Something remarkable happened when Flags of Our Fathers finished.

I caught it on a Wednesday afternoon, a quiet matinee showing, to ensure I saw it with the proper audience: one in which I was the youngest by a good fifty years. (I like that the elderly don’t eat popcorn loudly. Actually, they don’t eat it at all.) When the credits rolled, and names like Eastwood, Spielberg and Haggis appeared on the screen, the audience gathered their belongings and slowly marched toward the exits.

Then one old man stopped, halfway down the stairs, and turned to the screen. Another man froze in the aisles, his hat only halfway plopped on his head; his wife then looped her arm through his. A woman, with gray hair and those glasses that make eyes the size of silver dollars, turned from the exit back to the screen. A man wearing an old Burberry scarf, one that predated the pattern’s popularity, propped himself against a wall.

They all stopped, in somber remembrance, to watch a series of World War II images fade to and from the screen. For fifteen minutes, that handful of tired men and women remembered that good fight and its images of both heroism and sacrifice. Not until the screen faded to black did they finally file out the doors.

This was an overwhelmingly appropriate ending to a film dedicated to the importance of a single photograph: “The Raising of the Flag at Iwo Jima,” the most reproduced image in the history of photography. As the film notes, all modern wars have produced their iconic images – be it those created by photojournalists, dating as far back as the Civil War and the pictures of the bloated corpses at Antietam, or those filmmakers create in retrospect, such as the surreal and shocking depiction of the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now.

In 1973, Chick Harrity snapped a photo of a baby Vietnamese girl lying naked in a cardboard box. Her brother, curled up next to the box, clutched her tiny hand while begging for help. When finally printed in the states, Harrity’s picture inspired Americans to raise money for this little girl, and to confront the reality of one of the nation’s most gruesome wars. Just over a year ago, the White House News Photographers’ Association gave Harrity a lifetime achievement award. The girl whom he photographed presented the award.

President Bush closed that award ceremony with a telling statement: “When people think of historic events, they don’t usually remember the words … they remember the images. One photo may not tell us the entire truth, but it gives us a piece of the truth … a glimpse of history, and that’s important work.”

Ironic, then, that the U.S. military jailed a photojournalist for no reason. The photographer, Bilal Hussein, has been detained in Iraq, without a single charge, since April. According to the Associated Press, the photos the military have now prevented Hussein from releasing include “a man sweeping up a blood-drenched floor.” Another photograph depicts “a row of four dead children.” His photographs focused primarily on the loss of innocent lives in Iraq, whose sacrifices we often ignore.

And with good reason. Very few Americans can visualize the war. They cannot picture, nor fathom, the war-torn landscape and blood-caked portraits. And how could they? You have to rake the Internet to find any images or footage of this invisible war. President Bush’s cronies, with a little help from the squeamish media, have done all they could to suppress the truth for the good of both the nation’s morale and the media’s profit margins. Jean Luc-Godard once said, “The cinema is truth, twenty-four frames per second,” but somehow truth became subjective and circumstantial.

So for now, we have only situational freedoms: I only just saw my first picture of a fallen U.S. soldier, when over a hundred died in October alone. We live in a nation where a film can depict the assassination of the sitting president, but good luck trying to find a theater screening it. Our most insightful and inquisitive news programs air on Comedy Central. President Bush refuses to attend funerals of departed soldiers as a PR stunt, and cameras are not allowed at Arlington. And in the midst of this, we have averted our eyes; we let the media and the government cover them, as if Iraq were that inappropriate scene in a movie our parents regret letting us watch.

So when that audience stood there quietly, I had to wonder: Will our generation produce images that demand we stand and honor them? Can it? 4

Communication sophomore Bentley Ford is the PLAY film columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].