“The first victim of this war will be the truth,” claims one of the soldiers at the movie’s beginning but De Palma, far from being a moralising barker, immediately exposes the partiality of cinema through the voice of another soldier saying, “the camera always lies.” De Palma’s narrative strategy is depictive of his vision of reality: a cluster of events known not by an omniscient narrator but by whomever has access to the audiovisual archives available on the internet. Events since and the invasion of Iraq have introduced global audiences to new, rapid forms of communication such as You Tube, phone-made films, blogs and so forth and cinema has functioned (in Redacted at least) as a confabulatory catalyst of these interactive languages. The opening sequences of Redacted are caressed by the notes of Handel’s oeuvre (the same music used by Kubrick in Barry Lyndon) that eloquently – as only music can – introduce the spectator to the intensity of the horror to come. Terrorism is, occidentally rather than accidentally, gaudy and voyeuristic. In general Redacted was far from being a well-received film.ĭeparting from the contemporary paradigm of technological convergence, whereby every observer is at the same time an observed subject, De Palma illustrates the spread of a culture of exhibitionism as the potential telematic evolution of cinematographic voyeurism. On its severely limited release, the film was labelled as “hysterical bombast” (Mark Kermode, The Observer) and an “artistic failure” (Cosmo Landesman, The Times) by the liberal press of the oldest ‘democracy’ in the world in the US screenings were picketed (see while in Italy it has not received an official release in cinemas. Redacted is the meeting point where aesthetic reflection converges with a conscious ethical stance whose burden seems to be unbearable for the majority of us. In this film De Palma has questioned cinema and its cultural (visual) context in terms of representation of how to represent an event that the majority is firmly determined to conceal of how to render with images the visual dyslexia paining those eyes that have seen but do not want to speak out. With Redacted, the American cineaste Brian de Palma, has chosen, as he did previously in Casualties of War (lynched by the critics at the time of its release), rape as the only possible - and possibly the most apt - symbol of any imperialist operation, an allegory (and actuality) of war and its devastating effects on the social body of the victims as well as on the injured minds of the proactive witnesses to its horror. ![]() And it is precisely this ‘forgetfulness’ that we are all paying for now. What kind of society is it that advocates paranoia, inviting its citizens constantly to doubt each other while terrorising the harmless civilians of an innocent nation? What the unerring intelligence of the exporters of western ‘freedom’ has forgotten is that when, in place of obedience you can offer only death and despair, then your enemy will not care much about its own or anybody else’s life. The fanatical ambition of a civilizational clash, whereby our democratic (?) armies would have brought ‘civilization’ and ‘freedom’ to Iraq, is having many tragic consequences, one among them being the dramatic banning of any form of understanding towards what freedom honestly and practically means. Redacted: The Invisible Film on the ‘Invisible’ War By the Celluloid Liberation Front
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