Young Robert King in the 1990s is thoroughly annoying; a skinny slacker who, when he first arrives in Sarajevo, manages to set a bathroom sink on fire with the classic error of leaving a burning candle unattended after he falls asleep. He invites the cameraman to film the damage, all the while whining in a bleary-eyed state. He doesn’t know anything about the conflict in the Balkans which he has come to shoot, summarised by the fact that when he is tested on the names of political leaders in Serbia his default answer is always insistently Malevich. He repeatedly bleats on about his dreams of the Pulitzer Prize and yet not only appears curiously disengaged from what is happening around him, but doesn’t seem to have any particular knowledge of how to take pictures either. Agencies decline to take him on for both his distancing from the action and his apparent misunderstanding of exposure levels.
Yet for all this he is at least innocuous, and even plays the harmonica rather well. At least he isn’t as obnoxious as the other journalists, who have also descended upon the city like vultures to carrion. In one confrontation, a filmmaker called Jeff Chagrin snorts to Robert King: “I’m not sure you have the aura… the aura of luck that war journalists, I know, have” and the wonderfully offhand “I’ve come to so many front lines it’s like taking a double-decker bus.”
Finally, a front page assignment on prostitution in Sarajevo from The Guardian offers the turning point for King, but at the expense of alienating himself from the other journalists who are based there – although judging by their frosty responses to King in the first place this is not a difficult decision.
Orientalist music provides the backdrop for King’s formative years, until Robert branches out towards other global conflicts and Acid House kicks in. Mature Robert narrates his early ambitions to emulate his namesake Capa, over pictures that reflect a determination to be fully immersed in the situation. Whether it is a mire of dead bodies in Albania, a fleet of militiamen on horseback in Afghanistan or a strip club in Moscow, King is frighteningly close. This self-destruction is finally ended when King finds love.
In the present, King has filled out a bit and partakes in a little light hunting in the American countryside with his wife and young son. He still works as a journalist, but films rather than photographs in order to convey the devastation of the conflict situations he goes to. The resolution of King’s story is predictable, but then again, it could have a different documentary altogether – interviews with a narcissistic alcoholic at the side of a bar, or even a memorial to a fallen photojournalist. In this form, there is at least an offer of redemption, even if it is for King alone.
