When talking about the media representation of the 2003 war in Iraq, two terms are heavily used: manipulation and authenticity. Manipulation is often brought up in relation to the topic of television news coverage; several texts in media and communication studies show how the US military controlled media in order to establish a “presentable” image of war.^[1] The term authenticity, however, is often used for describing the specific quality of those pictures of war that through their online circulation embody the possibilities of digital communication: pictures taken by soldiers themselves with mobile phone cameras and camcorders, producing an enormous amount of images which are then spread via the Internet. These pictures promise to show what is missing in the TV news: combat action, improvised explosive device explosions and dead bodies. They are considered to be true and pure since they seem to show unstaged, real events.

The fiction films about the war in Iraq invariably pick up the aesthetics of these pictures in one way or another, as seen in The Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007), Redacted (Brian DePalma, 2007), The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) or Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010). It seems a logical conclusion to say that the movies actually use these aesthetics to gain an impression of authenticity, incorporating the look of online images as a style to share in this authenticity.^[2] It can also be assumed that we, the viewers, trust in this kind of authentication: even fictional films like The Hurt Locker are praised for providing a very authentic picture of war.^[3] This correlation leads to several questions. Does this mean the fictional depictions of war in Hollywood films are more authentic than the news reports on TV? Do they provide a more authentic view on historical events?

In order to deal with these questions, one could examine what kind of authenticity comes into effect here. But that would reinforce the contradiction inside which the discussion about media representation of war seems to be trapped: between the demand for authentic images on the one hand and the accusation of manipulation on the other. This contradiction derives from the idea that media representation should be able to represent the reality of war as it really is, in an objective manner that is not influenced by strategies of staging, and that there is an objective truth about war that only needs to be revealed. But what should a “real” image of war look like, why do such images not appear in TV news coverage and what role does the fictional genre cinema thus play?

In our view, what needs to be examined here is not as much the question how authentic images of war should look like in reference to an empirical reality, but how we are able to picture the war in the first place, and how to give war an image that makes it visible and tangible to us. That is, the reality of war is only graspable through the mediated experience of war. There is neither a “real” war out there nor the “right” way to represent it through media or to depict its truth. Rather, there are different modes of aesthetic construction and perception that are necessary to make war visible and palpable to us, to shape our attitude towards war as a historical event and to make moral judgments about it.

In this paper, we want to argue that war as a historical event emerges as specific modes of aesthetic experience that are generated and shaped by audiovisual media. These modes of experience are culturally and aesthetically formed and hence historically contingent. We would like to show how these modes of experience are shaped and how different types of audiovisual media interact in this process. In order to achieve this, we will provide an analysis of the documentary The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006), a film that has been praised with showing the most authentic picture of war. Drawing on an analytical concept developed with regard to the fictional Hollywood war film, we would like to show how even in documentary films the aesthetic modes and poetics of affect of the war film genre loom large, interact with new forms of media imagery (like mobile phone videos) and thus profoundly structure the viewer’s experience of war.

The War Tapes already drew a lot of attention from the circumstances of its genesis: all footage was filmed by soldiers themselves. Twenty-one soldiers in total were equipped with MiniDV cameras, five of them filmed during the entire year of their mission. A whole movie filmed through the eyes of soldiers, this shaky, right in the middle of the action camcorder aesthetic that has become so characteristic for the imagery of this war made the movie appreciated by the public especially for being “deeply authentic”.^[4] Our assumption, however, is, that it is not the authenticity of the immediate documentation of real events which constitutes the specificity of this movie. Rather it is the way in which the film organises this material. Its dramaturgy does not provide a chronology of real events or a true image of war, but a compositional unfolding of very subjective and sensual-affective modes of experience. From the beginning to the end this film is structured in its very own logic, which is, drawing on our central assumption, highly geared to patterns of staging and poetics of affect of the fictional war film genre.

The Hollywood War Film’s Poetics of Affect

Our description of the Hollywood war film stems from an understanding of genre developed by Hermann Kappelhoff that is based on a comprehension of cinematic forms as part of a communicative economics of affect.^[5] Behind this stands the assumption that a film genre is not only about subject matters or certain ways of organizing narrative events. “War” in the war film genre is more than a subject matter, it is a complex melange of culturally and historically shaped visual forms, affective experiences, and collective memories and myths. The war films are related to the audience’s knowledge of war; their viewers become familiar with images of loss, death and survival by more than just reference. The Hollywood war film genre modulates the audience’s emotional sensations between thrilling stimulation and horror, guilt and mourning, and vulnerability and ‘shock and awe’. The genre is hence better described as a dynamic system that addresses, shapes and differentiates emotional experience through formal staging patterns. Within processes of aesthetic perception the film’s poetics unfold as movements of affect which the viewer experiences as his or her own emotionality.^[6] Thus the films function as interventions in a mediated economy of affect in which the integration of the individual subject into communal life is negotiated again and again.^[7] We understand these films as a media practice in which a society addresses itself as a political community. Their poetics of affect–their aesthetic constructions triggering specific modes of viewer experience–thus provide an interface between abstract political conditions and individual self-perception.

Referring to these understandings, and drawing on Christine Gledhill’s “concept of modality”,^[8] our comprehension of genre is one that cannot be thought of beyond a genre system – a dynamic ensemble of forms and functionalities of expression that merge into different genres, as well as other forms of audiovisual articulation, as historically variable modes of staging and representation. These modes are not at all discrete entities but heavily related to one another and exposed to a constant mutual permeation–this becomes very clear in case of the war film, with its intertwined modalities of horror, thrill, action, etc.^[9] These “modalities of experience” gain shape through the films’ formal staging patterns, their orchestration and unfolding throughout the process of perception: camera movements and perspectives, rhythms of montage, lighting, sound, character movements, gestures, etc. all interact and structure the spectator’s perceptive, affective and cognitive operations.^[10] Hence, these specifically formed modalities of experience are the sphere in which the individual spectator’s sensations and feelings are connected to and integrated into abstract cultural and political processes. In this way a genre system constitutes a sphere of social communication in which events of social reality become accessible and are transformed as aesthetic experiences of cohabitation.^[11] The specific configurations of these aesthetic modes are historically contingent, dynamic and constantly changing; hence, analysing their very concrete appearances within particular films provides the key to examining the films’ and the genres’ cultural significance in a historical perspective.

In light of these ideas, the central questions brought to films are: How do they address their spectators? Alongside this, which staging strategies can be found and how do these strategies elicit and modulate the viewers’ perception and emotions? The aim is to describe the audiovisual orchestration of a film and its entanglement with affective moods embodied by a spectator subject as a specific poetics of affect. Accordingly, to establish a historical perspective, the cinematic forms of expression are not primarily brought into relation to a prior historical reality (the depiction of historical wartime events) but with how they situate the spectator within a shared world of sentiment, a sense of belonging to a common world of aesthetic, emotional and moral judgment. This situating has then to be examined as itself historically significant.

According to Kappelhoff’s concept, we assume that the modalities of experience that constitute the poetics of affect of the war film genre can be differentiated into a set of eight scene categories that can be identified within almost every Hollywood war film and of which each can be assigned to distinct realms of affect. They were developed from the classic war or combat film and are called pathos scenes.^[12] Besides their affective qualities which, as we will see, can often be situated in-between opposing poles of emotional conditions, they are determined by specific narrative constellations and aesthetic strategies. By dissecting their re-groupings and modifications one can pursue the historical, socio-political and media shifts from the origins of the genre to the Vietnam war film and contemporary movies about the conflicts in the Middle East.

