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Maybe the media circus surrounding Brian De Palma’s Redacted (see Pat Graham’s recent post) will spark the kind of water cooler chat that gets people into theaters, but the saber rattling has overshadowed any discussion of the director’s artistic intentions. When I first saw the movie in September, at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was struck by how stylistically different it is from his previous works; De Palma met the challenge of shooting a high-definition video feature on a $5 million budget by radically reinventing his approach to storytelling. Much as Barry Levinson recharged his creative batteries with the low-budget satire Wag the Dog, De Palma regains the vigor of some of his best 70s and 80s work using mock Web sites, blog posts, camcorder footage, and surveillance tapes to present a fictionalized version of the 2006 killings of a Mahmudiyah family by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
I asked him if the growing retreat of media consumers to outlets tailored to specific demographics might have something to do with the lack of broad-based protest. “I don’t know the statistics,” he responded, “but as the Internet becomes more commercial I’m sure then that news [there] will start to be corrupted too. The day news started to make money, that’s when everybody was in trouble. It wasn’t supposed to make money. You weren’t supposed to have talk shows and book deals and commercials and be hanging out with all the powers that be to get them on your talk show. You can’t really insult the vice president and expect him to come on your talk show.”
