Directed by Casualties of War’s Brian De Palma, 2007’s under-seen Redacted was an intense, unforgettable Iraq war movie. One of the earliest found-footage war movies, Redacted tells a fictionalized version of the Mahmudiyah rape and killings, a war crime that involved a group of US soldiers sexually assaulting a 14-year-old child before murdering her and her family. Redacted’s unsparing adaptation of this incident led to boycotts and bad reviews, although Redacted’s revolutionary use of the found footage format did earn praise from critical luminaries such as Roger Ebert and John Pilger. Redacted brought war movies into the twenty-first century with a style that made war’s horrors all the more palpably real.

Brian De Palma’s film based on the Mahmudiyah incident, in which American soldiers raped a 15-year-old girl and murdered her and her family in 2006, is unsettling to watch. It is the Iraq War we want to pretend didn’t exist. It is the dark underbelly of the war, in which policy-makers put soldiers in the middle of an unwinnable war, but where the war’s moral failings were not just at the top of the chain of command. It is a picture of ourselves that we don’t want to see. The film isn’t perfect and has plenty of shortcomings. Some criticized the film for not acknowledging that those responsible for the crimes were charged and convicted, but the point is not that the crimes were committed with impunity, but rather that they were committed at all. They need not be representative of the war in Iraq to be significant.

De Palma uses his film to explore both the nature of violence in war as well as the nature of media. Every scene in the film is viewed through some form of media present in the film itself. A soldier records his day-to-day interactions as part of a film project to help him get into film school. A French documentary crew makes a film about a checkpoint manned by U.S. soldiers. Local Arabic-language media covers violence perpetrated by the U.S. We watch events through security-camera footage, web chats, deposition videos, and terrorist propaganda videos uploaded online. The film is meant to feel like a documentary. The effect is heavy-handed at times, but almost 15 years later the saturation of media at every event, where people record the smallest thing on their cellphones, has become more pronounced. Is the camera a neutral observer? These questions go beyond just the Iraq War; just ask the kids at Covington Catholic.

I’m actually surprised how good Redacted is, considering the general critical disdain accorded to it back in 2007. It, however, won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival and was listed as the best film of the year by the respected Cahiers du Cinema. Well, it seems like they were right on the money.

Seeing the film now, it almost feels like a relic of a distant past—the burgeoning digital era as it were, with shoddy aesthetics, gimmicky transitions and DIY-style content creation.

To think that director Brian De Palma was shrewd enough to capture not just a snapshot of America’s controversial involvement in the Iraq War but also using the tools of the trade of the time that reflect the medium’s affordances and audience-implicating effects.

As such, Redacted, a satirical ‘found footage’-style fiction feels like the last word on the failed war. Based on the true incident of a young Iraqi girl raped and murdered by US soldiers, Redacted investigates the notion of truth by blurring the lines between reality and fiction.

Because De Palma’s mode of address is in the form of a constructed documentary (that, at the same time, is meant to be deconstructed by the viewer’s active engagement with a variety of visual stimuli, including websites with disturbing embedded videos, and footage of a French woman engaging in reportage), it gives us an acute sense of immediacy that while staged produces a rare authenticity that puts us right there in the chaos.

Yet, because of the distance provided by its staging, we aren’t necessarily conditioned to be emotionally involved… until we are by the end of the whole experiment.

Redacted is not an easy watch, but it tells us how America lost the war without telling us how America lost the war. In that sense, De Palma was far ahead of his time.

Grade: A

Cinema: a dizzying leap into the horror of war

In Redacted (2007), Brian De Palma portrays real crime by US troops in Iraq. But instead of elegant fiction, the filmmaker bets on the shattering of the real — and on the aesthetics of precariousness as a narrative power in the era of YouTube

By José Geraldo Couto, at the Instituto Moreira Salles Cinema Blog

Winner of the Silver Bear for direction in Berlin, elected by Cahiers du cinéma the best film of 2008, Redacted, by Brian De Palma, never commercially released in Brazil (only shown at the Rio Film Festival, with the title Guerra without cuts), arrives now to streaming, on the Mubi platform. It was worth the wait: it's an extraordinary job.

The dramatic core is inspired by a real fact: during the occupation of Iraq by US troops, a group of soldiers rapes a 15-year-old girl and kills her family (including the teenager herself).

But unlike Kathryn Bigelow's films on analogous themes (Zero Dark Thirty, The Darkest Hour), Redacted does not offer a fictional reenactment of events to create the illusion of a given, univocal, and unambiguous reality. Instead, it scrambles partial and fragmented views, presenting a “real” that is much more problematic, unstable, full of edges. Instead of catharsis, it delivers the annoyance, the perplexity. It's up to the viewer to deal with that later.

