Consider: If a filmmaker like, say, Brian De Palma, had used actual images of dead and injured Vietnamese war casualties in one of his fictionalized, semi-pseudo-documentary features like "Greetings" (1969) or "Hi, Mom!" (1970), would he or the films' producers or distributors have run a significant risk of being sued by the victims or their families? Are the legal or ethical issues any different now, with the carnage in Iraq? Why or why not? A few things to mull over regarding the latest "Redacted" scandal/controversy/promotional gimmick:
I suspect that De Palma was quite consciously out for publicity at the New York Film Festival press conference for "Redacted" Monday, when he accused Mark Cuban of HDNet and/or Magnolia Pictures of "redacting" the images of actual war casualties in his film's final montage. And it worked. Here's a movie about documentary reporting and amateur video and blogging of the occupation of Iraq and... look! IFC has posted a viral YouTube video of the NYFF confrontation between De Palma and Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles that has been featured (even embedded) on sites such as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Movie City Indie, GreenCine Daily, spout blog, jürgen fauth’s muckworld and I don't know how many other outlets including... well, the site you're looking at right now.
How much more meta do you want to get?
Bowles denies he was in on any "staging." But De Palma? Isn't that what he does? He provokes, he fakes, he toys with what's genuine and what's phony to the point where the distinctions become tricky or even meaningless. If his role in the press conference, at least, wasn't part of a "Be Black, Baby" performance piece (see "Hi, Mom!") then it sure ought to have been. And even if it wasn't, it still is. Spontaneous, pre-meditated, both, neither -- it's still a spectacle designed for the cameras and the audience.
Far from Vietnam: Internet technology as used, parodied and, yes, redacted in Brian De Palma's "Redacted."
But that's not really the most important issue, is it? De Palma says he got the images for the montage sequence either off the Internet or otherwise, and that they are photos of real people, with real injuries, that photographers took in Iraq. Except for a couple pictures created specifically for "Redacted" -- an wounded pregnant woman featured earlier in the movie and the victim of the fictionalized, (re-)enacted rape and murder -- the photos are meant to be perceived as shockingly unfiltered, and/or to further the movie's strategy of pushing the viewer to question what is real (I suppose I really should put quotation marks around that word in this context) and what has been composed for the movie you're watching. In the version of "Redacted" shown at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and perhaps in Venice and elsewhere, the faces of the actual victims have been blacked out -- as if someone had taken a marker and scribbled over their eyes to conceal their identities. (The logo of a YouTube-lookalike site shown in the movie has been similarly "redacted.")
De Palma says he wants to use the montage with the unredacted faces. Bowles says (in comments posted at Movie City Indie):
the sole reason that the photos are redacted, is that it is legally indefensible to use someone's unauthorized photo in a commercial work. any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false. And any indemnification does not preclude getting sued, and considering the asset bases of cuban and wagner versus depalma, there's no issue about who's purses will be attacked (not to mention the presumption of agreeing to the image of one of your loved one's mutilated body living on in the world wide media).Brian De Palma is neither naive nor stupid. He knows what Bowles says is true -- and that even if a suit went to court and the producers were able to successfully argue that their use of the photos was journalistic in intent, even within the context of a non-documentary commercial feature film, the cost of fighting such a lawsuit would be significant. In fact, "Redacted" announces itself as a "visual document" of "imagined events" (I'm not sure I remember the exact language used in the opening titles, but I believe that's close), and as such does not attempt to present any factual documentation for those events. De Palma also knows that, while "Redacted" plays with documentary, web, home video and other techniques and formats, it can't help but be an exploitation movie too, no matter how serious its concerns. It's right there in the title: Come see what has been forbidden for you to see.
Again, that's what De Palma does....
