For all of Moritz Neumüller’s profuse appeals to impartiality and critical objectivity, the very notion that Gian Butturini’s book LONDON had not only offended, but offended widely — indeed, globally — remains an untested one, founded not upon documentary evidence, but on faith, or magical thinking, alone. […]
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Exuding an exhaustive scholarliness and an air of academic authority, Neumüller’s textual apparatus thus becomes unstable on close inspection, at its worst incomplete, misleading, and factually inaccurate. … Parr and Butturini’s social media detractors, very limited in number and audience, never put forward a case to support their claims that Butturini’s London was a racist text. […] Nothing about this time-consuming yet vital censorship process was included in Morris’s version of the film saga. It is Morris’s deliberate avoidance or trivialization of the topic that raises suspicion that there must have been much more than he was willing to discuss. […] Capa’s surviving photos gave no evidence of the onslaught that had hit the beaches, and instead would raise doubt about the strength and significance of the landings. In short, they were precisely the kind of images the Allies wanted the Germans to see. And there’s small chance that was a matter of coincidence. […] Morris’s various tellings of the saga of Capa’s films omitted entirely a vital matter, that of censorship by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). Any undeveloped film coming in from correspondents at the front was assumed, as a minimum, to be classifiable as secret material, so the handling of Capa’s film would both begin and end on the censors’ desk. […] |
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