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A need to know more

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Special to The Times

“I’ve hardly ever been in step with much,” Brian De Palma said at a recent New York Film Festival media conference for his new movie, “Redacted,” and that offhand remark sums up his career as well as anything. After more than 40 years making films and nearly five years into the Iraq war, as Hollywood addresses that mess via mainstream releases like “In the Valley of Elah” and “Rendition,” De Palma has made a raw, upsetting movie that has no interest in healing or any of the other Oprah-isms that constitute “adult” filmmaking in Hollywood. ¶ “Redacted,” shot in Jordan in about 2 1/2 weeks on high-definition video, is based on a real incident in which American soldiers raped a teenage Iraqi girl, then killed her and her family. The story is similar to the one in De Palma’s 1989 Vietnam film “Casualties of War,” virtually ignored at the time of its release. But the Iraq war is happening in the time of blogs, camcorders and the Internet, and “Redacted,” which opens Nov. 16, tells its entire story through a montage of those media, as well as surveillance cameras, news reports, terrorist websites -- nearly all of it re-created from what De Palma found on the Web. (He was not legally able to follow his impulse to edit this actual footage into a film.)

Paradoxically, though there are more outlets for them, images from Iraq have not dominated the public consciousness in the way images from Vietnam did. That, De Palma says, was the prime inspiration for “Redacted.” “Where are the pictures? Why can’t we see them?” he asks. “If we’re going to invade, occupy, bomb, destroy, I would like to see what we’re doing.”

“Redacted” ends with a montage of photos of real Iraqi victims of the war, and when it is mentioned to De Palma that one young Web critic expressed outrage that she was made to see something like that, he answers, “I think it has to do with the fact that nobody’s seen any images from the war. I mean, if you go on the Net you can find them. But if you don’t look for them, you don’t know they exist.”

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AN IMPULSE TO SHIELD

During Vietnam, De Palma says, when the American people “saw them in Life and Look magazine and saw them on the CBS news, they said, ‘Oh, my God.’ You know, now there are no pictures of fallen American soldiers. And it’s such an obvious way of sanitizing what you’re doing.”

Just how contentious those photos are is suggested by “Redacted” itself being redacted. Against De Palma’s wishes, the photos of the dead and wounded Iraqis at the end of the film are presented with their eyes blacked out. At his film festival news conference, De Palma claimed it was done because Mark Cuban, president of HDNet, which financed the film, was disturbed by them.

This prompted a moment that would seem like high satire if it weren’t so troubling. Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Films (which is releasing the film), interrupted De Palma to claim that none of the war victims in the film had legally signed off to allow their images to be presented. Bowles did not answer De Palma’s question of how it’s possible to present war photos if everyone shown has to sign a waiver. But Bowles’ stance suggests the depth of the impulse to shield the public from unpleasant reality.

And it suggests the ability of Brian De Palma to still rankle. His first features -- “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!” -- skewered ‘60s counterculture cant amid counterculture euphoria. Beginning the charges of misogyny that have dogged him -- no filmmaker has dealt more with the tortured ethos of chivalry than De Palma -- “Dressed to Kill” angered feminists over its depiction of sexualized murder. “Blow Out” was a deeply personal cry of anguish over the policies of the Reagan era.

“Redacted” won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, but at home, sight unseen, it’s been attacked as traitorous by Bill O’Reilly and his sidekick, Michelle Malkin. The movie may outrage not just war supporters but also those like the young critic who have grown used to the sanitized-for-your-protection mainstream media representation of the war. Meanwhile, the five soldiers involved in the actual incident are in various stages of being processed through the legal system, with several pleading guilty to the crimes.

For De Palma, a director whose career has largely been concerned with how we see, how the meaning of images can be controlled and changed, a war in which even the sight of returning coffins of dead American soldiers has been kept from the public is a subject ripe for closer inspection.

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