The eight categories are:

1)    The pain of separation / corporate feeling (sense of (a new) community): Transition between two social systems

The affective potential of this category accrues primarily from the cinematic staging of moments of loss concerning aspects and elements of civilian society, and moments of merging into a new community. Thus, these scenes mark the transition of the soldiers between the two social systems of the quotidian sociality of civilian life and the military sociality due to the state of emergency that is war. They specifically portray aspects and processes of transition, variations and modifications of civilian sociality with the goal of establishing a military sociality. Recurring motifs are rituals of transition, processes of immediate replacement, the segregation of the sexes, and the establishing of paternal structures in the military community.

2)    The loss of ego boundaries (fear) / Exaggerated self-esteem: Formation of a group body (corps)

The affective potential of this pathos category is situated between experiences of loss of the self and the experience of an ego-dissolution, meaning the liquidation of the boundaries of individual potential in a larger group body. Orchestrating the relationship of the individual to the military body, these scenes emphasize the physicality of individual corporeality and its merging and absorption into a physically staged group body. A central motif is the military drill, a typical aspect with regard to visual compositions of the geometric figuration of the group body.

3)    Horror / fear / hostility: Battle and nature

The affective dimension of this pathos category stems from the cinematic concept behind classic horror films. It evokes the eerie uncertainty about that which one sees or hears, the fear of being abandoned, of losing one’s bodily self and one’s identity in chaos. On the level of plot and action, these scenes depict the battle against nature. This battle replaces the battle against the enemy and acts as a form of the experience of this battle. The scenes arise out of constellations offered by army formations and the natural hurdles which repeatedly need to be overcome and provide cover for the enemy, as well as out of signs of death and exhaustion that nature inscribes in the individual body.

4)    Feeling of omnipotence / feeling of powerlessness: Battle and technology

The affective dimension of this pathos category stems from the illusion of merging with military weapons technology in combat and the possibilities of cinematographic action modes as an image of a triumphant desire for fusion. The cinematic staging of these scenes revolves, on the one hand, around the merging of human bodies and machines, on the other around the special relationship between weapons and cinematic technology. In the first case the use of weapons is staged as the experience of technology as a body that has become infinitely powerful. This goes hand in hand with the dissolution of the individual body and its integration into the group body. At the fore of the latter is a specific form of viewing pleasure, which allows the spectator to experience and enter the perceptual and affective/emotional space of a cinematic battle without being harmed. Everyday perception is expanded by the technological capabilities of cinema.

5)    Feeling of solace / feeling of loss (homesickness): Homeland, woman, home

This pathos category focuses on processes of withdrawing from the social foundation of military order and returning to civilian life. Therefore, it often features modes of memory and references to something that is remembered. In a first variation, the mode of memory is established by the presence of absent characteristics, moments and characters from pre-war daily life. Often there are media-related reminders of civilian society within the film—for example photographs or music on the radio—that trigger memories of home within military order. The second variation portrays the completed withdrawal from military order—the return to civilian sociality. Here it is predominantly the military sociality in states of emergency that is remembered. The affective potential of these scenes arises either from a desire for civilian sociality or is characterized through the experience of exhaustion caused by the remembrance of war.

6)    Agony / grief: Suffering, victim, sacrifice

The crucial affective dimension of this pathos category is embedded in the sensorial experience of physical pain, vulnerability and dying. The inside view of an indissoluble, irreconcilable experience of suffering thereby characterizes the central pathos of American war films. Through different constellations and modes of cinematic staging the motif of suffering can appear in three variations: the victim, the sacrifice, and the scene of suffering. The victim scenes are about the realization of vulnerability and mortality. The victim’s image is usually staged as an unexpected moment of death. During the sacrifice scenes the soldier’s death is cinematically connected to a greater cause such as the army or the nation. The self-sacrifice of the soldier is portrayed as a heroic death—often this death and the subsequent funeral are staged as the renewal of the community.The scenes of suffering focus on the suffering individual who experiences himself or herself as a vulnerable and mortal body. The point of culmination is the apotheosis of the individual (deification).

7)    Anger / sense of guilt: Injustice and humiliation / moral self-assertion

On the one hand, the affective dimension of this pathos category contains rage as the transformation of moral judgement into bodily desire and the delight in the corporeal. This desire culminates in fury, rebellion and explosive rage. Its personification is the figure of the berserker. On the other hand, the scenes contain feelings of guilt as a consequence of the shared responsibility of the individual soldier for the suffering inflicted upon others by the military/group and/or the emphasis on national/collective responsibility. The cinematic staging of these figurations captures the individual experience of identity as a moral relationship to the societal forms of the military and the nation in a specific emotional sensation.

8)    Sense of community as the shared filmic remembrance of shared suffering

At first sight, these scenes are defined simply by the use and integration of documentary material into cinematically staged events. This includes footage of real battles and images of the dead and injured after the battle, as well as that of rituals of military life. But these scenes do not simply counter the fictional mode with one of factuality or authenticity. Rather, the cinematic events are referenced to the documentary images; the latter become fictionally charged—whereby the difference between the kinds of footage is not negated. Thus both documentary and fictional footage—edited into a dense visual memory—aim at the corporeal presence of the viewers who are given a relationship to the historical events by this documentary footage. The aim is an emotional participation in exactly these documentary images. This takes place in the mode of remembrance, promoting a sense of community that develops through the cinematic staging of a shared memory.

In their successive order and their combinations and overlappings throughout the course of particular films, these eight categories of pathos generate the films’ poetics of affect as a specific dramaturgical structure. The following diagram shows their arrangement over the course of the war film Gung Ho! (Ray Enright, 1943).

 

 

This structure can be described as a sort of basic or original scheme, typical for the first classic war films. Throughout history, these arrangements are constantly altered in specific ways. This systematic approach to the genre makes it able to analyse the films on two different levels: first, on the level of their macro structure, i.e. how they arrange the pathos scenes over the course of the whole film, and second on the level of their micro structure, i.e. how they concretely realise the particular categories through their strategies of staging in discrete scenes. Furthermore, this method of analysis provides the possibility to examine the war films in a historical perspective: by comparative investigations, it shows how the affective structures and realisations of the pathos categories are altered and transformed over the course of time, i.e. how the films address viewers’ experience and emotions in historically significant ways.

Although it was developed with close analysis of the fictional war film genre, it is crucial to the concept that these poetics of affect are highly related to other media formats. The ongoing transformations that the genre’s poetics undergo are driven by the constant exchange with audiovisual depictions of war in other formats, like news coverage, documentary, or YouTube videos.^[13] New forms of media technology provide new ways of expression, new ways of picturing and perceiving, of seeing, hearing and feeling the war. Through this exchange, the genre’s specific modalities of experience are altered and reformulated constantly, circulating throughout different types of media.

The Hollywood War Film and Media Representation of the Iraq War

In case of the 2003 war in Iraq, contemporary media representation was determined by an increased and dynamic emergence of new media types and audiovisual forms. As mentioned above, the possibilities of digital recording through mobile phone cameras and camcorders as well as the Internet presentation of these audiovisual material, had a huge impact on this war’s media appearance. In order to investigate how these new forms interact with the war film genre’s poetics of affect, we should first take a look at these pictures, especially with regard to their affective qualities and the modalities of experience they provide.

