Issue 1: Summer 2008
REDACTED (Brian De Palma, 2008)
Based on true events, Redacted recounts the rape and murder of a fifteen-year old girl by American troops serving in Iraq. Around this inflammatory incident, Brian De Palma constructs a brave and fiendishly clever essay on the ways in which images and impressions of the war reach those of us whose understanding of the situation is based entirely on media fragments of different types and shades. The film is constructed from a number of fabricated documentary elements- chiefly a soldier's video diary but also a ‘French' documentary, TV news snippets, various webcasts, and home movies.
This multivocal approach ultimately just avoids showing the central incident, whilst creating an emotive account of its build-up and consequences. By doing this, De Palma is not necessarily questioning whether or not the rape occurred. Rather, he is commenting on the violence of feeling that exists around a situation that reaches us only through the mediation of images, which is not witnessed first hand. Redacted is less concerned with questioning the truth or falsehood conveyed by images than asserting the truth of images in today's understanding of war. The film crystallises war as ‘experienced' by the millions following it from a distance, absorbing testimony through the media and internet.
The courage of De Palma's approach is in his striking refusal to eschew melodramatic emotionalism even as he cooly elucidates his analysis of the functions of images in this context. He manipulates even as he lays bare the manipulation. Yet so crudely potent is the harrowing content of his thesis that an affective urge to simply flow with the mounting waves of outrage threatens to sweep more subtle considerations aside. De Palma is not having it both ways for the sake of it- instead of adopting a position of detachment towards the type of images he examines, he acknowledges the aura of intense feelings that often follow their circulation in reality as much as in his film. After forty years of exploring the forms of cinematic manipulativeness, sometimes with brilliant sophistication, more often with elaborately banal results, De Palma is uniquely equipped to attempt this balance. The result is his best film to date.
-Maximilian Le Cain