Precarious construction

Anyone who is used to the exuberance, precision and elegance (even in the heart of violence and horror) of De Palma's cinema will find strange the collage of rushed images, rough framing, poor lighting, visual and sound “noises” and disparate textures that compose Redacted. What was sought there was to simulate, as if they were documentary records, a series of sources: an “image diary” produced by a soldier, newscast scenes, a French documentary, videos produced by Al-Qaeda, etc.

This method of construction virtually abolishes all “objective” narration in third person. Everything is mediated by some interested gaze, partial in both senses of the term, that is, incomplete and biased. The spectator is asked to fill in the gaps, the “outside the frame”, and to confront different perspectives.

As a result, the dramatic density is built not through the usual narrative artifices, but through a skillful orchestration of the fragments, in addition to the shrewd use of the musical score (Handel, Puccini), a terrain in which the music lover De Palma has always been a master. The emotional climax takes place on the only actual documentary images (I won't say which ones they are), soaked with the ravishing music of Tosca's third act.

To Godard's famous formulation, according to which “cinema is the truth at 24 frames per second”, De Palma usually responds with a joke: “No, cinema is the lie at 24 frames per second”. And he himself was always a great conjurer, who played with the status of the image and problematized the reality of what we think we see and hear, in films like Body Double, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out.

Impotence of speech

In Redacted, it is as if De Palma took this game to another level, making a film that is a serious reflection on his craft (narrating with images and sounds) and the denunciation of a reality that does not fit in any audiovisual discourse: the horror of war and the dehumanization it produces in executioners and victims. Once in a lifetime, the advertising slogan doesn't lie: "In a war, the first casualty is the truth."

It is, in a way, a film that (re)revolts against its own impotence, its own impossibility. Hence the anguish it produces. Hence, perhaps, its difficulty in being marketed and consumed. Mortal sin for an industry increasingly powerful materially and dwarfed morally.

Critically panned and hugely divisive when it was released in 2007, maverick director Brian De Palma's docudrama about the injustices of the Iraq war and its manipulative representation in the media holds up to be more interesting and inventive than many gave it credit for at the time.

[Steven] Spielberg was one of several reigning elder statesmen to weigh in during the Bush era, most powerfully in his heavy-artillery remake of War of the Worlds, which envisioned America under attack before reversing the terms of the metaphor to suggest that the Martians and their machines had a distinctly imperialist appearance. Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York was gestating for a decade before its completion in 2002, at which point its NYC creation myth had extra resonance (and its own subtle World Trade Center cameo). In The Departed, Scorsese had Alec Baldwin’s shady Boston cop Captain Ellerby invoke the Patriot Act (“I love it! I love it!”) as a symbol of ostensibly good guys doing very bad things.

Unsurprisingly, the ’70s survivor who confronted Iraq head-on was the indomitable Brian De Palma, whose Redacted adopted the same polemical hybrid of style as Moore, Cohen, and Range. The film is loosely based on a true account of U.S. military personnel raping a civilian girl, and unfolds as a series of video diaries, surveillance tapes, and YouTube clips that replicates an entire online multimedia landscape around recreations of the horrific event at the story’s center. By returning to the incendiary approach of his sardonic anti-Vietnam films Greetings and Hi, Mom!, De Palma transformed the recency of an ongoing catastrophe into an artistic strategy. Redacted proved so controversial that its producers insisted on recutting it for its New York Film Festival premiere, leading to a war of words with a filmmaker unafraid of biting the hand that feeds him. At one point, De Palma volunteered to buy the movie back and release it un-redacted, at once savoring and savaging the irony of the situation.

As images of distress go, Redacted’s photo-realistic final tableau of a broken, bloodied casualty of war was true nightmare fuel, while Paul Haggis’s money shot in 2007’s other major Iraq War movie, In the Valley of Elah, was constituted of simplistic semiotics: an American flag turned upside down. The film’s tale of a father learning the hard truth about his son’s activities while overseas earned Tommy Lee Jones an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, although he was better that year in a different role—as the reactionary, benevolent, and finally ineffectual sheriff in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country For Old Men. The film’s long, clean narrative lines, biblical severity, and setting in Bush’s old gubernatorial stomping grounds begged the questions of whether or not the Coens had instrumentalized Cormac McCarthy’s drug-runner thriller into a State of the Union address; critic Jonathan Rosenbaum interpreted the movie’s “gorgeous carnage” as an indirect mediation on the violence of the Iraq War.

