Film: “A cry of national shame”
“The true story of the Iraq war has been redacted [i.e. edited out] from the mainstream corporate media,” says Brian De Palma, whose hard-hitting Iraq drama, Redacted, premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week. “If we are going to cause such disorder, then we must face the horrendous images that are the consequences of these events.”
De Palma, who is best known for movies like Carrie, Scarface and The Untouchables, has clearly produced a stunning anti-war work. In a detailed and sympathetic review, Time magazine calls it “a cry of national shame“.
Redacted is inspired by a real event, the March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family and torching of their bodies and their home, by four American soldiers. It is constructed of seemingly real snippets of media: YouTube-like blogs, video posts, picture-phone emails and a daily video record kept by one of the soldiers.
The reaction of the British press to this film reveals much about the corporate media’s attitude to war.
So far, the Guardian’s response has been sadly typical of the newspaper’s overall approach to Iraq, just hoping the war will somehow go away so we can get on with the important news, such as Amy Winehouse’s drug problem and the price of organic food: “Yes, this is a stupid war. Yes, there are lots of media outlets. And people are dying on both sides.”
The Times is even more explicit: “Is the public really ready to pay to see films about nasty, bloody, complicated wars that most wish would simply go away?” All the Mirror can say about it is to pick on the film’s depiction of an Al-Qaeda execution of a US soldier.
But the Telegraph devoted half a page to the film, including this from its reviewer: “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.”
Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times raves about it: “Crafted not just for a new conflict but also for a new age of multiform, open-access image technology, this is a brilliant film with a passionate payload of political conviction.”
See this film if you can, and better still, write us a review.