These images function in a specific mode of temporality and directness: we are not so much attracted to them because of the fact that they show real events, but because there is a certain expectation of thrill and monstrosity. When clicking the button to watch these videos on YouTube, we have the expectation that they will make an impact visible or show the moment of explosion or death. This mode of anticipation is part of these images from the very beginning and charges them with a diffuse affective quality, one that is situated on the thin line between fascination and anxiety. It is both rooted in our familiarity with media practices, like using YouTube in order to find images of war, and also in the video’s formal features: the shaky movements, the low quality, the tinny sounds and arbitrary voices and off comments. The dominant mode of these images is an intrinsic subjective one: the setting and the shaky movements demonstrate that there is someone holding the camera, that we are with someone and are sharing his or her view. At the same time, we barely ever know who this person is and where and what exactly we are seeing. These pictures provide a subjectivity that potentially everyone who watches them can take on as his or her own, and that at the same time is shared by many individuals.

It is this affective quality which is subsequently assimilated and shaped into patterns of pathos by the war films as well as by other forms of media. Thereby, the core interest does not lie in establishing a reference to an empirical reality of war or history, but to the aesthetic possibilities that make war perceivable to us as a mediated experience. In this way, the films give a certain sense to these pictures, a possibility to relate them to our feelings and moral judgements as culturally and politically determined individuals. This circulation of poetic patterns does not merely work in one direction: in the same way fictional genre films incorporate patterns from other media formats, these other formats to a large extent draw on the genre’s poetics of affect when organising their audiovisual material.

It is, however, not a new discovery that war coverage in any media is influenced by staging strategies of fictional genre films. But these processes of permeation are commonly condemned as a disingenuous strategy of manipulation that blurs an objective depiction of war by drawing on emotional and ideological values. From our viewpoint, this mutual relation is an integral part of a dynamic process of cultural communication through audiovisual media. To elaborate on this, we will now track down the ways of interaction of the genre’s poetics of affect and non-fictional media by analyzing The War Tapes. It is important to note that we would like to emphasize the dynamic aspect of this process. This analysis is not about identifying mere stereotypical rules or standard motifs, but about processes of interplay, modulation and reformulation of poetic patterns.

Analysis: The War Tapes

Although the audiovisual footage The War Tapes was shot by several soldiers, three of them become central protagonists in the movie–Steven Pink, Mike Moriarty and Zack Bazzi. Each of them is characterised by a very specific personality.

 

 

Steve Pink is a talkative carpenter who is interested in journalism, has been studying English and who likes to shoot films and write. Again and again, we see him writing down words that he simultaneously audibly articulates via voice-over. Mike Moriarty is an exemplary patriot; he always places a lot of emphasis on values like family and pride in one’s country. To him, military service is an honourable duty, that–in his case–is associated with the images of 9/11: We see his own recordings of Ground Zero shortly after September 11, 2001, we see his hand touching the dust in the streets and we learn that he deliberately drove there to see “the wound” with his own eyes. Being described as a not particularly educated but thoughtful guy who struggles with depression, he is often shown in dark night shots. Zack Bazzi is a Lebanese immigrant who speaks Arabic and is characterised by a rather pragmatic attitude. Our knowledge about these traits is provided through the characters themselves: we watch them and listen to their voice-overs, coming to know their and their families’ stories.

In order to systematically identify how The War Tapes responds to the fictional genre’s poetics of affect it is at first necessary to have a look at how the film organises its material and draws on the categories of pathos we identified. In this regard, the film’s macro structure diagram is surprising.

 

 

Despite the film’s seemingly authentic approach to war, the macro structure of its poetics of affect shows strong similarities to the typical structure of classic war movies from World War II as seen in the diagram of Gung Ho!.

In the beginning, there is a strong appearance of category 1, transition between two social systems (the pain of separation / corporate feeling), and 2, formation of a group body (the loss of ego boundaries (fear) / exaggerated self-esteem), like it is with the classical genre film. The increased appearance of category 5, homeland, women, home (feeling of solace / feeling of loss (homesickness)) in the middle part of the movie is also very classical, and so is the battle sequence with category 3, battle and nature (horror/fear/hostility), and 4, battle and technology (feeling of omnipotence / feeling of powerlessness) in combination with category 6, suffering, victim, sacrifice (agony / grief), in the latter part. Even the return of category 1 in the latter third, with which a reintegration into the civilian society and the moral legitimacy is re-established and can be identified in this case in a very conventional homecoming scene. Then there is an epilogue, which shows the soldiers back home.

Going into more detail, the diagram shows that a significant attribute of The War Tapesis the increased appearance of category 5, homeland, women, home. This is surprising considering the fact that discussions surrounding the film almost always centre around the self-made material of the soldiers from Iraq. By examining the particular manner of how these scenes are structured and how they unfold within the dramaturgy of affect over the course of the film, it becomes clear that they follow a specific pattern. The structural configurations of these parts are clearly related to how they organise the central protagonists of the film.

The three characters are depicted through portrait scenes which mostly coincide with the sequences that are accounted for the pathos category homeland, women, home. Having a closer look at these passages, it stands out that there is a constant structure.

 

 

At first, there is a prologue in which all three of the characters are introduced one after the other. After that and throughout the course of the movie there is a separate portrait scene of each of them. However, all three portraits operate within similar principles. At the end of the film, there is an epilogue in which each of the three characters reappears in a prolonged sequence. Even though the structure changes throughout the movie, the length and the characteristics of these personalised scenes stay fairly similar, meaning that the movie creates a certain balance between its three characters. The only exception to this is an additional home sequence of Mike Moriarty at the end of The War Tapeswhich we will return to in later analysis.

Another structural principle becomes obvious through the diagram: just before every home sequence (pathos category 5: Feeling of solace / feeling of loss) there is a battle scene with gun fights or a scene in which the viewer is confronted with pictures of burnt or distorted and dead bodies (pathos categories 3: Horror/fear/hostility and 4: Feeling of omnipotence / feeling of powerlessness). How these scenes are related to the always following character portraits is demonstrated in the following clip from the first third of the film.

 

 

As we can see in the clip, the material’s montage is quite complex. We see a sequence of subjective shots joined together by a flowing montage and partially connected by a voice-over. There are a number of shots which are assigned to one or the other of the characters by displayed text. However, and this is crucial, we can still never be sure to whom the view that is presented to us belongs. In the beginning we accompany Moriarty, which is clearly marked by the text within the image and his voice-over. Then we are shown images of an explosion, and it is no longer clear through whose “camera-eye” we are now looking. This becomes especially striking when in-between shots of the explosion show us a shaky close-up of Pink, which makes it apparent that we are definitely no longer with Moriarty. Then, during the battle, the perspective completely dissolves–all we can see is loud, blurry chaos, in which any sense of orientation has been lost, making the view literally break apart. The affective dimension of the pathos categories 3 and 4 are fully brought to bear here: the use of imagery that is at once overpowering and powerless provokes a disturbing uncertainty, a feeling of being terrified of the dissolution and abundance of one’s (the protagonist’s as well as the spectator’s) individual body. Then, the way of cinematic staging changes completely and the mode of the ‘subject in chaos’ is converted into a much more stable subjectivisation: we suddenly see written lines on paper, hear Pink’s voice, see only his eyes in close-up: a moment of internalisation that creates a subjective space which, for a short period of time, completely binds us to the character of Pink. The unsettling affective quality of the previous battle is transformed into a different modality that brings some order.