No Country was a hit, but the Coens’ more incisive Bush-era commentary was their follow-up Burn After Reading, a delirious mashup of screwball stupidity and cloak-and-dagger paranoia featuring John Malkovich as a past-his-prime spy struggling to adapt after the thaw of the Cold War. It’s a funny movie set in a cruel universe: Its best scenes feature J.K. Simmons and David Rasche as CIA operatives performing a heartless, hilarious audit of the story’s ever-escalating body count—a callback to Dr. Strangelove minus the apocalyptic ending. Even as the film’s seemingly anachronistic analysis of tetchy (if hypothetical) U.S.-Russia collusion proved eerily prescient a decade after the fact, the dismissive dialogue in the movie’s ruthless coda couldn’t help but connect to cycles of foreign-policy fuckups and the political buck-passing that went with them.

“What’d we learn, Palmer?” queries Simmons’s high-ranking intelligence agent to his underling.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I don’t fucking know either … I guess we learned not to do it again.”

It’s telling, perhaps, that the movies associated with the Iraq War have less of an aesthetic legacy than those associated with World War I or II or even Vietnam. In 2005’s Jarhead, Mendes even deferred to Francis Ford Coppola by showing Marines watching Apocalypse Now for inspiration, conceding to the older film’s (and older conflict’s) hold on the collective imagination. For the most part, post-9/11 American war movies have been more attuned to politics and aftermath, with spectacle either miniaturized—as in the tense, horror-movie-like bomb-defusing sequences in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker—or else eliminated altogether. The most formally innovative Iraq War movie, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, avoids the battlefield altogether, focusing instead on a panoply of multimedia perspectives to get across themes of division and disinformation; where his 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War favored a dreamlike, lyrical detachment evincing distance from its subject matter, Redacted’s surveillance-style textures and artful integration of documentary material were evidence that the director was trying to speak to the here and now.

Stone’s Snowden is cynical without wisdom — just righteousness. Falling for the contemptuous line “You’re only protecting the supremacy of your government” doesn’t jibe with his supposed interest in protecting the U.S. after 9/11. Stone indulges this specious optimism then teases with it when geeky Snowden chooses the Internet as his “sin of choice” and CIA brass tell him, “You’ve come to the right whorehouse.”

Stone confuses sexual exploitation with the idea of the U.S. as a Super Spy nation that rapes its own citizens. This resembles the disillusionment that Brian De Palma displayed in his anti–Iraq War movie Redacted. A scene in which Snowden is reprimanded by a wall-size video projection of his boss — he’s symbolically dwarfed by the looming Big Brother government — is so over-obvious that it made me wish De Palma were applying his voyeuristic, techno-geek satire to this story (and to the sexual complicity of Snowden’s relationship with his ambitious girlfriend Lindsay, an anti-American fellow traveler played by Shailene Woodley).

When De Palma and Stone collaborated on Scarface (1983), they were more politically challenging. Unfortunately, both De Palma and Stone have since succumbed to political clichés and liberal nostalgia. They no longer challenge themselves. In Scarface, it was always clear that Al Pacino’s Tony Montana, the drug-dealing illegal immigrant, was a criminal; his gangster “hero” had slipped in through the cracks of U.S. diplomacy and capitalism. Yet here, Snowden’s betrayal of his employer — which might be considered criminal in the private sector — is justified as virtuous. “You’re running a dragnet on the whole world!” Snowden petulantly objects. (Stone then cuts to footage of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as an example of an “ousted Third World leader who would not play along.”)

In Stone’s 2013 drugs-sex-class feature Savages, home-grown criminality was thrillingly understood as a warped version of American values. Perhaps Stone needs to work from fiction in order to be a dazzling artist — as he was in making JFK, Any Given Sunday, and Alexander. But when borrowing semi-documentary style in Snowden, Stone forgets he’s telling a story of sedition, and he loses both his sense of human nature and his cinematic dazzle. The smug final image of Snowden taking asylum in Russia (“I’ve gained a new life”) shows him in heroic profile, completely overlooking the fact of his (and Poitras’s and Greenwald’s) seditious radicalization. Stone abets these traitors’ pride. His skill as a filmmaker and his virtue as a disgruntled American are the immediate casualties.

Stone talked through some of his filmography with the Los Angeles Times' Josh Rottenberg. Here's what he said about Natural Born Killers:

“That hurt. Warner Bros. never really supported the film. When I showed it to them, I had never seen such shock on the faces of the execs. It was like, ‘How are we going to release this movie?’ I think they never got their hands around it.

“That was a depressing time for me because the attacks were mean-spirited. It’s a unique picture, I think. It’s not normal. It’s a sensory overload. It was going back to my ‘Scarface’ days. It was, ‘OK, let’s ramp up the coarseness and the vitality.’ It’s a love story wrapped in a horror film.”