DePalma Uses Censored Iraq Images In New Film 'Redacted' ("It's all out there on the Internet")

[Hissyspit]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003634107

Brian DePalma Airs "Redacted" Iraq Images in New Film

By E&P Staff
Published: August 31, 2007 5:05 PM ET

- snip -

"All the images we...have of our war are completely constructed -- whitewashed, redacted," said De Palma in Venice, according to press reports. "One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war."

DePalma makes use of images he has grabbed from the Web, including soldiers' home videos and photos that have never appeared in print. There's also more standard documentary film footage and the use of fictionalized techniques and characters to avoid certain legal issues, making it into an unusual kind of "docu-drama."

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he said after a screening in Venice. "In Vietnam, when we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing, we saw the soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war,.

"It's all out there on the Internet, you can find it if you look for it, but it's not in the major media. The media is now really part of the corporate establishment.... "When I went out to find the pictures, I said (to the media) give me the pictures you can't publish... "Everything that is in the movie is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued."

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[rodeodance]

2. I do not think that many want to know.

[DemReadingDU]

3. There are several films about the war this year

People should be able to hear something

No End in Sight
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

Lions for Lambs
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0891527/
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809826835/video/3568954/

Rendition
http://www.renditionmovie.com/

[Fly by night]

6. Just saw "No End in Sight" yesterday

An excellent movie, hearing from those who tried to make the Iraq invasion a "success" but who could not overcome Bush's idiocy and the lack of combat experience of his chief advisors. It also calls out the extreme graft being practiced around this war.

Another $50 billion for Iraq. Not until toilet-crawling, holier-than-thou, sissy-hawking pigs fly.

[DemReadingDU]

7. We are going today

The film is finally in our city and showing at small local theater.

[CGowen]

4. Brian de Palma's Redacted shocks Venice

Brian de Palma's Redacted shocks Venice

By David Gritten, at the Venice Film Festival
Last Updated: 1:57am BST 01/09/2007

A wave of new American films about the Iraq war are due to arrive in cinemas over the next few months. Yet it's safe to say few could be more shocking or harrowing than the low-budget Redacted by veteran director Brian de Palma (Scarface, The Untouchables), which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival yesterday.

Shot with a cast of unknown actors on high-definition video cameras, it is about a small group of bored, restless US soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Samarra.

They are impatient with the war's progress, distrustful of all Iraqis (even the children) and eager to go home. Two of them concoct a plot for the group to revisit a household recently raided in a search for insurgents, and to rape the family's 15-year-old daughter. In a chilling finale they do the deed, but their mission also ends in multiple murder.

Intriguingly, one of the group (who harbours ambitions to go to film school) is compiling a video diary of life at the checkpoint. He takes his camera along on the raid and simply keeps shooting during the terrible events. Only later does he realize that this implicated him in the crimes.

To tell the story, de Palma boldly uses a variety of forms: blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the internet and the video diary the soldier is shooting. There are several references to the shortcomings of the mainstream media in reporting the real horrors of the Iraq war; de Palma makes a telling point with these alternative narrative devices.

....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/31/wvenice131.xml

[CGowen]

8. Hollywoodreporter

...

Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, De Palma's movie is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved.

Made so expertly that it appears to be assembled from genuine footage, the film details the extraordinary psychological pressure suffered by young soldiers on checkpoint duty in occupied areas of Iraq, and then follows one unit as two of its members skew monstrously out of control

...



The director makes great use of Handel's "Sarabande" in the picture, the somber tones familiar as the main title music in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon." It's a reminder that nothing depicted in this film is new and that it's a shame it needs to be told again.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/imdb/reviews/article_display.jsp?rid=9704&vnu_special_account_code=thrsiteimdbpro



I wonder how limited the limited release will be ?

[Spurt]

5. K&R

[Hissyspit]

9. .