Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.
The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.
Adams later wrote in Time magazine:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."
Images of the execution were also used in "Head" (1968), directed by Bob Rafelson, written by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, and starring the Monkees, Victor Mature and Annette Funicello. Reviewing "Head," Nick Burton wrote: "Indeed, there is much newsreel footage here of the Vietnam war, and the frightening image of a man being shot point blank in the head, execution-style, reoccurs in this G-rated film enough to remind the audience just what was at stake when people's attentions were distracted by escapism."
Who, if anyone, owns the rights to the image known as "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon"? Who owns the rights to the execution footage attributed to "NBC News" (taken by a South Vietnamese cameraman Vo Suu, who worked with NBC correspondent Howard Tuckner? Would such images ever be shown on television or in mainstream print or Internet outlets today? Do (or did) either of the men who were photographed have any rights (moral or legal) over how their likenesses were used? Are the images legally considered to be in the public domain -- and, if so, when did that happen? The pictures were taken by credentialed, professional news photographers. Does that make a difference? The infamous private photographs taken by and of American military personnel abusing captives at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were released with the identities of the prisoners digitally obscured. Should the same standards be applied to other images -- say, of civilian or military casualties? Do those standards change at the official end of a war, or major combat operations?
An article in Famous Pictures Magazine reports: "After the picture and footage flashed across the world there were cries for Loan to be charged with War Crimes for his summary execution of Lem. Loan's execution would have violated the Geneva Conventions for captured soldiers or Prisoners of War (POWs) if Lem had been wearing a military uniform. Since Lem was caught wearing civilian clothes, plaid shirt and black shorts, Loan was only restricted by the laws of the South Vietnamese government, which allowed the use of such harsh measures." So, this may have been documentation of a war crime. How do such considerations affect the rights or responsibilities of those who reproduced the photograph? Do the rights associated with the images vary after the fact, depending on whether the usage is journalistic, commercial, non-profit, political, satirical, comedic, sensationalistic, or otherwise?
The Bush administration has tried to prevent the press from photographing even the coffins of unidentified US military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do government censorship efforts change our view of war images? Are the legal or ethical standards for showing victims of accidents or natural disasters different from those for showing casualties of war? How? Given that "Head" was released the same year the execution occurred and "Stardust Memories" twelve years later, does the passage of time change how journalistic images are used in fictional contexts? Would you rather not think about this? I don't have definitive answers to these questions. Do you?
NOTE: Errol Morris writes a New York Times blog called Zoom: A Fillmmaker Uncovers the Hidden Truths of Photos in which he examines photographs and the stories behind them for evidence about what we think we see in them and what we think we know about them.
Going simply on old memories now...
There was a tour of Pulitzer Prize winning photographs that came to Dallas 4, maybe 5 years ago. The Adams picture was of course among it, and the placard that explained its origins illuminated the Adams/Time quote.
Apparently (and again, this is a bit of a half-memory), the General in the picture had just found out that the man in the plaid shirt had killed the family of one of his officers. This doesn't necessarily make it "okay" to beat and shoot him, but it certainly casts the whole picture -- and the decades of cultural baggage it carries -- in a whole different light.
Nothing further to add, just thought I'd throw that in there...
JE: Thanks, Ken. It does indeed alter the way you see the photo. All we know from the photo itself is that a man seems to be shooting, or about to shoot, another man in the head. The Famous Pictures Magazine article I linked to says something similar to what you recall, and goes into further detail: "Lem’s role in the Viet Cong is murky. Most reports give him the role of a Captain in a Viet Cong assassination and revenge platoon responsible for the killing of South Vietnamese policemen and their families. Eddie Adams was told by Loan that Lem had killed one of Loan’s friends and his family, "They found out that [Lem] was the same guy who killed one of his ---uh---Loan’s officers and wiped out his whole family." Yet facing international pressure when the picture and footage aired, Vice President Ky said the prisoner had not been in the Viet Cong but was "a very high ranking" communist political official. History hasn’t clarified Lem’s role in the Vietcong and the Vietnamese government has never acknowledged his role in the war. Lem's widow and children lived in poverty for years before being discovered by a Japanese TV crew living in a field. It was only then that the Vietnamese government provided her shelter. "
Two more quotes from the same article:
"After Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised his sidearm and shot Vietcong operative Nguyen Van Lem in the head he walked over to the reporters and told them that, 'These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me.' "
"... [T]he moment frozen is one almost at the instant of death. Taken a split second after the trigger was pulled, Lem’s final expression is one of pain as the bullet rips through his head. A closer look of the photo actually reveals the bullet exiting his skull."