This transition illustrates the main principle by which the film is structured and composed: the audiovisual perspective it creates through the camcorder material is on the one hand extremely subjective, but on the other hand this perspective does not belong to any specific point of view and cannot be assigned to any specific character as it constantly changes between the three (and potentially others that have no face or name). The three main characters are step by step carved out of this flow, they gain shape through the home portraits until the perspective is literally shattered again. At the same time, they are furnished with more and more attributes, which serves a progressively clear characterisation. If we take a closer look at how Moriarty’s portrait increasingly gains shape within the general flow of the audiovisual imagery, this principle becomes very clear.

 

 

This next scene, assigned with category 5 of our analytical systematisation, puts us right into a tent–it is dark, we hear a guitar playing and get the impression of a calm, sentimental atmosphere. Moriarty is singled out by a close up in green light through night-vision equipment, we listen to him through voice-over, he is talking about his family. We see a photo of his children on his computer desktop, then his home in full screen as the first picture of a now starting sequence displaying his wife and children back home.

 

 

In this way, the intense quality and unstable atmosphere of the battle scene is again set in relation to and canalised by a very subjective and personalised mode that can be described as a sort of internalisation, always leading us to the portrait of the person whom we are accompanying. What is interesting about the portrait on the level of narration, like in the other two, is the way Moriarty gathers attributes without being actually present: we learn of his domestic joys, his sense of duty, his suffering from depression, the pride his son takes in his dad. These portrait scenes function as an inverted picture, a photographic negative of the soldiers’ lives and feelings, and serve no other purpose than to assert their status as filmic characters. They frame the images of Iraq in a contrastive manner and thus become a kind of anchor on which the characters crystallise as types.

The changing movement, from the unsettling, precarious and uneasy camcorder mode in Iraq to the home portraits that give shape to the characters can be described as the core of the specific dramaturgy of affect of The War Tapes. What is brought to the fore here is the specific affective quality of the Internet images, which we tried to characterise earlier. The overall poetics of affect of the film amplifies the described features of these images: their unclear temporality, the lack of certainty and knowledge, and the expectation of what might come next, the precarious perspective that constantly falls apart but still is always so radically subjective. This mode is even further strengthened by underscoring that the view established here does not refer to an actual event or a concrete person. Instead it gains shape as a specific arrangement of experience that is, through the dramaturgical pattern, related to and equally shared between the three characters and framed by a dramaturgical structure of affective modalities.

Thus, the film The War Tapesunfolds and spells out the specific affective quality of Internet videos and at the same time transforms it into a modality of experience that is constitutive for the fictional war film genre. To elaborate on this, we will take a look at another scene. As the diagram shows, there is one exception within the symmetrical structure the film develops regarding its characters: in the film’s last third, there is an additional home portrait of Mike Moriarty. Similar to the other portraits, this scene is preceded by a battle scene (category 3 and 4), but this battle scene is special: it is the scene we know from the film’s very beginning, this time shown more extensively and with all its unsettling force. Throughout the film, the battle scenes have become more and more intense, with images that are increasingly horrific and disturbing, making the horror of war increasingly apparent, and finding a climax in this repeated scene. In this sequence we are confronted with the immediate perceptual experience of the Internet images again, even more intensified by the fact that we recognise the images from the beginning of the film. Before, we only saw charred bodies, but now we experience a soldier being wounded and see the faces of dead Iraqis, killed by the soldiers.

This scene is followed by the additional portrait of Moriarty’s home; then, from the internalised view of Moriarty, we are thrown into another disturbing setting: the next scene is about a little girl’s death when she is accidentally run over by the convoy Moriarty is travelling with. The scene takes place at night, shot in a dark, nightmarish way.

 

 

While we hear Moriarty’s voice recounting what happened when the girl was run over, the picture becomes completely dark. For this moment, we just hear the characters’ unsettled and afflicted voices, telling about the worst moment in their lives. Again a moment of internalisation that sets the following sequence into an extremely subjective mode. Blurry, pale dark pictures show a street scene at night, the car’s headlights drawing abstract patterns on the screen due to the stammering slow motion. Then, we are shown pictures from Mike Moriarty’s camera, trying to focus on the girl’s body that is hardly recognizable as human. The camera performs some sort of groping movement: it tries to get closer and closer to the body, to make visible what is unimaginable, although the images are not able to reveal anything. They remain vague, shaky and dark and finally blur more and more. Before they fade out, leaving an impression of subtle horror, they are again synced to the characters’ voices, as well as to the soldiers’ close-ups.

 

 

In this way, these shaky, dark, and horrific pictures are transformed into a mode that does not merely refer to a historical event (we don’t even know when and where this incident happened). Rather, it marks them as a subjective impression of someone suffering and mourning the cruelties of war in a way that we can share and that relates these hardly recognisable pictures to our own senses and feelings. What happens here is that these camcorder pictures are framed in a manner that highly refers to the pathos forms of the war film genre: in the way the pictures are organised, they realise a specific form of our category 6, Suffering, victim, sacrifice, or what Kappelhoff describes as the war film genre’s melodramatic core, the suffering of the individual being confronted with it’s own vulnerability.^[14] In this case, the vulnerability is not a bodily one, and neither the loss of a fallen comrade that is mourned. Rather, the individual suffers from its own confrontation with the cruelties of war and the own guilt it has to bear.^[15] However, this scene of suffering still gives expression to the central conflict around which the Hollywood war film genre constantly circulates: the contradiction between the striving for individual freedom and happiness as the defining and most valuable goods of this political community, and their loss and sacrifice in favour of war and greater political aims. It is this conflict that the films make accessible to the individual as concrete bodily sensations and a subjective feeling.

In our example of The War Tapes, the scene of suffering undergoes a specific alteration, caused by the camcorder pictures’ specific aesthetic quality. The camcorder’s groping movements and shaky, blurry pictures are not just technological artefacts that give an authentic impression because they testify that someone was present in this particular historical moment. Rather, they are themselves expressions of someone mourning, someone trying to cope with the situation, to get closer and closer to the unimaginable, horrific truth of this moment, without being able to reach it. The picture material itself, in the way it is organised in time, performs and expresses the movements of someone trying to get a feeling and an understanding of what this incident means to him or her. Hence, there is no empirical truth about the war waiting to be discovered; the only truth that can be revealed here is about the means and specific forms of expression and perception that are used in order to picture this unbelievable incident. They tell something about culturally and historically specific ways of perceiving, communicating and judging the war, giving expression to how an individual, the soldier as well as the spectator, as part of a specific cultural community, perceives, feels and thinks about the war in this particular historical moment, by means of contemporary media technology and traditional staging patterns.

Our analytical system of pathos scenes makes this alteration even more graspable. Compared to former war films, the specificity regarding the scene of suffering in The War Tapes is its merging with another realm of pathos that used to appear more distinct (in another category): the modality of horror. Here, the horror is not connected to the appearance of the enemy or a hostile nature anymore, as it is typical for our pathos scene 3, Battle and nature. Instead, it is the personal confrontation with the cruelties of war and one’s own guilt that is inset in this horrific mode of melodramatic suffering. This is not just about the representation of a war crime that the spectator is asked to evaluate rationally; again, it is the audiovisual composition that realises the horror and suffering as a feeling for the spectator.

