TRAINED TO SEE: THREE WOMEN AND THE WAR – Review by Nadine Whitney
Few people realise that some of the most poignant images and reporting from the frontlines of war come from women war correspondents. Women created some of iconic photographs from WWII; from the triumphantly patriotic to the weary angst of soldiers dying in leagues on the front lines, to the sorrowful and horrifying pictures of concentration camps and the victims of the Holocaust. Swiss director Luzia Schmid concentrates on three remarkable women — Lee Miller, Martha Gellhorn, and Margaret Bourke-White — who battled not only sexist bureaucracy and the notion that women were too feeble to be allowed access to battles (unless as nurses) to create some of the most important reporting and visual records of the period.
Reporting for different publications such as Conde Nast/Vogue (Lee Miller), Collier’s Magazine (Martha Gellhorn), and Life Magazine (Margaret Bourke-White) each brought a wealth of journalistic and artistic knowledge to their war correspondence. Perhaps already the most famous of the trio was the writer Gellhorn who had previously reported on the Spanish Civil War and was a speech writer for the White House. She was also known as one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives – Hemingway’s macho persona and personality meant that he quite deliberately sabotaged Gellhorn’s career. He wanted a stay-at-home wife who would coddle him through writing his novels. Instead he got a firebrand with her own integrity and drive who used any ruse she could to ensure she was reporting on the frontlines.
Lee Miller was an American ex-pat who moved to Paris to study photography with Man Ray. There she became his muse, but more importantly developed new photographic techniques. A former fashion model and actress (she appeared in Jean Cocteau films) Miller was working for Vogue in London when the war broke out. She chaffed to do something for the European people who had become her family. Eventually, she was offered embedded reporting by Conde Nast and although she was cynically used as an icon of glamour on the battlefield, she created some of the most unforgettable images to come out of WWII, including a shot of her bathing in Hitler’s bathtub.
Margaret Bourke-White was the first photojournalist to be allowed into the Soviet Union. Of the three women she was the most patriotic, a position that soured for her as the war went on and she saw how much it was costing GIs and the people of Europe. She was also surprised to find her photographs of field hospitals were being censored by the Pentagon and that she ended up on the list of the House of Unamerican Activities.
Luzia Schmid traces each woman’s journey across Europe as they eventually end up in Germany. She and fellow screenwriter Katarina Cvitic want you to see what the trio saw with an intimacy that allows the audience to learn not only about the correspondents but their individual expeditions through WWII and the complex emotions they each felt. The sexism they had to battle not only from the military but also their partners (in the case of Gellhorn and Bourke-White) and how being on the frontlines damaged them. By the time they reached Buchenwald and Dachau and the documented the fall of Berlin they all had lost the sense that war was any kind of adventure, and although fighting fascism was essential and had to occur, the casualties of the conflict were too many to justify the lasting cost and trauma of military conflict.
Trained to See uses a mixture of letters, diaries, photographs, and reports made by Gellhorn, Miller, and Bourke-White. It is essentially first-person narration of the events from their perspective. The women were complicated; sometimes imperious, often egotistical. The war they fought was on several fronts – they had to fight entrenched sexism. What Gellhorn did to get to D-Day after Ernest Hemingway supplanted her and got his Collier’s Press Pass, will astound.
Luzia Schmid asks the audience to consider what the woman’s eye brings to war correspondence. Gellhorn continued to report on every major conflict of the 20th Century and is amongst the best to ever do the job. Miller and Bourke-White’s photographs shocked America and to this day, although largely uncredited, their work did influence how the military used their resources. The last thing these women wanted to end up as was propagandists, even if they initially allowed themselves to be used as such. Trained to See is a brilliant visual and narrated document that brings the perspective of ground-breaking professional woman to the fore.
