Capa in Berlin

Apart from not going to Christoph Schlingensiefs play (or rather, going, but walking out again), I also went to two exhibits in the 'Gropius Bau' in Berlin. One was an exhibition about Stanley Kubrick (way too much to take in in one afternoon - but brilliant nonetheless). There were photographs, film snippets and props from nearly every one of his films, including the mask Tom Cruise wore in 'Eyes Wide Shut', as well as his cape.

The other one was a Robert Capa retrospective. I initially kept mixing him up in my head with Frank Capra, who is, of course, someone else altogether. Capra made movies, and imdb tells me there are 52 of them. Robert Capa was a photoreporter, who was born as Andre Friedmann in Hungary. His legacy are over 10000 pictures (stills), and a few of them are iconic. Such as his picture of Pablo Picasso, holding a parasol for Francoise Gilot, or the world famous picture of a soldier collapsing in the spanish civil war. There is quite a controversy about this latter image, and the exhibition catalogue had a multipage article by Robert Whelan devoted to dispelling the myth that it is a fake. His article can be found here (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/capa_r.html). I personally find it hard to believe that two people were shot at exactly the same spot, and that they collapsed in a nearly identical manner. It might of course be a moot point, as everyone has seen the image and has felt the shudder of the closeness and the immediacy of killing. As an image of pointless death, it is clearly evocative enough.