As the analysis has shown, the examination of the poetic patterns that circulate throughout different media formats provides an important keyin order to deal with the enormous amount of audiovisual forms that determine contemporary cultural communication.The War Tapes organises and frames its seemingly authentic audiovisual material in a way that heavily relates to the poetics of the fictional genre on different levels. The genre’s staging patterns are altered by relating them to the new picture material and to the modalities of experience it provides. In this way, these pictures are made accessible to a culturally specific way of experiencing, feeling and judging the war. It is not the authenticity of the raw footage that makes a film like The War Tapes so credible to us. Instead, it is the aesthetic construction that makes no difference between the “real” and the “manipulated”, the “authentic” and the “staged”, but gives us the necessary framing to experience what this war means to us in a specific moment of time or in history.

 

---

 

^[1] See for example: Howard Tumber and Jerry Palmer, Media at War:The Iraq Crisis (London: SAGE, 2004).

^[2] See for example: Martin Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (London: Pluto Press, 2011).

^[3] While critiques praised the film for its realistic approach, several military members felt compelled to claim that the depictions of the soldiers’ experiences are not authentic at all. However, this heated discussion shows how public discourse is trapped within the dichotomy of manipulation and authenticity, as we will argue later on in the text. See Julian E. Barnes, Ned Parker and John Horn, “’The Hurt Locker’ Sets Off Conflict,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2010. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/25/entertainment/la-et-hurt-locker26-2010feb26.
Accessed May 15, 2015.

^[4]Tribeca Film Festival Film Guide Archive. https://tribecafilm.com/filmguide/archive/512cf49f1c7d76e0460019ca-war-tapes.
Accessed May 18, 2015.

^[5] Hermann Kappelhoff, “Melodrama and war in Hollywood genre cinema,” in After the Tears: Victimhood, Subjectivity and the Melodramatic Mode, ed. Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, in press). See also Hermann Kappelhoff, “Der Krieg im Spiegel des Genrekinos. John Fords They Were Expendable”, in Mobilisierung der Sinne. Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, ed. Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013), 184-227. Hermann Kappelhoff, “Affektmobilisierung und mediale Kriegsinszenierung,“ in Sprachen der Emotion. Kultur, Kunst, Gesellschaft, ed. Gunter Gebauer and Markus Edler (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014), 245-266.

^[6] This understanding is founded on the neophenomenological film theory of Vivian Sobchack as well as Gilles Deleuze’s description of affect as the ability to affect and be affected, as a prepersonal intensity of becoming. See Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Brian Massumi, foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), XVI.

^[7] In the light of Jaques Rancière’s “Politics of Aesthetics” and Stanley Cavell’s remarks on cinema as a possibility of the experience of social reality, Hermann Kappelhoff addresses this foundation of political/democratic processes as the basis of theories of cinematic realism and genre cinema. He is thereby drawing on Hannah Arendt’s re-reading of the Kantian sensus communis and Richard Rorty’s notion of commonality and solidarity as a sentimental development of moral identities. See Hermann Kappelhoff, The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015) and Kappelhoff, “Affektmobilisierung und mediale Kriegsinszenierung.“

^[8] Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre”, in Reinventing Film Studies, ed.Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2001), 223.

^[9] Matthias Grotkopp and Hermann Kappelhoff, “Film Genre and Modality. The Incestuous Nature of Genre Exemplified by the War Film,” in In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy, ed.Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 29-39.

^[10] Hermann Kappelhoff and Jan-Hendrik Bakels, “Das Zuschauergefühl – Möglichkeiten qualitativer Medienanalyse,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 5, 2 (2011): 78-96.

^[11] Hermann Kappelhoff, Matthias Grotkopp and Michael Lück have extensively outlined the theoretical backgrounds and historical developments of such an understanding of genre during their lecture series “Genre und Gemeinsinn” held at Freie Universität Berlin in the years 2013 and 2014.

^[12] This research approach has been developed and conceptualised in the research project Mobilization of Emotions in War Films (2008 – 2011) within the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin and its follow-up project Staging images of war as a mediated experience of community (2011-2015), under the direction of Hermann Kappelhoff and funded by the German Research Foundation. For detailed information, see: http://www.empirische-medienaesthetik.fu-berlin.de/en/affektmobilisierung/index.html.

^[13] Several studies have shown that non-fictional war reporting and the fictional war film genre have always been closely intertwined, on the level of production economics as well as of aesthetics. See for example David Gaertner’s work about the relation of film and Newsreel production and aesthetics in the Hollywood studio system during WWII: David Gaertner, “Mit allen Mitteln. Hollywoods Propagandafilme am Beispiel von Frank Capras why we fight-Reihe,” in Mobilisierung der Sinne. Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, ed. Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013), 307-344.

^[14] Kappelhoff, “Melodrama and war in Hollywood genre cinema.”

^[15] Kappelhoff, “Melodrama and war in Hollywood genre cinema.”

 

Notes on Contributors

Cilli Pogodda is a research associate in the DFG project “Staging Images of War as a Mediated Experience of Community” and assistant lecturer at the Seminar of Film Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working on a dissertation project with the topic “Media Technology, Aesthetics and Affect in Media Representations of the Iraq War”. Her main research interests are genre cinema, media aesthetics as well as cinematic corporeality and affectivity.

Danny Gronmaier is a research associate in the DFG project “Staging Images of War as a Mediated Experience of Community” and assistant lecturer at the Seminar of Film Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently working on a dissertation project about the aesthetic historicity of Hollywood sports films. His main research interests are, amongst others, the relation of film and history, affect theory, the medialisation of sports, and genre studies.

 

Bibliography

Barker, Martin. A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films. London: Pluto Press, 2011.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, XVI.

Gledhill, Christine. “Rethinking Genre.” In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 221-243. London: Arnold, 2001.

Gaertner, David. “Mit allen Mitteln. Hollywoods Propagandafilme am Beispiel von Frank Capras Why We Fight-Reihe.” In Mobilisierung der Sinne: Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, edited by Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, 307-344. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013.

Grotkopp, Matthias and Hermann Kappelhoff. “Film Genre and Modality. The Incestuous Nature of Genre Exemplified by the War Film.” In In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy, edited by Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli, 29-39. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

Kappelhoff, Hermann. “Melodrama and War in Hollywood Genre Cinema.” In After the Tears: Victimhood, Subjectivity and the Melodramatic Mode, edited by Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (in press).

—— The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

——“Affektmobilisierung und mediale Kriegsinszenierung.“ In Sprachen der Emotion: Kultur, Kunst, Gesellschaft, edited by Gunter Gebauer and Markus Edler, 245-266. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014.

——“Der Krieg im Spiegel des Genrekinos: John Fords They Were Expendable.” In Mobilisierung der Sinne. Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, edited by Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, 184-227. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013.

Kappelhoff, Hermann and Jan-Hendrik Bakels. “Das Zuschauergefühl – Möglichkeiten qualitativer Medienanalyse.” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 5, 2 (2011): 78-96.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Tumber, Howard and Jerry Palmer. Media at War: The Iraq Crisis. London: SAGE, 2004.

 

Filmography

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010).

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007).

Redacted (Brian DePalma, 2007).

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008).

The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006).

