One of the most prominent emerging common ways of achieving realism in war filmography is the use of realistic viewpoints through photographs. The term indexicality is introduced in order to title the captured moment in time and space for photography. War photography and its framing devices have, therefore, in many ways established its indispensability in Standard Operating Procedure (2008) and Redacted (2007) by building credibility with its indexicality while purposing distancing the movies themselves from the audience, preventing total emersion. Redacted is a staged documentary about reconstruction of the events leading up and the ravaging consequences of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and his family by American army soldiers…show more content… “While video, television, and online news are conspicuously full of images penetrated by sound to the point of inseparability, still photography (“still” in the sense of “free of noise or turbulence” as well as “immobile”) remains a powerful way of transmitting traumatic events (Zarzycka). Zarzycka also mentions how the rendition of visual mediums create this sense of tangibility and realism to the war. This is what is happening on the ground and the this is what you get in these photos. He also interestingly puts war photography in a spot that because these images are so crucial, they must be able to portray both sight and sound of the war in order to take the audience into this real world of war. It is definitely not the ‘melodrama of Versailles and the Louvre’ but war photos, as mentioned by Marwil, show the ‘terrible reality and earnestness of war’ (36). The absence of sound in photography is not an emptiness but rather the culmination of the “negative of all the sounds” we imagine that ignites a myriad of different emotions, seen from the characters’ faces within the still photos and the surrounding situations, from screams to anger to protests to impeding danger (Zarzycka). Spefically in the three movies examined in this essay, there are certain scenes where the images are enhanced by videos and music and voiceovers explaining what is going on in the photos. Such use of sound does not eclipse but enhance the photos in question. Photos in these scenes are also “digitally mobilized using slow pans, zooms, and fades, and are accompanied by various soundscapes” (Zarzycka). Photos have the power to capture a moment in time at a specific location from a singular medium. “As well as the exhilarating sense of being there, there was also the unreserved trust in the image itself that the medium inspired” (Marwil 33). When the light contact the object,
