Documentary prescient about Mideast
The explorer, author, photographer, diplomat and stateswoman Gertrude Bell was the subject of a well-intentioned but starchy biopic earlier this year, with Nicole Kidman doing her regal best to infuse a melodramatic misfire with dignity and deeper meaning.
Luckily, the documentary “Letters From Baghdad” has arrived to deliver details about Bell’s extraordinary life and career, which took her from aristocratic England to the Middle East (“my second native country!”), where in the early 20th century she researched culture and customs and, after World War I, played a pivotal role in creating a country called Iraq.
The folly of that colonial exploit and its grievous present- day implications run like a cruelly ironic subtext throughout “Letters From Baghdad,” which has been constructed entirely from Bell’s correspondence, secret communiques and other primary sources. Tilda Swinton — also an executive producer on this project — reads Bell’s words while nitrate images of historic Persia, Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula crack and sparkle with astonishingly rich period detail.
Filmmakers Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbuhl marry those images with a sound design that subtly gives them an extra dimension. Making compelling use of the pictures Bell produced with her camera, they’ve created an immersive plunge into a time, place and cultural zeitgeist that feel both far away and of the moment.
Less successful are the fake vintage talking-head “interviews” in which actors portray such Bell con- temporaries as T.E. Lawrence, Sir Percy Cox, Sir Arnold “A.T.” Wilson and Frank Balfour, whose declaration in 1917 helped paved the way for a Jewish state in Palestine.
“Letters From Baghdad” suggests that, if more political leaders had heeded Bell’s advice regarding Arab autonomy, cultural sensitivities and the dangers of sectarianism, the region might look very different today. Although Cox was a supporter, Bell was marginalized by his successor in the British Mideast office, and her final days were spent amassing objects for the Iraq Museum.
Bell comes across as a fascinatingly contradictory figure: romantic and headstrong, then — after two tragic love affairs — increasingly tetchy and “difficult.” Those in search of context for today’s headlines — whether about the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War or the strategic break between several Arab states and Qatar — will find it in “Letters From Baghdad,” a bridge between the present and a past that really isn’t past.