It seems to amplify what Adams meant when he said photos do lie by showing incomplete truths.
It's a very extraordinary scene to those who don't understand, but what you have seen you must believe, if you can, if you can.
Thinking about the censorship, I can only guess that the choice to censor came from the particular circumstances. Powerful journalism, and only a short stretch of footage, versus a long stretch of photographs in a commercial product. But you probably knew that. I also think the choice to censor can only really come before an image has been made public. How could you try to keep people from seeing something when they've already seen it? But that doesn't bring us to an answer. Know what? Put John Stuart Mill on it.
Lem in an assassination squad? Even that casts an incomplete picture. I'm certain the situation is much grayer. No lion and lamb. Just two lions. Or not even two lions. Two men in very complex situations.
Another spin on this image in Stardust Memories: when the film was first released, the photo covering the wall in Woody's apartment elicited nervous chuckles and laughs from some in the auduence.
At the time, our PC culture had yet to trickle down to Asians.
I respect your writing and you as a person, Mr. Emerson. But I must disagree with you on this subject.
In a time of war and massive human suffering, where is the issue of a person's rights and privacy to his own image? Very low in the ladder, way below life and death, food and survival of oneself and family, suffering mental and physical, despair and pain. To pretend that one's rights on things like his image and copyright and monetary reward, when the world is crumbling around you, is ... a reflection of intellectuals who have never really seen or experienced the pain and anguish in a setting like this.
It's a matter of proportion.
Can you imagine digitally blocking out the face of the man being executed? Would you feel the same empathy and humanity if his face is gone and he is dehumanized? To remove the faces of the victims of Abu Ghareb has that effect -- they are nameless, faceless "others" that are alien to Americans. They might as well not be human.
a reader: Yours is exactly the kind of thoughtful response I was hoping the questions in my post would elicit. I appreciate your point about the line between protecting victims and showing what really happened without dehumanizing the victims (further). In some ways, I felt this way about 9/11, too. While I feel for the casualties and their families, part of me thought it was wrong for the media to hold back from showing the real consequences of the attack. But that wouldn't have been good for ratings. People would have been outraged. Congressional investigators announced that there were many photos from Abu Ghraib of Americans torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners that were "much worse" than the ones that were officially released and widely published (in their redacted form). I wonder how much worse it could be -- and where those photos are.
Years ago I was mesmerized by a Masterpiece Theatre dramatization of "Testament of Youth," Vera Brittain's heartbreaking memoir of life in England during World War I. A point made during one of Alastair Cooke's intros has always haunted me. He pointed out that while an entire generation of young men were being slaughtered, the British government was maintaining tight control over the images and even the casualty reports coming back from the front. He compared that to Vietnam, and asked viewers to wonder what would have happened if people in Britain's time had grasped the full horror of the trenches. Would they have rioted until it ended?
Cooke was assuming that technology and television meant that in future no government would be able to exercise such tight control over what we saw. How little he knew, either of what a determined administration can accomplish or what a supine media can countenance.
I wholeheartedly agree with reader, above--to remove faces is to dehumanize, to argue copyright for such pictures is to miss the point entirely. I also think of the famous image of the naked little girl, running down a Vietnamese road after being napalmed. In this new media world of ours, where no one must be upset, we'd be told that her rights were somehow being violated by showing us this dreadful image. And this is as false as it is fatuous. It is not the victims we protect when we strip out images of war. It is the perpetrators.
Dear Mr. Emerson:
Your blog articles about Redacted and the Viet Cong photograph continue to needle me and refuse to go away in my mind. Considering your receptive and kind response to my previous comment, I thought I should write to you directly about what's been bothering me, even though I can't say I have a clear stand on these complicated issues.
What is it that bothers me on an immediate level? I have not seen the De Palma movie Redacted and am not sure if I want to, but your description of his approach -- blurring the line between what's real and what's re-enacted -- and his habit of toying with the audience's expectations and trust in images makes me ill. It is bad enough that images are manipulated every day to distort truth and serve propaganda on news media. Of course the BBC/Frontline documentaries have a point of view despite the real footage they show. The same can be said (and then some) to the images shown on Fox News every day.
As a postmodern artistic statement, Mr. De Palma has every rigth to make his movie however he wants to. Sure, an artist can take a political or apolitical stand -- any stand including pro-war hawkish stand as well as the opposite and somewhere in between -- on any political issue.
