The Stringer

"How do you reconcile something so tragic, yet something that has brought fame?" A documentary that proposes that Nick Ut, photographer of “The Terror of War” (aka Napalm Girl), may not have actually taken the photo. Instead it seems like it was taken by a ‘stringer’ (a local freelancer, in journo speak)—Nguyễn Thành Nghệ. There’s a half decent case to be made here—indeed we can see some discrepancies in the timeline, and as to who was where and when. There’s also an analysis that suggests the photo was taken on a Pentax instead of Ut’s Leica (using the corners of the frames as tell-tales). However, the film suffers from Netflix-documentary-syndrome where its content is stretched thin, its production style is too showy and it is too brazen in trying to give us a hot-take. There’s a computer reconstruction of the events worth watching, but beyond that it struggles to fill its run time. The Associated Press (who Ut worked for at the time)analysis is thorough but inconclusive. The…

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