The legal risks are undeniable, and the question will come down to who is willing to distribute the film, in what form, and how much they are willing to risk. Karina Longworth reports receiving an e-mail from HDNet owner Mark Cuban, whom De Palma accused of having moral/aesthetic qualms about the montage:
“The film is going to be ‘redacted’ before we release it. He is using images that have not been cleared. We can not use images that have not been cleared. No movie can,” Cuban writes, noting that Magnolia has offered DePalma the opportunity to buy the film back and release it on his own dime. “At that point if its a matter of principle to him, he can absorb 100 percent of the risk and release the film as he sees fit. If he chooses not to, then we will release the movie without the images.” [...]Generally speaking, the festival press has characterized the closing sequence as, well, "powerful" -- citing it as the film's coup de grâce and maybe even the rationale for its existence. It is unclear to me whether Magnolia is willing to release the film with the "redacted" montage, as presented in film festival screenings, or wants to remove or replace the sequence entirely.“There is no way I am going to include images of people who have been severely wounded or maimed and killed when the possibility exists that their families could unknowingly see the images and recognize a loved one,” Cuban writes. “In this day and age, those pictures will be stripped out of the DVD release and unquestionably be posted on the internet exponentially increasing the likelihood it could happen. I wouldn’t do that to anyone.”
But this brings me back to the question at the top of this post. "Redacted" adds the Internet to the mixture of media forms and styles De Palma synthesized and satirized in his political/commercial comedies in the '60s and '70s. That same technology, and the urban combat in Iraq, has enabled Iraqis to access information and legal mechanisms that weren't available to poor, isolated, rural, illiterate, and/or non-English-speaking Vietnamese. Did the geographical and technological limitations of the place and time allow their images to be used with relative impunity? Perhaps the legal ramifications are different now than they were then -- or are the differences primarily matters of media penetration and practicality? Have the moral issues changed at all? Where is the line, commercially and ethically, between BBC/"Frontline"-type documentary journalism (of the type imitated by the French doc in "Redacted") and creations or recreations in a fictionalized context? Or between exploiting casualties of war and exposing the realities of what is happening to them? And does "Redacted" honestly address these questions? I'm not so sure, but at least in this sense the discussion about the movie may be (intentionally or unintentionally) more challenging and illuminating than what is in (or not in) the movie itself. Then again, once you posit that idea (especially about a film that so deliberately toys with reflexivity, dialectics and alienation effects), it automatically becomes an extension of the movie....
Unless I'm wrong and De Palma didn't really want to shake anybody up.
The language used in the press notes for the film call it a "fictional documentary." Might this phrase be part of the language used in the beginning of the film?
Of course, DePalma is using this to his own advantage--he's been dropping that "Redacted has been 'redacted'" line at a festival a week for the past month, and every time, he pauses for effect afterwards, as if he's waiting for gasps that don't come. But was the NYFF a full-on stunt in which DePalma and Bowles/Magnolia were equal collaborators? I still don't think so. I think the video shows DePalma reacting to Bowles with the genuine petulance of someone who just said something stupid and didn't think he'd be challenged. But that's just my best guess. Regardless, just by writing this comment, I'm doing DePalma a favor that I don't think he deserves.
I believe there's a crucial difference between a frontline documentary and what Redacted is trying to do. Mainly, Frontline's journalistic intentions versus De Palma's commercial (and - arguably - political) intentions. Although one can argue that any journalistic endeavour comes with it a certain amount of bias and perspective, most journalists follow protocols (multiple sources, quotes) that increase its credibility as news and attempt to minimize the journalist's personal bias. As a "fictionalized documentary" the film should not be received with any more weight than The Blair Witch Project or any film regarding the war, of any kind.
To attach the montage of "actual footage" (which I agree is quite powerful) at the end of this film strikes me as crass and disrespectul. Additionally, to include staged photos within this montage speaks to the intentions of De Palma and to the level of respect he has for the victims and soliders of the Iraq war.
I can understand his point that all the media we consume are redacted in some way and that in many cases, it becomes difficult to distinguish between fiction and reality. However, by mixing in staged photos, not to mention the entire film before the montage, De Palma redacts his own film. It seems, the movie is less about the issue of Redaction and more of a product of the process.
Cuban's censorship has little effect on the level of "truth" De Palma claims to reveal in this movie. His censorship has only placed some semblance of dignity and respect on the film.