I guess my point is that I cannot see how these arguments are meaningful ... to me. Perhaps it's because I'm a woman, nonacademic, not exactly American, or perhaps I just have a different point of view. I just find De Palma's attitude toward truth to be incredibly cynical and the discussion over the victims (in any war) rights to their images and the possibility of lawsuits from Vietnam or Iraq or any war to be full of absurdity. A Canadian citizen's lawsuit against US government was recently rejected by the US court, over his allegation that he was kidnapped and taken to Syria and tortured for months. No civilian "collateral casualties" in any previous wars, except perhaps the Jewish Holocaust victims, successfully got any justice or compensation from their undeserved and causeless suffering in wars. There is something disturbing, detached, and ... cruel, almost, in suggesting that they might sue for the unjustified use of their images in a US movie, when these people live in a poor, demolished home with questions of survival and dead neighbors and families around. Am I overreacting? Perhaps because I have at least indirect knowledge of people and a world in which there are far more urgent and meaningful concerns than how their images are used? Perhaps I have lived through (again somewhat indirectly) events in which I knew people would prefer their images and images of atrocity and injustice are broadcast to the world rather than hidden and covered up and ... redacted? To demand their image rights sounds a lot like "why not let them eat cake?"
The photograph of the Viet Cong being executed is one of the most powerful images ever, because it is honestly real and because there is something universal and universally moving. The executioner/general Ly was not included in the photo, and rightly so. He might have his own revenge that we could have appreciated. Or perhaps we who live in our safe comfort could even be persuaded that the guy in the photo had it coming and deserved to be shot like a dog. But the image does not give us the room to be rescued from the horror of war -- the meaningless, absurd, general human cruelty that such an environment brings about, and the naked wrongness of the mere act of killing a fellow human being regardless of motive. Even if this is a face of a stranger who looks nothing like a white, middle-class American who has never treaded has far as the inner city ghetto, even if the causes of his execution is entirely foreign and irrelevant to one's life, we still sense the chill down our spine, don't we? At the capability of harm and hate of humanity. And our empathy with such an "other". We need not know who he is or why he is being shot, for we know such things happen every day and, given a cosmic coincidence, could happen to any of us, on either side of the gun.
And we can't bear it. We can't bear such harrowing reality and our own complicity in ... the Vietnam war or the current events or all the evil. I can't deny my own complicity, however unwilling and indirect, today at the moment. For whom the bell tolls? So it is natural that we look for a way to distance ourselves from the emotional effects of war and suffering. Would be nice that we don't see the faces, the corpses, the smoking houses, the blasted limbs, the scars and bruises. Out of sight, out of mind. Or yes to the images, but with the assurance that they are staged, made-up, untrustworthy, fictional, who the f*ck cares anyway ... And we put between us and the misfortune of those in an alien tribe a safe distance -- like the moral right to taking revenge, or philosophical arguments over reality, or art, or fancy postmodernism. So that we don't have to look at the bloody faces and the eyes and feel they are as human as we; so that we can stop feeling powerless and ashamed.
I don't know if I am making sense. Anyway, I have a lot of respect for your scholarly writing in film -- just read your article about Barton Fink after I rewatched it. I love reading your blog.
reader, Campaspe: What you both say reflects much of the ambivalence and turmoil I feel about this, too. How can someone really "own" an image of another's suffering? Our copyright laws say it can be done -- but I, too, feel strongly that certain moral considerations are much more important than "intellectual property" in this respect.
I see what I think De Palma is trying to do, yet I think he fails miserably -- for many of the reasons you describe. If he has the best of intentions, they backfire because either way (showing the faces or not showing the faces) has a dehumanizing/numbing effect. If he has the worst intentions, the effects are still the same.
To show the faces is to say: These people don't matter as people, deserving of dignity of dignity and respect. They are just "victims," and that trumps any human right they may have to protect themselves from exposure and further exploitation and humiliation. On the other hand, if their faces are "redacted," its like we're denying them a full measure of humanity in another way -- painting them as faceless. Yet, only by showing the real horror of the violence can we truly hold those who perpetrated that violence accountable for their actions.
Whatever De Palma's intentions, he's exposing real tragedy and exploiting it in a fictional context at the same time, which, as you say, devalues real suffering and distances us emotionally and aesthetically. Yet there are positive and negative arguments either way...