This month we're into classic literature and films about war correspondents.

Books

Paris in Mind
edited by Jennifer Lee

Like the many faceted faces of a Picasso painting, Paris in Mind presents complex portraits of one of the world’s great cities. Lee is to be commended for her selections here; it would have been easy to merely choose the gushy, the adulatory pieces, but she picks some tough numbers to provide a well-rounded, thoughtful compilation, including James Baldwin’s account of the persecution of Algerians in Paris. Historical works by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin prove that Americans’ love affair with the City of Light is as old as our nation itself. This book is a must for any Francophile’s library, but a word of warning: it’s best read the way I did, while on an extended Parisian stay. Anything else would be more torturous foreplay than a reader could withstand. CM

Dubliners
by James Joyce

This classic by Joyce offers his deeply cynical views of what his homeland, Ireland, had become. A Dubliner himself, he left home at 23 and spent the rest of his life living on the Continent, variously in Zurich, Paris, and Trieste, while he wrote of life in Ireland. In this collection of short stories, his characters run the gamut of classes from prostitutes to the well-to-do, but in each portrait Joyce paints a picture of men and women who live life with a type of longing so poignant as to create a sense of physical suffering in the reader. And yet he handles this sorrow with such exquisite subtlety that the book should become a primer for any student of fiction. His deeply etched psychological sketches take a look at a human nature that goes far beyond geographical boundaries, to the core of the striving and vulnerability that binds us as a species. But Joyce has deliberately chosen the stories of sad, ineffectual, clumsy and delusional Dubliners, Dubliners who love their drink and who long for better days.

As an inspiration to beleaguered authors everywhere, let it be known that Joyce struggled for ten years to have Dubliners published. And at 26 he had the confidence to assure his publisher that his book was the only hope of saving civilization in Ireland, by giving his fellow countrymen, “one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.” Since civilization in Eire appears alive and well, it seems Mr. Joyce’s treatment may have worked. CM

Film

About War Correspondents
by Lisa Alpine

Speaking of embedded—a word forever grilled into our brains from the Iraq war—what war? was there a war?—here are some movies out in video that are about journalists covering war-torn countries. These flicks are not light-hearted and certainly don’t make me want to switch my venue from travel to the front-line, but I admire the guts and motivation it takes to report from dangerous places.

Harrison’s Flowers
Director Elie Chouraqui's graphic look at war-torn Yugoslavia adroitly mixes a gripping love story with unrelentingly violent scenes of the brutality of war. Serving up a realistic depiction of the dangerous work undergone by photojournalists and reporters deep inside hostile territory, Harrison's Flowers strikes a chilling chord - especially with the recent killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl still so fresh in our minds. Andie MacDowell does a fine job as the main character; however, Adrien Brody steals the film as Kyle Morris, a photojournalist who gets talked into helping Sarah travel into the most hazardous areas in search of Harrison. This film is dedicated to the 48 journalists that were killed in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995.

Welcome to Saravejo
Abjures the modern jargon of "the conflict" or "the peace process" and instead measures degrees of involvement and responsibility—individual choice, personal morality. "Big guns, little children, evil men, great television," says one character. But with a simmering intelligence, a discerning eye, restless focus and an unerring sense of how to place the camera as an eavesdropper, director Winterbottom's work is never less than compelling. Shot in Sarajevo in early 1996 as the Bosnian cease-fire began, Welcome to Sarajevo has a rare bravura, a work of passion that is also scrupulously thought out, both as fiction and as filmmaking.

Killing Fields
Dith Pran is an aid, translator and friend of two journalists who are covering the war in Cambodia. He saves them from execution but they in turn cannot save him. He is eventually exiled to the labor camps in Cambodia's countryside, where he endures four years of starvation, torture and war before escaping to Thailand. Based on the novel "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" by Sydney Schanberg.

Salvador
Richard Boyle and director Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay based on Boyle's experiences. James Woods plays Boyle, an out-of-work journalist who heads to El Salvador with his friend Dr. Rock (James Belushi) after his wife takes his son and leaves him. He convinces Rock that they can cover the "little guerrilla war" while enjoying drink, drugs and women. But once in the country, they realize the danger. Boyle and a photojournalist witness hundreds of bodies left to rot in the sun by right-wing death squads. Catholic Archbishop Romero is assassinated and three American nuns and another woman are raped and murdered. (like I said, not light-hearted but it is the truth of what happened.)

Under Fire
Nick Nolte is Russell Price, an American photojournalist covering the Nicaraguan revolution. Price meets Claire (Joanna Cassidy), a reporter for National Public Radio. They find themselves involved with revolutionaries and actually photograph a slain leader to make it appear that he is still alive. Network news anchor Alex Grazier (Gene Hackman) sees the photo and flies to the country to cover the story.

The Year of Living Dangerously
Directed by Peter Weir. Featuring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Murphy, Linda Hunt. Guy Hamilton, an ambitious Australian reporter on his first overseas assignment, is befriended by a short Eurasian cameraman who has connections in high places. Hamilton soon gains an entree to Indonesian Communist Party leaders, as well as insight into Jakarta's grim realities on the eve of a major political upheaval.

Foreign Correspondent
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Featuring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders. A naive reporter is dispatched to Europe on the eve of World War II to cover a pacifist conference in London, where a secret treaty between two European countries is supposedly being negotiated. Producer Walter Wanger brought the movie adaptation of war correspondent Vincent Sheehan's Personal History to the screen with Foreign Correspondent. Wanger stayed abreast of breaking news events all through the filming to keep the picture “hot.” The final scene, with the reporter broadcasting to America from London during a Nazi bombing attack, was filmed a short time after the actual London blitz.