Never Look Away
The story of the remarkable photojournalist Margaret Moth is imperfectly told yet ultimately impressive.
Image courtesy of Kaleidoscope Films.
It is far more common than one would wish to find that a film starts well and then disappoints in its later stages but it is much more unusual when, as here, that happens in reverse. Never Look Away is a documentary that marks the directorial debut of the actress Lucy Lawless who also has a credit as one of the four writers concerned. Their subject matter – the life and work of the photojournalist Margaret Moth who died of cancer in 2010 – is a fascinating yet challenging one. How best to frame and develop Moth’s story when her own presence in it is limited to archive footage is a difficult question and I do not feel that the writers here have come up with an effective answer.
Born in New Zealand in 1951 as Margaret Wilson, she started her career as a camerawoman in that country in the 1970s while also developing early on a fondness for skydiving. In 1980s she would move to America and had by then opted to change her name to Margaret Gipsy Moth. In the years that followed she established a notable reputation for her work in conflict zones. Never Look Away shows footage from the early 1990s that comes from Kuwait, Sarajevo, Saudi Arabia and Georgia but the most remarkable aspect of Moth’s life lay in what came after that. Returning to Sarajevo in 1992 she was shot in the face and her jaw was shattered. For most people who survived that kind of injury it would have terminated their career but by 1994 Moth was back at work and, indeed, back in Sarajevo. In the following years she would be found as fearless as ever in such places as the West Bank and Lebanon.
Patently there is a powerful story to be told here and if Moth herself can only be seen in old footage her early death does mean that her siblings are present in the film to talk about her as are many of her work colleagues including Christiane Amanpour. From 1990 onwards she was a key worker for CNN and, despite the passage of time since her death, many Americans in particular will approach this film knowing of her but others won't be in that position. It is the case that early on in the film the CNN correspondent Stefano Kotsonis talks of his first assignment with her in Baghdad, but the approach adopted to tell Moth’s story is an odd one and it hardly grabs the attention if one is not already well informed about her.
The main presence early on – and not only then – is Jeff Russi who looks back on becoming Moth’s lover when he was seventeen and she was thirty. Already selling weed, he was fully transformed by this woman whose goth persona was linked with a lifestyle centred on acid trips, heroin and attendance at punk clubs. Russi thought their relationship was special, but Moth insisted that it be an open one in which she would keep her freedom. Eventually Moth would encounter a French sound recordist named Yaschinka – this was in Saudi Arabia in 1991 – and they too would enter into a significant relationship. Yaschinka is still around and like Russi he becomes a major contributor to the film referring to the fact that he also had a heroin habit and describing how at Moth’s insistence she was the one who worked and was the dominant figure in their shared lives. But allowing so much space to these two men means that Moth’s love life, hardly a subject of the greatest interest, is largely central throughout the first half-hour of Never Look Away. It is only after that that the film brings in her siblings who talk of the difficult childhood that they all had with harsh discipline, a father who treated them badly and a mother who was even more violent. Knowing all this helps us to understand Moth’s rejection of a standard married life (she never wanted children) and may help one to understand both her cynicism about life and the anger that many people detected within her.
However, one feels that this material should have been up front to draw one into her story. Once known it adds meaning to a comment that her camera was a spotlight on bad behaviour rather than being akin to a gun. Nevertheless, it is clear that Moth was a driven woman determined to record war in all its brutality. Even Kotsonis, who hates the idea of ever glamorising war, admits to finding it exciting to be there and the intoxication Moth seems to have found in it may well have had a dark side as well as revealing her bravery. One passing factor that is striking is that when covering Operation Desert Storm, she met and impressed General Norman Schwarzkopf who took a liking to her. The suggestion later on that she acted tough but was not really that way could be true but it's not wholly persuasive.
Letting the story of Margaret Moth unfold as it does here too often fails to draw us in to the full, but in the second half of the film the grip that has been missing earlier comes to the fore. First there is the detail in the account of her response to the near-fatal shooting: the lack of self-pity and the sheer determination to win through until she could continue her work as before bring a new weight to this portrait of her. Then, inevitably unplanned but no less powerful, there is the footage from Lebanon confirming the killing of civilians which speaks to us today with terrible irony because it is so close to what is happening now in Gaza despite Moth’s hope that her footage would be seen and thus prevent such things from ever being repeated. The last third of Never Look Away has all the power that it needs, but one is still left wishing that those writing the piece had found a more effective route into Margaret Moth’s story.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Jeff Russi, Yaschinka, Stefano Kotsonis, Christiane Amanpour, Joe Duran, Tom Johnson, Sausan Ghosheh, Peter Humi, Susan Stein, Jan Wilson, Shirley Wilson, Ross Wilson, and archive footage of Margaret Moth.
Dir Lucy Lawless, Pro Matthew Metcalfe, Tom Blackwell and Lucy Lawless, Screenplay Matthew Metcalfe Tom Blackwell, Lucy Lawless and Whetham Allpress, Ph Darryl Ward, and Jenna Boss, Ed Whetham Allpress and Tim Woodhouse, Music Jason Smith.
Ingenious Media/General Film Corporation-Kaleidoscope Films.
85 mins. New Zealand. 2024. US Rel: 22 November 2024. UK Rel: 29 November 2024 Cert. 15.
