Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures and key player in yesterday’s Redacted press conference dust-up, responds to the chatter that the incident was a publicity stunt on Movie City Indie. As I noted earlier, DePalma has been milking the issue at a number of festivals, and it appears that Bowles finally reached a breaking point:

there was absolutely no calculation involved at the press conference yesterday. depalma has been on a toot about how we’ve compromised his film, and then he stated publicly at the official nyff press conference that in no uncertain terms mark cuban, for aesthetic reasons, wanted the photos out of the film. i had just arrived and this was one of the first things i heard. in an almost tourette’s like moment, i just blurted out out that it wasn’t true. [...] the fact of the matter is, none of the companies that have released depalma’s work in the last 30 years would ever touch this film. and because our company, which has had it’s fair share of controversial, uncompromising films, actually was the one stupid/brave/committed enough to do so, we end up being the evil force trying to shut down a director’s vision.

Bowles also notes that the Director’s Guild has sided against DePalma on the matter. You can read Bowles’ full comments here. Jurgen Fauth also has video of the press conference, which I’ve embedded above; you can here his take on the fracas here.

UPDATED 10/10: Last night, a commenter at Movie City Indie calling himself “A. Nonymous” disputed Bowles’ note that the DGA voted against DePalma, and stating that “an arbitrator ruled the company could use redacted photos in the film, rather than the unredacted photos Mr. De Palma wanted to include”–so it’s not so much that the DGA voted *against* DePalma, but that they sided *with* Magnolia/Mark Cuban.

And in the comments to this post, Matt V writes: “Check out the TypeKey profile name of the anonymous commenter on the mcindie site. DKorduner - Who, since he has a “DGA email address” is probably David Korduner, who is the General Counsel for the DGA. Why is he making (or at least trying to make) anonymous comments on a blog site?” A fair question, although perhaps the bigger issue, is what kind of lawyer tries to make anonymous blog comments using his work email address?

Several film blogs have posted Jamie Stuart’s thoughts on yesterday’s NYFF press conference for Brian DePalma’s Redacted. In a nutshell: DePalma mentioned that the film’s final montage (which consists of real photographs of real victims of real terror and war-associated violence, and which is thought by many to be the most powerful portion of the film) is in danger of being “redacted” by the film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, at the request of the Magnolia/HD Net founder Mark Cuban. According to Stuart, DePalma’s comments were discredited yesterday by Magnolia’s president:

As [DePalma] began discussing the film’s use of actual war photographs and their graphic nature, Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia began shouting from the rear of the Walter Reade Theater to refute De Palma’s claims that Mark Cuban was trying to, well, redact them from the picture’s release. Then, just as the press conference was coming to a close, producer Jason Kliot rushed the stage and grabbed moderator Jim Hoberman’s mic to offer the crowd his version of this distribution controversy. I was left wondering how spontaneous this all was or whether they knew it would be immediately blogged upon to stoke media attention.

I was less inclined to see this as a pure stunt. I knew DePalma had been pushing this button at press conferences as far back as Telluride, where his statements were vague enough to be misinterpreted but loud enough to be difficult to miss. If this fighting between filmmaker and distributer started as a ploy for attention, then it doesn’t make sense that Magnolia would wait this long to publicly respond. Still, unsure how to interpret this latest event, I sent an email this morning to Mark Cuban to get the official word. Cuban confirmed to me that Magnolia has, indeed, asked DePalma to remove the images from the film, and will not release Redacted unless the final montage is cut. More details after the jump.

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It’s funny how various threads in my life will converge sometimes. I recently read Susan Sontag’s essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, a dense and beautiful examination of the relationship between photography and war. It has enough fodder for a few dozen blog posts (her observation that the US has a museum devoted to the Holocaust and another to the Armenian genocide, but not a single museum devoted to the African slave trade could be fodder for a four volume gift set), but for this post I’ll focus on her closing point. However much we hanker for statistics, sound bites, and photos regarding war, for those of us who haven’t been there, those things can’t hold more than a momentary shock to our otherwise fortified thinking. Art, film, and literature, on the other hand, can go a long way toward a deep change in how we see and understand war.

Two recent examples of this come to mind for me