MATTHEW VANDYKE IN LIBYA WITH THE REBELS IN POINT AND SHOIOT

"In the past it was easy to be both behind the camera and in front of the camera. But during a war, it became a more difficult thing to manage."

So says Matthew VanDyke as he narrates his experience as a fighter in a brigade of the Libyan revolutionary army in 2011. (He calls it "brigade," though the word he gives, كتيبة/katiba, usually is translated "battalion," but he doesn't pretend to be an expert on Arabic.) Matthew Curry's documentary, much of which was shot by VanDyke himself, tells how he got there. It's a remarkable story of a sheltered "only child of an only child of an only child" with OCD from a middle class Baltimore family raised by his mother and grandmother, with few friends in school, well educated (an M.A. in Middle East Studies from Georgetown), who's never done anything. So he leaves his girlfriend, Lauren Fischer, in his mid-twenties, and goes off traveling the Middle East and Northern Africa on a motorcycle on a "crash course in manhood." There is a strong element of bravado and egotism. He's inspired by the film Laurence of Arabia, which had helped spark his interest in the Arab World; by adventure stories, video games, and Australian adventurer Alby Mangels' cheesy World Safari films from the 1970s and '80s. He points and shoots, behind the camera, and in front of it. The results turn out to be thrilling, for him and us.

At first his timidity and OCD cripple him and from afar Lauren brands him as a coward. This gives him a push and he becomes bolder, turning into an adrenaline junkie, motorcycling recklessly and relentlessly shooting himself doing so. He actually starts having what, to him at least, are real adventures. He logs over 35,000 miles on his motorcycle, doubling back and forth, traveling to Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. He offers his services to the underfunded Baltimore Examiner as a freelance war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan. The offer is eagerly accepted and he finds the American soldiers "very friendly," more than willing to be shot posing doing the things they do, like breaking down the door of a house. Equally willingly, we see, they show Matt how to load and shoot a wide variety of weapons, which he proves quite good at. This will come in handy later.

The seminal moment, but one he didn't capture on film, is when in Mauritania he meets Nuri Funas, a bearded, longhaired, easygoing peace-and-love Libyan hippie traveling in Africa on foot with his cousin, who becomes a good friend. Nuri tells him he has to come to visit in Libya, and he does. Nuri's friends become Matt's friends, the truest, almost the only, friends he's ever had.

After four years Matt returns to Baltimore, a seasoned man, more at peace with himself and pleased with the exciting life he's been living and ready to settle down with Lauren. But just then the Arab Spring breaks out, and there is revolt in Libya. Matt feels compelled to go and join his friends, and Nuri. He goes off in a day, with no preparation. This infuriates Lauren, though it hardly surprises her, or his mother. He finds Nuri, a changed man, part of the revolution. Through bad luck, most of Nuri's friends are killed and though Nuri escapes, Matt is captured and imprisoned at Brega. He's held in wretched conditions, which he describes, for nearly six months, in two prisons. This experience as he tells it, in matter-of-fact but gruesome detail, is more vivid and nasty than the confinement depicted in Jon Stewart's Rosewater. For instance he pares down his finger and toenails with a plastic spoon because he fears being tortured by having them pulled out. But he is never interrogated beyond the first time, probably, he thinks, because the film his captors seized from him tells them all they need to know. When he gets out, when rebels open the cells, Matt finds Nuri again, and due to his experience of imprisonment he has increased "cred" and is even more welcomed. He films himself being advised by a representative of Human Rights Watch to go home. And surely Lauren and his mother want him to come back. But Nuri has a uniform and weapons for him. He stays.

This is when in the narrative Matt utters the line quoted at the outset: "In the past it was easy to be both behind the camera and in front of the camera. But in a war, it became a more difficult thing to manage." Still he does manage it, making his own film of himself in a truck with a bunch of Libyans all holding rifles. And it's real. (We have a word for this now: a "selfie.") But Matt proves uncommonly good at this war film stuff by now, even if his role wavers between participant and observer. Everyone is self-conscious, and everyone is shooting photographs with one hand and AK-47's with the other. He just happens to be better at it.

Matt realizes he is lucky to have survived the imprisonment, and it has made him much more careful. He turns out to be a creditable fighter, with his weapons knowledge from the American solidors in Afghanistan and Iraq and his new caution and wisdom. Ironically, though he's never fought, he knows weapons from his imbedded journalist work better than many of the insurgents.

Some, such as one of the regular film critics for the New York Times, think all this a deplorable display of narcissism. I think this is quite wrong. I call it luck. Matt VanDyke all along was in his own way and to the best of his ability doing what Richard Haliburton, or T.E. Lawrence, or many others have done, with different degrees of luck. The difference is that Matt was, on the whole, able to be both behind the camera and in front of the camera while exciting things were happening. The film Curry has produced with Matt includes a romantic story and remarkable footage as well as a very closeup picture of Matt himself.

For the time when he had no camera, in the jail, Matt's experience has been recreated in some rather nice rough-looking animations by Joe Posner. The film, by twice Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry, which lets Matt for good or ill do most of the talking, won the documentary prize at Tribeca, and one can see why. Point and Shoot provides rare insights into manhood, ego, and war, as well as being one of the best real life coming of age tales and action travel diaries of recent times, and a troubling, sometimes gruesome, sometimes absurd portrait of the new image-conscious, cellphone-shooting, social media urban warfare of today. Highly recommended.

Point and Shoot, 85 mins., debuted at Tribeca 19 April 2014. Many other film festivals since. Its release date was 31 October 2014. It opens 5 Dec. in San Francisco at Landmark's Opera Plaza.


MATTHEW VANDYKE (CENTER) WELCOMED BACK AMONG LIBYAN REBELS IN POINT AND SHOOT

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.