DrewG
04-15-2008, 02:07 AM
http://www.dvdrama.com/imagescrit2/r/e/d/redacted_2.jpg
For director Brian DePalma, it is safe to say it has not been a career of saccharine or subtle moments; he simply isn’t interested in making anyone feel good about much of anything and he will go to great, exaggerated lengths to provide the depravity. His latest in a career of extremely polarizing efforts is Redacted, an “imagining” of events before, during and after the rape and subsequent murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi by U.S. soldiers in March 2006.
The debate at the center of the cinematic techniques in Redacted is what is the purpose of consistently reminding the viewing audience that what we are watching is a concoction, or a “visual documentation” as opposed to a brutal reality? But how, in certain ways does this reminder of its fiction deepen the anti-war stance that DePalma is attempting to establish? In some ways, the reminder of the fact that it is merely a film is a debunking effect to the film’s abrasive style, but in other ways it serves a deeper meaning in its overstating ways, everything from the acting styles to the cinematography compositions to the visual transitions instilled. The question though: is the balance between these two extremes distracting or enlightening?
Why would this be considered distracting? This is an atypical representation therefore it will almost always ensure that the viewer is discomforted by what they’re being presented. Again, to brush this work off as simple, thoughtless, clichéd machismo would be to put down the craft of DePalma’s work as instigator for deeper thought about things we may have not actually taken time to think deeply about. It is similar to how people have complained about the high definition faux French documentary placed sporadically in Redacted’s narrative in its placement with the other parts of the presentation. DePalma says that he “decided to convey this in this very stylized pseudo-French documentary because I wanted to slow everything down” (Davies). By doing this it is not a means to take us out of the picture, but further inward. The establishment of this checkpoint being filmed is like the war; long, drawn out and now very depressingly, becoming routine. When the action hits and the visuals become less patient and graceful it mirrors the unpredictability and futility of it all; we don’t even know who the enemy are and by consistently mistaking the “right” ones to kill we end up alienating even the innocent ones. As one title card reads after Flake (Patrick Carroll) kills a pregnant Iraqi teen at the imagined checkpoint filmed in the French documentary: of the 2,000 wounded or killed at checkpoints by U.S. soldiers, only 60 were found to be insurgents.
In his look at Redacted, A.O.Scott of The New York Times (“Rage, Fear and Revulsion: At War With the War”) summarizes the recent trend in American cinema: stern, serious pictures dealing with Iraq and the United States’ global responsibility. According to Scott “their moods and methods vary widely” and like the others he says “I find myself drawn, in each to more or less the same conclusion. I am glad this movie was made, but I wish it were better” (Scott 2007). What this allows Scott to do is not judge the movie based on a knee jerk reaction to such provocative content, but rather to examine it based on the merit of its technical nuance in association with constructing a wartime social commentary.
Scott calls DePalma “an unrivaled master of showy cinematic technique” and allows this comment to anchor the understanding for the multiplicity of visual representations DePalma evokes to tell his story; the gritty soldier shot footage, the pretentious high definition French television documentary, the imitation YouTube uploads, cell phone films, surveillance cameras and a myriad of other things. Many have claimed that a film with such a need for focus in order to strongly convey a point needs to be more carefully sculpted than Redacted but Scott says that this “takes us on a tour not only of the battlefield, but also of the modern media environment, where no moment goes unrecorded and where everyone is, at least potentially, a filmmaker.” This is clearly evident in the character of Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) whose “fly on the wall” documentation of the rape might be his ticket to USC film school.
Furthermore it is not merely indicative of the media cultivating our perceptions of a war far beyond control anymore; it implies that our complacency with simply ingesting this information being fed to us is detrimental to future development. When McCoy (Rob Devaney) says in the film “I didn’t think they were actually going to do it” in terms of his comrades raping the young Iraqi girl, it is his hesitation in this moment and in the moments before the rape that redacts not just the ability to stop the terrible event but to bring forth the truth and instill punishment for those guilty. The amount of cutting between these news sources isn’t a way that the film loses the grip on what it’s trying to say, but more a method for disorienting the viewer in a representation of the world where information comes from all angles in a crisis and how differentiating it all is an insurmountable task. As the tagline reads, and as McCoy says towards the beginning of the film “Truth…is the first casualty of war.”
