photographer David Sherman (Andy Samberg), she travels to the heart of the war, looking into the suffering and pain of the dormitories, barracks, and makeshift medical tents, taking pictures of the incomprehensible. And she sends the pictures to her trusted friend Audrey.

On the topic of ‘photographed’

<이>Director Kuras, who directed her first feature, looks back on her long career as a cameraman and approaches the subject of the ‘photographed picture’ in a similar way to many directors before her. Using famous snapshots or staged photographs, she guides the audience through Lee’s experiences until the end of the war, captured in iconic moments of a completely different nature; the moments after his suicide in the bunker, which perfectly captures the surreal elements; and the images of the unspeakable atrocities of the POW camps.

Despite the significance of these photographs and the authentic camerawork of Paweł Edelman, which changes from gorgeous and wide to colorful and painfully narrow and gray as the war unfolds, Kuras allows her protagonist very little of her own dramaturgy. From the beginning, she knows what she wants, because Lee is “on the right side.” Kuras allows her protagonist to become a war reporter for moral reasons: she wants to document the horror. What grows is a trauma that Lee, like so many other witnesses, will never leave.

Her feminine gaze, and that of the ordinary war correspondent, still persists and is relevant, but it is explored in a more focused and ambivalent narrative approach than in Kuras’s feature film, both in book and documentary form, and in Judith Mackrell’s nonfiction book Women at the Front about Miller and Martha Gellhorn, Helen Kirkpatrick and colleagues like Clare Hollingworth, which can be found in much of the early work. You can see the protagonist’s passion for war.

And in Luzia Schmid’s documentary “Three Women – War”, which will be broadcast on television in 2023, only the original diaries and letters of the journalists Miller, Gellhorn and Margaret Bourke-White are quoted on an audio level. The people depicted also express enthusiastic excitement at first. Their joyful enthusiasm for the war gradually changes into fear, horror, despair. Her “gaze” changes, an uneasy “gaze” appears in the face of unfathomable horror. Kuras owes this transformation to the protagonist.

Winslet’s constant “tantrums”

Despite the narrative simplification, “Lee” still manages to be driven by leading lady Kate Winslet’s passion, her absolute trust in the story, a fair amount of constant “snarkyness” she gives Lee, and – you hear – a lot of capital investment: Winslet had to stop filming, so she paid for several weeks out of her own pocket.