Sarfraz Manzoor

Brian De Palma has described his latest film ‘Redacted’ as ‘a fictional documentary’. It is a term which while seemingly oxymoronic also feels grimly appropriate since it is set in Iraq and depicts a war that many would argue was itself based on an untruth. ‘Redacted’ refers to the process of editing to prepare for publishing, the verb ‘redacted’ is often used to describe documents or imagers from which sensitive information has been removed. The film was inspired by the true story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeer_Qassim_Hamza)  of a fourteen year old Iraqi girl who was raped, shot in the face and burned along with other members of her family by American soldiers two years ago. In plotline at least ‘Redacted’ recalls De Palma’s Vietnam era ‘Casualties of War’ but that film was made fourteen years after the end of the conflict.  The films that Hollywood made about Vietnam- Apocalypse Now, Platoon, First Blood- served to provide some historical perspective to that particular military misadventure. ‘Redacted’ is one of a clutch of films- Paul Haggis’ ‘In the Valley of Elah’ and Nick Broomfield’s (http://www.nickbroomfield.com/haditha.html) ‘Battle for Haditha’ are others- that are being released in the midst of a continuing war and one which is the first major military conflict to have unfolded in the multimedia age. The young soldiers who came to Baghdad and Basra arrived armed with weapons of mass communication: mobile phones that could record video footage and internet enabled laptops. If television brought the Vietnam war into the living room, the Iraq war is being brought home through mobile phone footage uploaded onto YouTube and the soldiers blogs. It is the preponderance of such material online and its paucity in the mainstream media which inspired Brian De Palma. ‘Redacted’ is then like Paul Haggis’ ‘In the Valley of Elah’ an example how film-makers are borrowing from other genres and media. The mockumentary is not new as those who recall Spinal Tap and The Blair Witch Project will confirm and more recently ‘Cloverfield’ and ‘Diary of the Dead’ have both strained for authenticity by claiming to be the products of found footage. But what De Palma and to a lesser degree Haggis have done is different. In Haggis’ film mobile phone footage recorded by Tommy Lee Jones’ soldier son in Iraq brought the brutal truth about the war home to his father. De Palma’s film owes something to the 2006 documentary The War Tapes which gave a soldier’s eye view of Iraq thorugh footage that three troopers filmed themselves. In ‘Redacted’ De Palma offers a collage of styles and clips: a soldier’s personal video, news footage, Iraqi insurgent website and even the beheading of an American soldier. Since the film’s backers were worried about legal problems the director was forced to change some details about the actual events. De Palma had wanted to end the film with a photograph of the actual young girl who had been raped but was forced to show a staged photograph prompting complaints that his own film had been ‘redacted’. In order to get the film made De Palma filmed on a budget of only five million dollars using unknown actors. The director has been utterly unequivoval as to his reasons for why he made the film telling journalists ‘I did this film because I believe that if we as a country are going to cause such disorder we must also be prepared to face the horrendous images that result from these events.’ He must wonder if he should have bothered as the critical and commerical response (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/02/iraq.film) in the United States has been, to say the least mixed with one right wing critic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP6_Dm9gLzU) dubbing it as ‘the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I mean, the out and out worst, most disgusting, most hateful, most incompetent, most revolting, most loathsome, most reprehensible cinematic work I’ve ever encountered.’ I saw the film earlier this week. Having read advance notices I knew that I should expect ‘Redacted’ to be distressing viewing and I imagined that it might be a film to admire for its directorial flair. But while it is unquestionably distressing ‘Redacted’ is not only an indictment of how war can brutalise young minds, it also offers a damming verdict on the mainstream media’s reporting from Iraq. In part this is because the use of embedded journalists which while perhaps necessary given the dangerous situation (http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/Iraq/Iraq_danger.html) in Iraq means that the media has to rely on the military for access. In Vietnam the media was not controlled to that same degree and thus the media’s reporting from that war was, some claim, influential in turning the American public against the war. ‘In Vietnam we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing’ De Palma has said ‘we saw soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war.’ The US Army also recently forbade its soldiers access to YouTube (emails and videophone messages still get through) but even now there are some disturbing clips available online. In one clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq5_vG3cYGM) a couple of American soldiers persuade young Iraqi children to say ‘Fuck Iraq’ and ‘I love pork’. ‘Aren’t you a Muslim’ asks one of the soldiers to a young boy. ‘I thought Muslims weren’t allowed to eat pork.. doesn’t that make you a dirty little heathen bastard Muslim?’ Elsewhere on the internet (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ync1wDIec) you can watch Corporal Joshua Belile singing a self-penned song called ‘Hadji Girl’ about a soldier who falls in love with an Iraqi girl, but then is ambushed by the family when he goes to meet them. In the song Belile sings that ‘hid behind the TV/ And I locked and loaded my M-16/ And I blew those little fuckers to eternity.’ James Blunt this ain’t.

De Palma’s film concerns a group of soldiers who one night, drunk, high and horny, leave their compound and with pre-planned precision rape and kill a teenage Iraqi girl. I had worried that using a collage of different styles would make it hard to emotionally engage with the film but in fact the technique works brilliantly well not least because as well as the US soldiers’s video footage De Palma also recreates Islamist websites where the kidnapping and killing of Americans is celebrated. ‘What I’m trying to do’ the director has said ‘is to make the viewer aware of the techniques that are used to present supposedly the truth to them. They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going in Iraq, and they think that’s the truth. In anything on television, somebody is selling something – whether it’s a product, whether it’s a policy.’

Colby Buzzell is a 31 year old former soldier in the US Army whose My War blog (http://cbftw.blogspot.com/) has been turned into an acclaimed book. When I spoke to him from his home in California he told me that during his time in Iraq he had witnessed similar incidents to the one with the Iraqi boys being made to say ‘I love pork’ but that it was mostly a function of being bored and also ‘sometimes you don’t even know what you are doing, what you have become.’ It is that process of dehumanisation that De Palma captures in ‘Redacted’. ‘The media has just got lazy’ Buzzell told me ‘so you have the soldiers doing the job that the reporters should be doing’. De Palma’s critics have claimed that his film gives succour to America’s enemies. The Fox News presenter Bill O’Reilly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPn-TD9-VBM) claimed that the film ‘will incite young Muslim men…to act on their hatred. If just one of those men straps on a bomb vest and murders people, that is on Brian De Palma.’ Buzzell, who spent one year in Iraq for the army, disagrees saying ‘there is nothing more American than questioning our government’ while De Palma himself has said that ‘the true story of the war in Iraq has been redacted from the mainstream corporate media. The pictures are what will stop the war. If we get these pictures and stories in front of a mass audience, maybe it will do something.’ ‘Redacted’ is not a perfect film but it is essential viewing for it reminds us that five years on from the invasion of Iraq we are still not being given the full picture.