Monday,
November 05, 2007
Brian De Palma's "'Redacted"
Searches For Truth in
The
ANNOTICO Report
"Redacted,"
is based on a real incident in which American soldiers raped a teenage Iraqi
girl, then killed her and her family.
This
was a tragic event, but if one can get by that for the moment, it is important
to take note as to how the US government has tried to "sanitize" the
Invasion, Killing and Destruction of Iraq, and
"manage" the news, trying to pour out as much "optimistic
assessments", and "feel good news", to counter any adverse
statistics and images.
Brian De
Palma's Need to Know More
In
'Redacted,' he goes looking for a bigger picture of what's happening in
By
Charles Taylor, Special to The Times
November
4, 2007
"I've
hardly ever been in step with much," Brian De Palma said at a recent New
York Film Festival media conference for his new movie, "Redacted," and
that offhand remark sums up his career as well as anything. After more than 40
years making films and nearly five years into the
De
Palma has made a raw, upsetting movie that has no interest in healing or any of
the other Oprah-isms that constitute "adult" filmmaking in
The
story is similar to the one in De Palma's 1989
Paradoxically, though there are more outlets for them, images from
"Redacted" ends with a montage of photos of real Iraqi victims of
the war, and when it is mentioned to De Palma that one young Web critic expressed
outrage that she was made to see something like that, he answers, "I think
it has to do with the fact that nobody's seen any images from the war. I mean,
if you go on the Net you can find them. But if you don't look for them, you
don't know they exist."
AN IMPULSE TO SHIELD
During
Just how contentious those photos are is suggested by "Redacted"
itself being redacted. Against De Palma's wishes, the photos of the dead and
wounded Iraqis at the end of the film are presented with their eyes blacked
out. At his film festival news conference, De Palma claimed it was done because
Mark Cuban, president of HDNet, which financed the
film, was disturbed by them.
This prompted a moment that would seem like high satire if it weren't so troubling.
Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Films (which is
releasing the film), interrupted De Palma to claim that none of the war victims
in the film had legally signed off to allow their images to be presented.
Bowles did not answer De Palma's question of how it's possible to present war
photos if everyone shown has to sign a waiver. But Bowles' stance suggests
the depth of the impulse to shield the public from unpleasant reality.
And it suggests the ability of Brian De Palma to still rankle. His first features
-- "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom!" -- skewered '60s
counterculture cant amid counterculture euphoria. Beginning the charges of
misogyny that have dogged him -- no filmmaker has dealt more with the tortured
ethos of chivalry than De Palma -- "Dressed to Kill" an gered feminists over its
depiction of sexualized murder. "Blow Out" was a deeply
personal cry of anguish over the policies of the Reagan era.
"Redacted" won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, but at
home, sight unseen, it's been attacked as traitorous by
For De Palma, a director whose career has largely been concerned with how we
see, how the meaning of images can be controlled and changed, a war in which
even the sight of returning coffins of dead American soldiers has been kept
from the public is a subject ripe for closer inspection.
The
ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:
Italia
Italia
Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com (3 years)
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net