But even Scott senses that the attempt at provoking this “hodgepodge of brutal naturalism and self-conscious theatricality” is the potential for true power is undermined by issues of performance. Of course, the efficiency in how such a polarizing issue picture conveys its message is important, but not in the scheme of picking minor parts. It is their conjunction with the whole that is truly important, so therefore the overstated acting and “profane, macho” script are not out of line with the overall context of the film. When Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) says in the film of the young girl “that tasty skank is a spoil of war” there is almost no way this line with any actor could not come across as exaggerated. The damaging aspect here is that, according to DePalma, these are actual quotes of the convicted soldiers, only slighted changed in fear of lawsuit.
It is also imperative to think of actual soldiers in Iraq on downtime speaking to a camera. Surely they aren’t Brando’s or Pacino’s; they’re in the middle of nowhere and need something to do. As much as DePalma’s pre-composed rendition, the real thing might seem equally forged to the untrained eye. The set-up of these movies is equally realistic and staged. They are realistic in the sense that they’ve got a grainy quality and improvisational feel; the camera freely pans from one subject to another and these scenes are composed of very long singular takes that last for minutes at a time. From here, it is a tremendous part of the film’s structure and telling by DePalma how these home movies build from this opening segment of boredom and curiosity as these soldiers begin to question what exactly they’re doing. Our reaction to lines like this as overblown shows our own denial in what is going on over there. It’s hard to look at and it is even harder to hear and believe, but it’s all true and our own dismissing of it is providing outlets for the war to continue on and on. It’s only as distracting as we begin to make it and view it separate from the other aspects of the overall film.
This criticism of the hyper stylized approach also opens up another debate about the cinema’s depictions of the chaos of war. For example, DePalma’s approach to the Iraq conflict is distinctly similar in terms of style and story structure to his 1989 film about rape in Vietnam, Casualties of War. Between these two films it seems that DePalma has a set style for unfurling his thoughts on America at war. But what about a film that uses surrealism for its stylization in order to convey not just the insanity of war, but also the paranoia and insecurity that mounts when nothing can be trusted? Francis Ford Coppola did this with striking visual appeal in 1979’s Apocalypse Now, the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) and his doomed crew as they voyage upriver in Vietnam to stop a renegade American soldier in Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).
--POST CONTINUED BELOW--
For director Brian DePalma, it is safe to say it has not been a career of saccharine or subtle moments; he simply isn’t interested in making anyone feel good about much of anything and he will go to great, exaggerated lengths to provide the depravity. His latest in a career of extremely polarizing efforts is Redacted, an “imagining” of events before, during and after the rape and subsequent murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi by U.S. soldiers in March 2006.
The debate at the center of the cinematic techniques in Redacted is what is the purpose of consistently reminding the viewing audience that what we are watching is a concoction, or a “visual documentation” as opposed to a brutal reality? But how, in certain ways does this reminder of its fiction deepen the anti-war stance that DePalma is attempting to establish? In some ways, the reminder of the fact that it is merely a film is a debunking effect to the film’s abrasive style, but in other ways it serves a deeper meaning in its overstating ways, everything from the acting styles to the cinematography compositions to the visual transitions instilled. The question though: is the balance between these two extremes distracting or enlightening?
Why would this be considered distracting? This is an atypical representation therefore it will almost always ensure that the viewer is discomforted by what they’re being presented. Again, to brush this work off as simple, thoughtless, clichéd machismo would be to put down the craft of DePalma’s work as instigator for deeper thought about things we may have not actually taken time to think deeply about. It is similar to how people have complained about the high definition faux French documentary placed sporadically in Redacted’s narrative in its placement with the other parts of the presentation. DePalma says that he “decided to convey this in this very stylized pseudo-French documentary because I wanted to slow everything down” (Davies). By doing this it is not a means to take us out of the picture, but further inward. The establishment of this checkpoint being filmed is like the war; long, drawn out and now very depressingly, becoming routine. When the action hits and the visuals become less patient and graceful it mirrors the unpredictability and futility of it all; we don’t even know who the enemy are and by consistently mistaking the “right” ones to kill we end up alienating even the innocent ones. As one title card reads after Flake (Patrick Carroll) kills a pregnant Iraqi teen at the imagined checkpoint filmed in the French documentary: of the 2,000 wounded or killed at checkpoints by U.S. soldiers, only 60 were found to be insurgents.
