HOLIDAY SNEAKS - THE DIRECTORS - A need to know more - In 'Redacted,' Brian De Palma seeks a bigger picture of what's happening in Iraq. And reality sets in as he searches for answers.
"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 Iraq war, as Hollywood addresses that mess via mainstream releases like "In the Valley of Elah" and "Rendition," 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 Hollywood.
"Redacted," shot in Jordan in about 2 1/2 weeks on high-definition video, is based on a real incident in which American soldiers raped a teenage Iraqi girl, then killed her and her family. The story is similar to the one in De Palma's 1989 Vietnam film "Casualties of War," virtually ignored at the time of its release. But the Iraq war is happening in the time of blogs, camcorders and the Internet, and "Redacted," which opens Nov. 16, tells its entire story through a montage of those media, as well as surveillance cameras, news reports, terrorist websites -- nearly all of it re-created from what De Palma found on the Web. (He was not legally able to follow his impulse to edit this actual footage into a film.)
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Paradoxically, though there are more outlets for them, images from Iraq have not dominated the public consciousness in the way images from Vietnam did. That, De Palma says, was the prime inspiration for "Redacted." "Where are the pictures? Why can't we see them?" he asks. "If we're going to invade, occupy, bomb, destroy, I would like to see what we're doing."
"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 Vietnam, De Palma says, when the American people "saw them in Life and Look magazine and saw them on the CBS news, they said, 'Oh, my God.' You know, now there are no pictures of fallen American soldiers. And it's such an obvious way of sanitizing what you're doing."
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