In one especially horrifying scene in The War Zone, the camera is motionless, an impassive observer, as the father rapes his daughter.
Another photographer, Ron Lopez, who witnessed the incident, testified in State Supreme Court in Riverhead, L.I., that the two had engaged in "a tug of war" over the camera.
She comes across here as an increasingly vehement avenging angel waging a kind of war with the camera, using it to expose what might be called both the tyranny and the inner lives of images, especially the images of women that bombard and shape all of us at every turn.
Possibly this is meant as irony -- Tupac Shakur was shot dead at 25 -- but the soldiers who appear tonight in VH1's "Soundtrack to War" lecture the camera with sincerity that seems to reprove the filmmaker, an Australian painter named George Gittoes, whose voice can be heard frequently in the film.
The first 23 minutes of the footage showed Palestinians playing at war for the cameras, they said, falling down as if wounded, then getting up and walking away.
The French Army accredited a small corps of fine artists to work near the front lines and capture the Great War in ways the camera could not.
Call it the Ken Burns approach: find striking archival photographs and artwork, as Mr. Burns did in his "Civil War" series; let the camera pan over or zoom in on the stills to inject movement; overlay the visuals with evocative period music; interlace with sage commentary; and hire famous people to speak the words of distant historical figures.
There's his catalogue of images: moving water reflecting the sky, silver birch forests, cast-iron bells, religious icons, horses, apples, mud, war; the fluid, serpentine camera movements of impressive duration and sensuality; and the prodigally poetic method of storytelling, with unsignposted dream sequences and flashbacks.
In the first important wars of which there are accounts by photographers, the Crimean War and the American Civil War, and in every other war until the First World War, combat itself was beyond the camera's ken.