Karlo: I hope some of your points emerge from the discussion about "Redacted." All movies -- documentaries or features -- are the results of thousands and thousands of choices about what to include, what to leave out, and how to present the material. But there ARE legal and ethical and journalistic distinctions between a pseudo-doc and, say, a television news documentary -- though both are just as capable of telling truths or telling lies or presenting misrepresentations.
One key difference is the willing participation of the people on screen, whether they're appearing as themselves or actors playing characters. Another is the understanding that we are not seeing people actually killed or injured or raped or tortured in a fictionalized film. There are laws against staging those sorts of things.
The reason festival critics have singled out the final montage in "Redacted" is because it makes a distinct leap from fiction into nonfiction (and then mingles the two with a few staged shots) at that point. So, who has the right to use images of civilian casualties, in what contexts, and for what purposes? Those questions have been around since the invention of photography, but I don't know that they can ever be universally resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Cuban and Bowles are taking the sensible legal stand -- and may have the stronger moral case as well. But De Palma raises disturbing questions, too: How DO you get a contractual "release" from victims and their families in a war zone? If De Palma wanted to use, say, the NBC news footage of South Vietnamese officer Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head (also famous from Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph), he could theoretically license the images from the copyright holders. But the man who was killed is clearly seen, with blood spouting from his head (in the film footage) and is identified as a Viet Cong, Nguyễn Văn Lém, though his identity and military status are not known for certain. Do he or his family have any rights? Does it make a difference that he was an officer rather than a civilian? The image was widely reprinted became a propaganda symbol for the anti-war movement -- as was the famous image of the naked girl hit by napalm. Was that exploitation of these casualties of war? Or was it, at least on some occasions, justified because these were real images from the war and the public had a right to know what was going on? Come to think of it -- I believe Woody Allen used that Eddie Adams image as wallpaper in "Stardust Memories," didn't he? I'm pretty sure that was legally cleared.
(BTW, Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" does a fine job of examining the relative truths of war photographs and the rights of the people who appear in them -- and those were US military.)
The thing that bothers me about this is the use of the staged photos from the film's narrative in the context of the real photos. I haven't had the chance to see Redacted yet - who knows, maybe I never will in the form that DePalma seems to want it released - but it makes me think that he's trying to make one of two points, one of which is shaky and one is a real pet hate of mine.
The first interpretation would be that notions of truth and reality have become hopelessly intermingled in this war, perhaps more than any other. Arguably true, but I'm not sure how the particular device DePalma has used here is meant to indict those responsible for this muddying of the waters (ie. the government and the press).
The second, and more irritating, interpretation is that DePalma is trying to say that the reality is now so terrible that it is indistinguishable from his fiction. Which, if true, elicts a massive "so what?" - the fiction wouldn't be possible without the reality, so comparing the two is meaningless.
Worse, it suggests that DePalma is trying to defend this film (which he will have known will be controversial, and which he does of course have the right to defend) with the old "this is reality" argument - even the title, Redacted, suggests that this is the ugly truth that we're all ignoring. I've always hated this argument, partly because it reminds me of people like Eli Roth and David DeFalco who go on about how their movies are "reality", then claim they were trying to create the most extreme thing they could think of without realising the dissonance between these two statements.
The other issue, which is addressed in your article, is that any film, even a documentary, is seen through a subjective observer, it is edited and sound-mixed, if it's a fictional film then it's scripted and acted too. Now, of course you could make a film that is so realistic it is indistinguishable from reality, but you have to accept that it is still a film, still something that people created and chose to create. Saying that your film is only a mirror of reality comes perilously close to abdicating responsibility for your film, of throwing up your hands and saying that you're not to blame.
As I say, I haven't had the chance to see it yet, so I could be completely wrong. But those are the feelings I get from hearing DePalma talk about the movie.
Well Exuse me. I am Eamonn Bowles' daugther and first of all... this incident did not have anything to do with publicity. And for the person above calling Eamonn Bowles stupid... well he's smarter than you will ever be. The points he made in this debate were completely valid and true.
JE: Claire, as I was careful to mention, I saw this as De Palma's attempt to generate some publicity while he was onstage, not your father's. I think your father stood up and told the truth. And, no, he's not stupid in any way!