Brian de Palma Redacted and Fair Use & Abu Ghraib blow back

Brian de Palma’s new Iraq war film Redacted is getting strong reviews for being difficulty, violent, hard hitting feature film. It is the documentary footage at the end of the film of war victims, taken by anonymous photographers and of unidentified persons that is creating controversy. In an interview with for the New York Film Festival, De Palma explains that all of these images inn the film float on the Internet and that they are engaged in the film under a principle of fair use. Magnolia, the films distribution company and backer, headed by Mark Cuban, do not want the legal responsibility of showing images without proper permissions. The film critic J. Hoberman, who conducts the interview, suggests that the sooner it goes to trail the better. The fair use issue seems to be two fold from de Palma.

1. The images are already in a de facto public domain (Internet)

2. There is a moral imperative to be able to use these images freely. He cites images of the Vietnam war (photojournalists one assumes) as the motivation for him to go into the streets and protest that war as well as make his war films of that period.

There is really no information about this fight on the Magnolia Redacted site. The blogs here and here have been a bit suspicion of a media stunt, but it seems like a pressing issue that has come up domestically around entertainment properties. To frame this debate as one that extends to civic use of media and representation within democracies deepens the stakes.

The Abu Ghraib prison images were not un-attributed. The location, time of the images and identities of the victims were documented aspects of the military interment. The question was not whether the images were authentic (all the signatures were in place), but whether they were credible¬¬¬––whether an American public could fathom this kind of overdrive of cruelty as an analogue of waging war. They are amateur shots taken by US military that, as writer Luc Sante has described them, are really “trophy shots.” The point Sante makes about the terror the Abu Ghraib images evoke is not the horror of war, but something far more perverse in its domestication, its standardization as it were. He writes, “The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that for a few seconds I took it for a montage.” It’s the unreal of the documentary image are troubling in the Abu Ghraib case.

Mark Cuban for Redacted, and to a certain extent our government in regard to media images of the war, argues that it is an abuse and further violence to the victims to circulate such images. What Brian de Palma argues in the defense of his film is that people should be able to see the images of this war. It is our right and our duty to see them. I guess these guys will not be hugging this one out.