 

 

Much of the discourse about the ethics of Holocaust representation considers it a sacred event that imposes representational limits. Survivors are often considered “authorities” of Holocaust memory. However, Alasdair Richardson defines the Holocaust as an event “on the edge of living memory”: soon there will be no first-hand witnesses to share their stories.^[1] When the last survivor dies, the responsibility to remember will be entirely passed onto a new generation who cannot provide first-hand accounts of events; they did not literally witness this tragic past, but are called to “bear witness” in a more abstract sense as they remember the Holocaust through memorials, education and other media.^[2] While debates about the “appropriateness” of Holocaust representation have long-existed, the recent surge in online engagement with it complicates issues further and has led to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) launching social media guidelines for educators.^[3]

Young people are particularly prevalent users of social media, thus it is not surprising that they might turn to this format to remember the Holocaust. The theme of this issue is conflicting images/ contested realities, and much of the youth-produced material relating to the Holocaust online has been contested by the press and academics because it appears to conflict with pre-existing guidelines about the ethics of Holocaust representation by not presenting the truthful and solemn engagement expected of such works. Should this be particularly concerning? This paper considers the extent to which pre-existing guidelines about “appropriate” representation, mostly defined by survivors, are still relevant to young producers of digital Holocaust memory, and whether there might be new ethical questions that are as, if not more, important. Is the fact these contested images conflict with pre-existing ethical guidelines problematic or productive?

Holocaust Memory, Representation and Digital Media

When Anna Reading suggested in 2001 that “the Holocaust has taken on a virtual dimension”, she could hardly have predicted the impact digital technology would have on contemporary Holocaust memory.^[4] There is now an abundance of digital material available or in development, from hologram survivors to digital archives; virtual ghetto tours to Holocaust denial YouTube “documentaries”.^[5] The democracy of the Internet offers users a variety of different explorations of this past and gives opportunities for a wide range of individuals to participate in producing Holocaust memory, as well as consuming it. While professional organisations will be more aware of the guidelines associated with “approriate” Holocaust representation (whether they adhere to or deliberately challenge them), it is less likely that the average Internet user will have this knowledge, especially young people.

There is a growing number of platforms, in relation to material constructed for users, that enables anyone to contribute to Holocaust memory, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The YouTube video I Will Survive Auschwitz shows a male survivor with his grandchildren dancing at various concentration camps.^[6] It received mixed feedback, with many survivors lambasting it as distasteful, but younger generations celebrating it as the survivor’s way of remembering his history.^[7] The site also hosts numerous youth-produced Lego stop-motion videos about the Holocaust that have also faced criticism for impropriety. However, if the new generation is to be the future authority of Holocaust memory, then to completely condemn its modes of communication is counter-productive. Behind the drive to remember are imperatives to learn from the past and defend against denial. By refusing to engage with young people’s preferred methods of communication, we risk discouraging them from engaging with Holocaust memory.

Criticism about Holocaust representation is often influenced by survivors Terrence Des Pres and Elie Wiesel’s writings. Des Pres commands that the Holocaust must be represented accurately and treated as a solemn and unique event.^[8] While Wiesel condemns that mainstream media, particularly NBC’s Holocaust miniseries (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1978), for “trivialising” the Holocaust.^[9] Wiesel critiques the series’ use of melodrama and soap opera conventions which were unavoidable given its format. However, as Lawrence Baron notes, the formal limitations of film (and by extension, television) should not automatically mean that these media are not suitable for Holocaust representation, particularly when they have the potential to reach wide audiences.^[10] In response to criticisms of Holocaust, Andreas Huyssen states:

If it is our concern and responsibility to prevent forgetting, we have to be open to the powerful effects that a melodramatic soap opera can exert on the minds of viewers today. The post-Holocaust generations that received their primary socialization through television may find their way toward testimony, documentary, and historical treaties precisely via a fictionalized and emotionalized Holocaust made for prime time television.^[11]

Huyssen’s words should also be heeded in the context of social media, through which today’s young people receive “their primary socialization”.^[12] On the Internet, they can quickly find their way to historical sources, literally a few “clicks” away from any initial encounter. However, social media is more complex than television because young people are no longer just spectators, but users and producers.^[13]

Work by Meghan McGlinn Manfra and Jeremy D. Stoddard, Anna Reading and Peter A. Sproat focuses on web content about genocide created for young people rather than by them, thus does not fully account for the democratic possibilities and limitations of the Internet.^[14] They highlight texts that enable young people to see and hear eyewitnesses, but engage them less in actively contributing to memory. In one of the few works about youth-produced content online, Jason Hansen notes “the development of new technologies  […] [has] dramatically reduced the barriers to participation that have historically limited the influence of individuals in [the process of the construction of public memory]”. ^[15] Young people are now producing memory as well as consuming it.

In response to this new trend, in 2014, IHRA published guidelines for using social media in Holocaust education. The report recognises that with changing technologies, any definition of “social media” must be fluid, but recognises it as digital spaces that is “not passive”, where  “individuals […] actively participate, collaborate, contribute, and create”.^[16] The report highlights the misconception that young people are digital natives, the usefulness of moderation and privacy tools and the public nature of social media; it specifically emphasises the importance of appropriateness, vocabulary, and historical context when discussing the Holocaust online: issues at the forefront of wider debates about Holocaust representation.^[17] While the report is targeted at educators, these issues are relevant to thinking about young people’s use of social media too.

I now turn to one example of youth-produced social media to examine the extent to which it speaks to pre-existing ethical frameworks about Holocaust representation and the new challenges its online dimension offers. I will discuss Circle Productions’ “brickfilm” – a Lego stop-motion animation – Lego Holocaust (2011) uploaded to YouTube. The following analysis explores how this example of youth-produced social media engagement with Holocaust memory speaks to, and often transgresses, long-established concerns about the appropriateness, but also reveals new challenges social media introduce to discourses about Holocaust memory and representation.

Lego Holocaust

 

Two male Lego figures, one looking concerned, one more cheerful, appear on screen. A narrator explains that these are “normal looking people”, but that “Hitler and his followers saw them as powerful enemies”. There is a cut, and in the next shot the men’s heads have changed to monstrous faces – more specifically, Star Wars fans will recognise them as Yoda and Greedo (famous characters from the series). This is the opening sequence to Circle Productions’s “brickfilm” Lego Holocaust. The film continues with a Lego narrator stating that he will explain what happened during the Holocaust. This is followed by the film’s only non-Lego image: an archival photograph of a yellow star that is shown as the narrator explains, in voiceover, that some of the ways Jews were segregated in Nazi Germany. A series of historical re-enactments are then presented in Lego, with characters’ voices provided through voiceover. Firstly, an authoritative Lego figure orders a general to carry out mass executions. Then there is a confrontation between three male Lego figures in a shop, representing the boycotting of Jewish businesses. After this, an official unloads a Jewish man from a Lego police car into a concentration camp mostly constructed of grey Lego bricks. Here, the Jewish man witnesses a shooting, where plasticine is used to express the victims’ blood.

 

Then, the narrator stands in the barracks of the camp describing living conditions before a black screen is accompanied by different characters’ voices exclaiming their fear and asking “where is God?”. Finally skeleton Lego figures with yellow heads enter the gas chamber. They fall to the ground, before a transition shows the same characters now with skeleton heads to match their bodies.