In his look at Redacted, A.O.Scott of The New York Times (“Rage, Fear and Revulsion: At War With the War”) summarizes the recent trend in American cinema: stern, serious pictures dealing with Iraq and the United States’ global responsibility. According to Scott “their moods and methods vary widely” and like the others he says “I find myself drawn, in each to more or less the same conclusion. I am glad this movie was made, but I wish it were better” (Scott 2007). What this allows Scott to do is not judge the movie based on a knee jerk reaction to such provocative content, but rather to examine it based on the merit of its technical nuance in association with constructing a wartime social commentary.
Scott calls DePalma “an unrivaled master of showy cinematic technique” and allows this comment to anchor the understanding for the multiplicity of visual representations DePalma evokes to tell his story; the gritty soldier shot footage, the pretentious high definition French television documentary, the imitation YouTube uploads, cell phone films, surveillance cameras and a myriad of other things. Many have claimed that a film with such a need for focus in order to strongly convey a point needs to be more carefully sculpted than Redacted but Scott says that this “takes us on a tour not only of the battlefield, but also of the modern media environment, where no moment goes unrecorded and where everyone is, at least potentially, a filmmaker.” This is clearly evident in the character of Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) whose “fly on the wall” documentation of the rape might be his ticket to USC film school.
Furthermore it is not merely indicative of the media cultivating our perceptions of a war far beyond control anymore; it implies that our complacency with simply ingesting this information being fed to us is detrimental to future development. When McCoy (Rob Devaney) says in the film “I didn’t think they were actually going to do it” in terms of his comrades raping the young Iraqi girl, it is his hesitation in this moment and in the moments before the rape that redacts not just the ability to stop the terrible event but to bring forth the truth and instill punishment for those guilty. The amount of cutting between these news sources isn’t a way that the film loses the grip on what it’s trying to say, but more a method for disorienting the viewer in a representation of the world where information comes from all angles in a crisis and how differentiating it all is an insurmountable task. As the tagline reads, and as McCoy says towards the beginning of the film “Truth…is the first casualty of war.”
But even Scott senses that the attempt at provoking this “hodgepodge of brutal naturalism and self-conscious theatricality” is the potential for true power is undermined by issues of performance. Of course, the efficiency in how such a polarizing issue picture conveys its message is important, but not in the scheme of picking minor parts. It is their conjunction with the whole that is truly important, so therefore the overstated acting and “profane, macho” script are not out of line with the overall context of the film. When Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) says in the film of the young girl “that tasty skank is a spoil of war” there is almost no way this line with any actor could not come across as exaggerated. The damaging aspect here is that, according to DePalma, these are actual quotes of the convicted soldiers, only slighted changed in fear of lawsuit.
It is also imperative to think of actual soldiers in Iraq on downtime speaking to a camera. Surely they aren’t Brando’s or Pacino’s; they’re in the middle of nowhere and need something to do. As much as DePalma’s pre-composed rendition, the real thing might seem equally forged to the untrained eye. The set-up of these movies is equally realistic and staged. They are realistic in the sense that they’ve got a grainy quality and improvisational feel; the camera freely pans from one subject to another and these scenes are composed of very long singular takes that last for minutes at a time. From here, it is a tremendous part of the film’s structure and telling by DePalma how these home movies build from this opening segment of boredom and curiosity as these soldiers begin to question what exactly they’re doing. Our reaction to lines like this as overblown shows our own denial in what is going on over there. It’s hard to look at and it is even harder to hear and believe, but it’s all true and our own dismissing of it is providing outlets for the war to continue on and on. It’s only as distracting as we begin to make it and view it separate from the other aspects of the overall film.
This criticism of the hyper stylized approach also opens up another debate about the cinema’s depictions of the chaos of war. For example, DePalma’s approach to the Iraq conflict is distinctly similar in terms of style and story structure to his 1989 film about rape in Vietnam, Casualties of War. Between these two films it seems that DePalma has a set style for unfurling his thoughts on America at war. But what about a film that uses surrealism for its stylization in order to convey not just the insanity of war, but also the paranoia and insecurity that mounts when nothing can be trusted? Francis Ford Coppola did this with striking visual appeal in 1979’s Apocalypse Now, the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) and his doomed crew as they voyage upriver in Vietnam to stop a renegade American soldier in Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).
--POST CONTINUED BELOW--