Quotes of the Day

As an aspiring artist visiting new York City in the late '60s, Sydney-born George Gittoes had his 15 minutes with the emperor of pop art. "I can remember having a discussion with Andy Warhol," he recalls, "and I said, 'As far as I'm concerned, more people watch the news than anything else. To me, news is pop art.' And Andy agreed." In the decades since, Gittoes, 56, has pushed that concept beyond the usual 15 minutes of fame.

Traveling to many of the world's trouble spots, the artist has documented the atrocities of Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda in a hyper-real mix of painting, drawing and diary-making. A typical Gittoes canvas, with its Goya-like grotesqueries, can make Picasso's Guernica look like a picnic. But on arriving in Iraq in 2003, the artist felt a new medium was required to capture the surreality of what he was experiencing. Meeting Baghdad's gangsta rap–spouting U.S. Marines, Gittoes was inspired to shoot the musical documentary Soundtrack to War (2004), in which mainly black soldiers sing straight to camera over the sound of rifle fire. Some of the eye-opening footage was used by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, and Gittoes' fêted film has found a home on America's VH1 cable channel as well as at Melbourne's Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, where Soundtrack to War is currently playing.

One of the film's most memorable characters is Elliott Lovett, last seen rapping in Uday Hussein's former palace. When he told the filmmaker his Miami hometown was more dangerous than Baghdad, "I followed that lead like you would as a journalist," says Gittoes. And what that led to is Rampage, the documentary that has its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival next week. In 103 fast-and-furious minutes, we meet Lovett's neighborhood of Brown Sub. It's Miami Vice without the pastel suits and palm trees, a no-go zone where AK-47s are the weapons of choice and violent crime runs rife. Gittoes' energetic camera records a life for the Lovett family no less harrowing than the abuses at Abu Ghraib. "It's very rare that people come to see us," says brother Marcus, "unless it's something tragic."

His words prove sadly prophetic: during Rampage's filming, a family member was shot dead by a rival street gang. Gittoes films the funeral and the fruitless police search for the culprit, but also turns the camera on himself, suggesting that the attention he's brought to the community is partly to blame for the crime. "This is the problem with documentary filmmaking," he says at one point. "There are lives at stake."

Otherwise, Gittoes takes to the medium like a man possessed. And in the process he discovers a new subject. The last third of Rampage charts youngest Lovett brother Denzell's attempts to crack the New York music business, and in his spiky rap lyrics, we get an electrifying glimpse of the unfolding legacy of the Iraq war. "I'm not going to wave a banner against Bush or Howard," Gittoes says. "I'm going to help a 14-year-old rapper make songs that will reach a younger generation." With a sequel already planned, Rampage is a startling work in progress.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• War artist George Gittoes finds a new medium