Deconstructing the spectacle of war?: Brian de Palma's Redacted, Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha, Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah and the Iraq War

Résumé En

This chapter examines the generic hybridization of the Iraq war film away from the combat film and against the forms of spectacle and the weaponized gaze that War on Terror allowed. The discussion raises issues about the political and ethical difficulty of representing an ongoing war and the artistic difficulty of renewing war film tropes. Paying special attention to Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, and Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, all released in 2007, the analysis shows how those films, through their reflexive scrutiny of digital war imagery and adoption of conflicting points of view, break away from the spectacle of war and strive for an “ethics of clarified vision” (Garrett Stewart). In doing this, they react against the sanitized, one-sided representation by those war films which reveal the “theatre” of war while screening – in the sense of redacting – the realities of war.