The Bang Bang Club

The really successful thing about the movie is that the director apparently (I wasn't there to know how truthfully) managed to reproduce in a convincing, graphic manner the real atmosphere of combat photograph shooting. What Marinovich (and Silva) wrote down as separate accounts of the events, tensions and dangers of taking the most striking and memorable photographs, Silver just develops in well-organized scenes. Greg's crazy visit to the hostel - the step that brought him into the "club" and turned him into a world-renowned photographer - was particularly dramatic and colorful. Otherwise, the movie has not created any story of its own - it just has just patched up the highlights in Marinovich and Silva's book and bound them together within the loose frames of a dull and uninspiring story of the four "bang bang club" photographers meeting, working together and coping with the existential and ethical issues of their vocation. Perhaps Silver did not want to manipulate Marinovich's text; the outcome, however, is rather insipid and people who have just watched the movie and never read the book may very well miss the point.