Real-Life Violence
Director Brian DePalma says "Pictures are what will stop the war," and he's out to prove it. His new film "Redacted," which focuses on the brutal rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family, uses graphic images from the war that he says media outlets have been too timid to show.Director Brian DePalma says “Pictures are what will stop the war,” and he’s out to prove it. His new film “Redacted,” which focuses on the brutal rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family, uses graphic images from the war that he says media outlets have been too timid to show.
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The film centers on perhaps the most horrendous known atrocity involving U.S. troops, the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl and four members of her family in March 2006. DePalma had directed in 1989 a movie about a rape by U.S. soldiers of a Vietnamese girl called “Casualties of War,” starring Sean Penn and the young Michael J. Fox.
“All the images we…have of our war are completely constructed — whitewashed, redacted,” said De Palma in Venice, according to press reports. “One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war.”
DePalma makes use of images he has grabbed from the Web, including soldiers’ home videos and photos that have never appeared in print. There’s also more standard documentary film footage and the use of fictionalized techniques and characters to avoid certain legal issues, making it into an unusual kind of “docu-drama.”
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A 22-year-old man with apparent social difficulties is suspected of killing six people and injuring seven late Friday near the University of California campus in Santa Barbara.
The veteran foreign correspondent writes that while physical courage is common on the battlefield, moral courage is not. When young men and women are sent to occupy a foreign land -- whether Vietnam, Gaza or Iraq -- and they encounter constant danger, a population hostile to their presence and a faceless but determined enemy, the value of human life inevitably becomes relative and killing all too quickly becomes murder.
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