 

 

At first glance, the fact that Lego Holocaust is an animation might seem particularly problematic. Paul Wells and Alan Cholodenko relate animation to “bringing to life”, while the Holocaust was characterised by torture and mass murder.^[18] However, the form has often been used to address serious issues in animated documentaries, a genre that one could consider to characterise Lego Holocaust. Annabelle Honess Roe defines such a film, as one that “(1) has been recorded or recreated frame by frame; (ii) is about the world rather than a world wholly imagined by its creators; and (iii) has been presented as a documentary by its producers and/or received as a documentary by audiences, festivals or critics”.^[19] As a stop-motion film that attempts to tell the history of the Holocaust (however simply), Lego Holocaust clearly fulfills Honess Roe’s first two criteria. Though the filmhas not attracted enough public attention to fairly judge it against the third, its educational structure and use of documentary techniques such as an objective narrator, archival photograph and a narrative about the history of a real event, suggest Lego Holocaust is an animated documentary. The film’s producers have clearly attempted to “give a sense of what we understand reality itself to have been” (as Bill Nichols identifies as conventional of documentaries) by re-enacting scenarios related to the Holocaust, however this does not necessarily mean Lego Holocaust offers, what Wiesel and Des Pres would consider, an accurate, non-trivial representation.^[20]

Circle Productions is a group of animators that produce “brickfilms”, mostly for school projects.^[21] There is a growing number of such films online, the popularity of which has led to the development of www.Brickfilms.com and the Academy Award-winning feature film, The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014). Many amateur works are uploaded to YouTube. Evidence in video descriptions suggests schools are adopting this as a form of creative independent learning. However, it is not necessarily teachers that suggest the use of Lego. When a commenter on YouTube asked Circle Productions if Lego Holocaust was created for homework, one of the film”s producers replied: “It was an RE portfolio and was better than writing about it [sic]”. This comment implies it was the young students who decided to use Lego for the assignment. Joshua Leasure of www.Brickfilms.com notes that while Lego is historically associated with play, when making such works “you stop seeing Legos as toys. You get used to seeing them moving around acting… from a film perspective, it becomes just another medium”. However, he identifies two major limitations of Brickfilms: the one facial expression of the characters, usually a grin, and the need to use voice to distinguish identities and emotion.^[22] Interestingly Lego Holocaust’s first Jewish character looks concerned rather than smiley. As Baron highlights with live-action, “brickfilms’” limitations are part of their identity, when a Jewish man is transported to a concentration camp in a white police van in Lego Holocaust this foregrounds the imaginative compromises the producers have to make in order to compose their narrative with Lego. It is not necessarily an attempt to dishonour the memory of the Holocaust.

 

 

If Lego Holocaust is held up to pre-existing guidelines about Holocaust representation, then it seems “inappropriate”. While the young producers clearly attempt to educate their audience, they certainly do not engage with the factual complexity of the Holocaust. Furthermore, the use of colourful Lego pieces might be construed as refuting the solemness of the event. The mostly smiling characters and bright colours certainly evoke a sense of the trivial. When Hansen spoke to one of the young boys involved, the producer attempted to quantify his awareness and knowledge about the Holocaust stating  that he “supplemented information he had gained from a Holocaust-related diary his class was reading with images of concentration camps from the H.B.O miniseries Band of Brothers and ‘information from my dad’”.^[23] While his research sources may not be academic, as to be expected of a child, the film clearly reveals an attempt to tackle some sophisticated lines of thought. Lego Holocaust uses a “contemporary” Lego narrator who walks through “historical” spaces, such as the barracks, explaining the living conditions. Circle Productions seems to subtly engage with the differences between concentration camps then and now, emphasising that they are spaces one can walk through freely today.

 

 

It is significant that the narrator does not enter the gas chamber, which can be read in the context of debates about la pellicule maudite (the “confounded” or “missing reel” – mythological footage of the gas chamber in action, the use of which was debated by Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard. The former claimed such footage should be destroyed, while the latter, that it must be shown to redeem cinema of its failure to record the Holocaust. ^[24]). Furthermore, the choice not to place the narrator in the gas chamber emphasises this as a moment the spectator (and producers) can never truly understand even through mediated forms – no one can share the victims’ experiences. The producers use a mixed media approach, including a photograph of a yellow star emphasising the “reality” behind the re-creation, reminding the spectator that while this may look colourful and animated, it refers to a real, tragic era of history. A dark screen represents the barracks at night, as one of the prisoners asks “why have we been abandoned by God?”, while others express fear, highlighting a plurality of responses and referring, however simplistically, to the theological questions provoked by the Holocaust. However, the brief time the young producers give to each of these complex issues might lead one to deem the film to be “trivial”.

The film works against IHRA guidelines, simplifying historical fact and confusing chronology. For example, in the second scene, a Nazi official orders a general to have all Jews sent to camps and murdered, when we know that the “Final Solution” was only introduced with the Wannsee Conference in 1942 – an event that belongs later in the Holocaust narrative. Furthermore, by ending with the cliché gas chamber scene it avoids counter-narratives of the Holocaust: ghettos, mass shootings, malnutrition and disease in concentration camps; stories of resistance, escape and survival. It also conflates concentration and death camps, a common misnomer due to Auschwitz’s (the most famous “camp”) multi-functions. This evidence strengthens the case for considering the film a trivialisation of the Holocaust.

Most troubling perhaps, and an issue not noted in the pre-existing guidelines, is the young narrator adopting the role of the perpetrator as he voices their threats towards Jews. With social media offering young people the opportunity to produce Holocaust memory, it gives them the chance to role-play “characters” from this traumatic past too. Though adult actors perform as Nazis in fiction films, at first glance, it seems particularly problematic when a child “plays” a perpetrator. The importance of play then, is not to be dismissed in relation to “brickfilms” as quickly as Leasure suggests. There is a growing body of work that considers play in the context of Holocaust and genocide memory as a productive rebellion against the traditional representational guidelines.

While play seems a trivial activity, and brightly-coloured Lego, not solemn, it offers opportunities for “postmemory” generations to engage with the Holocaust. Marianne Hirsch uses the term “postmemory” to refer to the complex experiences later generations have with Holocaust memory when they did not experience it first-hand. She states, “postmemory’s connection to the past is […] mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” – characteristics also associated with play.^[25] James E. Young notes that for such generations, their memory of the Holocaust is always hypermediated – they do not remember the actual events of the past, rather their memory is shaped by media encounters with it (films, literature, survivor testimony etc.).^[26] He argues that toys allow individuals “to imagine history, not as it really happened, but as it matter[s] in their life”.^[27] Thus the act of, what he calls, “memory-play” expresses how such producers perceive the significance of the Holocaust.^[28] As Young states, “it becomes memory of the witness’s memory”.^[29]

Jordana Blejmar reinforces Young’s idea when she claims that “playful memories […]redirect our gaze from the experience of adult survivors and towards those of their descendants, offering a new (child-like) perspective”.^[30] While Blejmar is directly referring to artists whose parents survived atrocities, her notion of the “child-like” perspective is particularly interesting in relation to Lego Holocaust. It infers a naiveté and innocence in the producers’ attempt to confront this past. The over-exaggerated voices the film’s narrator adopts for Nazi characters expresses that it is the mass media (where the “Nazi” has become little more than a symbol of evil), rather than history, where these young people discover such figures. Also the gas chamber finale repeats the “master narrative” portrayed in the majority of Holocaust films. “The Holocaust” then for Circle Productions is not merely a historical event, but a cultural symbol recognised from media representation.^[31]The educational framing of their film evidences they clearly did not set out to create an offensive piece, but they reveal their lack of knowledge about the Holocaust (which one would expect not only from young people, but anyone who did not experience it). Thus the film is not only a work about the Holocaust, but what it means to these young people: it is an expression of hypermediated Holocaust memory.

