By JRS
Documentarian George Gittoes painting in his Berlin studio
“What irritates me a bit about the fine art world,” director George Gittoes told me this week, “Is if I make a sixty-minute film about Iraq, which I do, I see my sixty-minute program as art, and I don’t the art world has caught up with Andy Warhol and other people like him. They still feel something has to go through a museum before it becomes art.”
So began our epic interview in his publicist’s sprawling West Village conference room. George is unlike most documentarians you’ve seen before, in a great many ways. For one thing, he’d rather be interacting with his subjects, for better or worse, whether it puts him in harm’s way or not. He has been shot at, arrested, and sentenced to death—on more than one occasion. He views news as a form of art, and therefore, warfare falls into this category. But not without lasting affects. “People talk about the psychological damage war does to people, but it also has a damaging spiritual affect. I don’t know how many times, in all the years I’ve been covering war, I’ve been with a bunch of soldiers and there’s one who keeps saying “I want to pop my cherry,” meaning he wants to kill someone. He wants to have contact. They think that once you’ve fought in combat and you’ve killed an enemy, you become a man like it’s a right of passage. I’ve always told them that they don’t want to do that, because it’s stupid. I don’t know how many times that same night, that same soldier has spent the whole night weeping on my chest, my clothes wet with his tears. As soon as you kill someone, you discover that you’ve killed part of your own soul. It’s just a fact.”
