THE SLIFR FORUM: REDACTED GETS REDACTED?

On to horrors of other sorts. Like the horrors of war, and intimations of censorship, and the chilling effect of the looming specter of litigation. All of these got mixed up into a bitter brew at the New York Film Festival this past week during the press conference following a screening of Brian De Palma’s Redacted. According to reports from those who have seen it (I as yet have not), the movie, assembled from gathered multimedia footage, including graphic images of death obtained from the Internet (presumably the images directly referenced in David Edelstein’s recent comments about the film) and staged footage, uses its collage approach to tell the story of American soldiers buckling under the strain and terror generated by their participation in (and their inability to get a grip on the purpose of) the Iraq war.

Redacted has been shown as festivals such as Cannes, Toronto and Venice, where De Palma took home the Best Director prize, and now, as it nears its American release date (Nov. 16) through distribution by HDNet/Magnolia Pictures, the pioneering digital filmmaking corporation owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, De Palma has used the New York Film Festival to denounce Cuban and his company for not standing behind the film’s use of graphic war photos depicting mutilated Iraqi citizens, which were shown without alteration in previous film festivals. At the point in the NYFF press conference when the video begins, De Palma makes a statement that Cuban himself “redacted” the images because he found them “disturbing.” He is immediately challenged by Eammon Bowles of Magnolia Pictures, who argues that Cuban and the company began to worry about the possibility of endless and expensive litigation based on the use of those images. Then producer Jason Kliot takes the stage, borrows moderator J. Hoberman’s microphone and attempts to relate a rather more diplomatic explanation for the risks Cuban took to finance the film in the first place. Kliot makes a very strong statement about the nature of Fair Use laws in the United States as being set up “so we cannot use images of our own culture to tell the truth about our own culture.” But then he follows with an odd comment implying that Cuban not only has financial concerns regarding the use of the imagery, but also that he and his partners are worried over being “associated” with unredacted images showing massacres on the screen.*

It’s a fascinating piece of video. At Movie City Indie, Ray Pride posts the clip and a comment from filmmaker Jamie Stuart, who courts the possibility that the confrontation was a publicity stunt, but then concludes, largely from the uncomfortable look on De Palma’s face, that it’s the real thing.

The piece left me thinking about a couple of things. I want to hear more about how the film itself came to be redacted. At what point did Cuban decide this was too great a risk to take? Comments from the Reuters article at Venice suggest that the process had already begun by the time De Palma accepted his award. Obviously De Palma believes in his film as a work of art that has been designed, at least in part, to effect change, to be a part of furthering public opinion toward ending the war. In that regard, it’s not surprising that he should be on the defensive and protective of his work. But what about Cuban, Wagner and Magnolia Pictures? Are they right to protect their interests over those of the film? Are they being disingenuous in making changes to the film now as opposed to insisting that they be presented in a certain way from the outset? And is Eamonn Bowles, who is not the director of the film, just covering his bosses asses during the taped conference, or could he be right that the black-barred images actually work thematically as a brutally ironic commentary within the film about the incendiary nature of those images? I say “could” because, again, until I or any of us have actually seen the film, it’s all speculation on the order of art versus commerce. But think what those black bars imposed on the sex scenes between Selma Blair and Robert Wisdom did to heighten the commentary about race that was at the center of the first half of Todd Solondz’s Storytelling. What does seeing this clip of the NYFF press conference for Redacted make you think about? What questions are you asking?

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UPDATE 10/9/07 3:47 p.m.: Here are myriad Redacted links reporting on the movie itself and its reception at the New York Film Festival as gathered by the invaluable David Hudson and Green CIne Daily. Thanks, David!

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* UPDATE 10/9/07 7:46 p.m.: Karina Longworth has a fine and well-considered post on the Redacted situation that incorporates a statement she obtained from Mark Cuban. You can read it here. Part of Cuban's statement seems to clarify the point Kliot was apparently trying to make. Karina reports: "Cuban characterizes this business decision, at least in part, as a moral issue. In other words, don’t expect the montage to resurface as a DVD extra on his watch. `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.'”

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UPDATE 10/10/07 10:09 a.m.: I'm not sure how I overlooked it, but there is a very good collection of information about Redacted available at the essential Brian De Palma site De Palma a la Mod, courtesy of site curator Geoff Songs.

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