VENICE FILM FESTIVAL: STOP THE WAR NOW

By Uli Schmetzer

 http://www.uli-schmetzer.com/



VENICE, September 1, 2007 - Better late then never.
This could be the redeeming message for two of Hollywood’s icons who have come to the anti-war party a little late. The duet however made up for their late arrival with powerful films premiered at the Venice Film Festival this weekend.
‘Redacted,’ is Brian De Palma’s vivisection of a platoon of soldiers who gang-raped and murdered a 15 year old Iraqi schoolgirl and then shot dead her family. This movie has moved into the new era of film-making, mixing reality with fiction, using soldiers’ blogs and e-mails for the script. This method creates a dramatized ‘fake’ documentary which in this case corresponds to the infamous real-life murders in Samara, Iraq.
“In the Valley of Elah’ Paul Haggis, a one-time successful TV show director, uses the same method. While de Palma is determined to shock his audience (in an interview he said he hoped to film would help end the war) Haggis focuses on a platoon of soldiers who have returned from the war but once back home cannot toss off their violent behavior pattern.
De Palma uses a sledgehammer to drive home his point, Haggis a rapier.
Both films deal with the inhumanities of wars that convert even sensitive and educated men into killers, torturers and sadists. The shock realization of such reality films is this: ‘The brave American boys’ and ‘the celebrated war heroes’ are a myth. The American GI can be just as nasty, just as cruel and just as dehumanized as were Germans, Japanese, Chileans, Chinese, Argentines, Israelis and Africans and all the other abominations created by wars, by military orders, by political ‘isms, by religion, by ethnic squabbles and by a media that vilified or glorified conflicts on the say-so of its masters.
Why then this sudden splurge of anti-war films? Where were these film makers three years ago? In those days anyone with a brain and a little knowledge realized the Americans were walking into a hornet’s nest in an Iraq divided by suppressed religious sentiments and ethnic separatism. There was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction or involvement in 11’9’01. The war was lost before it started. So what has made the rest of the American ‘left’ jump onto the anti-war bandwagon now?
In an interview after his film Haggis rejected the charge of being a Johnny-come-lately but admitted there was no finance for a project he had on the table shortly after the war started.
The fact is today anti-war sentiments are fashionable again, no longer denounced as ‘unpatriotic’ ‘seditious’ or ‘un-American?’ Producers are forking out money to back them.
Does this not recall Hollywood a generation ago when anti-war movements and anti-war films forced a reluctant American administration to pack up and go home from a war long lost? But then Vietnam offered no economic advantages. Withdrawal may have been embarrassing but it did not tilt the stock market. Iraq is another kettle of fish. American oil and service companies are not going to allow the bonanza to slip through their hands. Over the next months the oil companies are sure to finance a spate of pro-war potboilers and promote the argument that a few bad eggs don’t necessitate killing the hen.
But the bad eggs are growing in numbers.
‘In the Valley of Elah” the soldiers who come home from Iraq cannot leave behind their psychological burden, the schizophrenic monster into which many have metamorphosed during the war. One part of their personality remains the ‘nice, polite American boy’ blabbering phrases like “have a nice day’ or ‘I am sorry for your loss.’ The other part is the monster prone to violence, the one that stabs his best buddy and doesn’t know why; the one who drowns his dog and a few weeks later his wife.
This monster has come home and today his presence neutralizes the always ready American excuse for war atrocities: “In war shit happens.”
Now ‘the shit’ is happening at home.
Both films were received with long standing ovations in a Europe where public anti-war feelings have long outstripped those political and commercial interests that found it expedient to remain an American ally, well, until the opposition was voted into power.
‘Redacted’ (a word used to indicate a document has been censored) starts slowly with small inhumanities at checkpoints and the racist chit-chat of Marines who have realized the Iraqis do not see them as liberators but as enemies. The aggression of the platoon members escalates over the next months. During raids on private homes they manhandle women and knock around men. The dormant anger explodes when the platoon sergeant, the one who always preached caution and ‘treat everyone as an enemy if you want to stay alive,’ is blown to pieces by a booby-trapped easy-chair. The marines plan revenge, a revenge tinged with sexual fantasies. They focus on a pretty schoolgirl who must pass their checkpoint every day. They raid her house near the checkpoint kill the mother the little sister and the old grandfather. Then they gang-rape the girl, shoot her in the face and burn her body.
This incident happened in real life and was exposed by internet messages. SMS and video messages also exposed the atrocities and humiliations at Abu Ghraib.
“In the Valley of Elah” deals with a father, a blow hard retired army sergeant whose son has come home for the war but is missing after a night out drinking and doing drugs with his unit. He has been murdered. In his search for the murderers, the father delves into the horror of his son’s changed personality thanks to the son’s video messages on his mobile phone.
The film’s last scene is indicative of a United States where millions are beginning to realize their country has been betrayed, mislead and taken on a merry-go-round by a cartel of political and commercial manipulators.
In this final scene the father hoists the American flag upside down - an international signal for:
‘Help!’

ends