Alina Marazzi's The Girl with the Leica opened at the Venice Film Festial this month, and most of the coverage so far has focused on what it gets right and wrong as a biopic.
The mannered performances, the jazz-age dance numbers, the tangle of lovers and émigré friends circling Emilia Schüle's Gerda Taro; all good things for a film reviewer to explore.
But as a writer for Digital Camera World, I'm more interested in a detail buried in the plot that might matter more to anyone who's ever taken a photograph and had it uncredited.
Here it is in a nutshell. Gerda Taro, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and André Friedmann, a Hungarian Jewish émigré, photographed the Spanish Civil War together in the 1930s. They decided that their work would sell better under an invented American name: Robert Capa.
Friedmann eventually kept the name for himself and became one of the most famous photojournalists of the century. Taro died in 1937, aged 26, run over by a tank during the retreat from Brunete.
For 70 years after that, a meaningful chunk of what Taro had shot stayed filed under Friedmann's name, in his archive, only adding to his legend.
Why Robert Capa?
At the film reflects, the pair selected "Robert Capa" with care. In the drama, we see Taro and Friedmann explaining to their friends that Jewish names hurt their sales, while more "marketable" ones improved their fees and assignments. So they constructed one. Confident, glamorous and entirely fictional.
It worked. Picture editors bought it, readers bought it and eventually history bought it, too, crediting one invented man for two real photographers' work, long after only one of them was left alive.
For anyone who's ever argued over a shared credit line, or had a picture desk shorten "additional photography by" down to nothing, it's a historic version of a familiar problem.
A byline is supposed to be a matter of fact. Here it was more like a marketing decision, made under pressure by two people trying to survive as Jews in Europe. And yet long after the war was over, no one felt bothered enough to correct the record.
Then in 2007 in Mexico City, three boxes of negatives, misplaced for decades, finally surfaced.
Once those negatives had been physically examined, frame by frame, historians were able to work out which "Robert Capa" images were shot on Taro's camera and which on Friedmann's. This was serious forensic archival work, seven decades after the fact.
Marazzi's film dramatizes the moment this attribution issue was created: Europe in the mid-1930s, when a joint invention felt more like a survival tactic than an erasure.
I haven't yet seen the movie myself yet, but Lee Marshall's review for Screen Daily argues that the film's impressionistic style keeps Taro 'beyond our reach', even as it tries to restore her.
Perhaps that's fitting for the woman who shot some of photography's most famous work, but whose name spent 70 years failing to get the recognition it deserved.
The Girl with the Leica doesn't yet have a theatrical release date. It will next be featured as part of Filmfest Hamburg on September 29 in Germany. Find out more at the film's official website.
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