As has been discussed, one of the particularly concerning issues about Lego Holocaust, however, is the fact the young narrator plays perpetrators, imitating Nazi anti-Semitism when he states “you filthy Jew!” as a victim is marched into the concentration camp. However, Ernst Van Alphen emphasises the particular usefulness of playing perpetrators. He proposes that heteropathic identification (a term he borrows from Kaja Silverman, who defines it as, “temporarily and partially – becoming (like) the other”) with perpetrators is productive.^[32] Van Alphen claims that while identification with victims can help us recognise their suffering, it fundamentally reinforces a sense that we are innocent (just like them). However, identifying with perpetrators, albeit temporality and partially, “makes one aware of the ease with which one can slide into a measure of complicity”.^[33] Van Alphen suggests, through playing perpetrators, rather than identifying with victims (a position so commonly suggested by museums and feature films), that one can learn meaningful lessons from the Holocaust. He implies this is more important than whether a representation is solemn, accurate or non-trivial.

The educational tone of Lego Holocaust is somewhat exceptional compared to works like Ben Riley’s Lego Animation on the Ways of Torture in Sobibor Death Camp (2011) (which from the voiceover appears also to have been produced by a young person).^[34] However, the latter film also foregrounds the hypermediated dimension of postmemory. This “brickfilm” uses British game show Countdown’s (Armand Jammot, 1982-) ticking clock soundtrack to divide its narrative into segments: Jews arrive at Sobibor, enter a gas chamber, die in the gas chamber, while others are shot. It is a piece of ultraviolence. One might well consider it inappropriate, however, it is important to read this as an example of how young people remember the Holocaust. Perhaps, its ultraviolent dimension, which IHRA and educators prefer to avoid, is the factor that most colours this individual’s hypermediated memory of this past.

We should not instantly dismiss “brickfilms”. Lego Holocaust illustrates young people’s ability to engage with the Holocaust through play – an activity that challenges pre-existing representational guidelines, but does not necessarily mean that the work is inappropriate. Indeed, through play, these young people are able to express not only their knowledge about the Holocaust (however inaccurate or unfactual this may be), but also their hypermediated memory of it: they show their audience what the Holocaust means to them as young people in the Twenty-First Century. The film points to a transition in Holocaust memory, that we are now entering a somewhat postmodern age defined by works about postmemory, rather than only the historical event of the Holocaust. While the playfulness of Lego Holocaust suggests challenges to pre-existing ethical guidelines about representing the event, its social dimension points to new issues.

YouTube has the potential to be a wonderfully democratic platform, as Hansen notes, someone can create and upload a video in seconds, and share it with the world. However, this also has consequences.^[35] Patricia Lange highlights that it gives young people the opportunity to learn in public, which on the one hand enables them to get feedback from beyond their local community, but on the other hand, places them in a vulnerable position – a potential target for harsh criticism and “trolls”.^[36] Hansen notes that the type of negative comments on YouTube videos referencing the Holocaust range from dismissing its importance and anti-Semitism, to banal posts about production quality.^[37] In her analysis of the online use of photographs of the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes in Cambodia, Stephanie Benzaquen concludes that “YouTube does not seem conducive to community building […] Comment culture on YouTube, creating an aggressive and entertainment-oriented environment, makes it difficult for people to find a way to a more active outlet for their potential opinions and historical interpretations”.^[38]

The few YouTube comments about Circle Productions’s film express an interest in the rationale for its creation: “have you done this as a homework piece? You have a lot of facts I think you should get a really good Mark” [sic]; bizarre comment about production: “British accent are great” [sic]; or expressions of shared knowledge: “I’m so glad people other then [sic] me know the horrible things the nazi [sic] did to the Jews!!!!” and “I know about the holocaust”. The most worrying is perhaps the first comment suggesting the film is somewhat historically accurate and the peculiar second remark. While Ben Ripley has comments open, no one has replied to his work publicly. It would be simple to suggest that neither film has been viewed beyond family, peers and friends, but with the former video receiving more than 1,000 views and the latter more than 400, this is evidently not the case.^[39]

While Lange, Hansen and Benzaquen draw attention to the potential dangers of YouTube comments, there is only a minor suggestion of this in these case studies. However, taking their research into account we should question whether it is appropriate to encourage young people to share such sensitive material online. How else might they be supported to work through the issues of the Holocaust in creative ways that intellectually stimulate them without sharing their work with an public audience? Furthermore, if few people are commenting, why bother sharing work publicly? When professional film-makers are criticised for tackling the subject, despite often thorough historical research, how can we expect children to master the complexity of the Holocaust in such a way that will be considered perfect enough to avoid negative criticism online? With the existence of Internet trolls – individuals who seem to make it their hobby to harass people online – any attempt to completely avoid such criticism seems futile. Perhaps keeping such work on local systems might be safer. To place young people in a position where they are targets for abuse seems antithetical to Holocaust commemoration. While Circle Productions and Ben Ripleyhave not received aggressive responses, the producers seem to have gained little from sharing their work publicly online. While IHRA suggests the use of private settings to Holocaust educators wanting to engage with social media, it would be useful if the importance of such features were also introduced to their students. Furthermore, young people not only produce content for YouTube, but are also avid spectators of its content. Thus, the platform offers the potential danger for young people to access traumatic or offensive material. With Holocaust denial videos surfacing on the first page of searches for “Auschwitz” on the site, this is of particular concern.

“Brickfilms” are a form of communication young people use to participate in digital communities. They raise challenging questions for Holocaust representation. To simply lambaste them as inappropriate could discourage young people from engaging with Holocaust memory. When such a plethora of Holocaust denial and Neo-Nazi material exists on social media platforms, it seems counter-productive to discourage production of commemorative content on these sites. We must be careful not to participate in a media panic and immediately consider them as “trivialising” the past. By taking young people’s constructions of Holocaust memory on social media seriously, we are introduced to some poignant questions that encourage us to reflect on the future of Holocaust memory in a time when survivors can no longer share their testimony or define ethical guidelines:

1. Are the pre-existing guidelines regarding Holocaust representation still relevant to young people, to whom the Holocaust can only be known through hypermediated memory?
2. When young people become producers of Holocaust memory, how do issues such as play challenge pre-existing guidelines? Are these challenges productive?
3. What new issues arise from the social dimension of platforms like YouTube? Is it safe for young people to share their constructions of Holocaust memory on these sites?

The images young people create online relating to Holocaust memory may be considered to conflict with pre-existing ethical standards about Holocaust representation, however by carefully studying youth-produced content like Lego Holocaust, we can see that it points to a significant shift in Holocaust memory: Holocaust memory is now not only about remembering what actually happened in the past, but also considering how it is relevant to later generations.

 

---

 

^[1] Alasdair Richardson, “Holocaust Education: An Investigation into the Types of Learning that Take Place When Students Encounter the Holocaust”{PhD thesis, University of Winchester, 2012},  28.

^[2] Today, the notion “to bear witness” in regards to the Holocaust refers to actively remembering it.

^[3] IHRA, “Using Social Media in Holocaust Education”, accessed February 20, 2015, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/media-room/stories/new-social-media-guidelines

^[4] Anna Reading, “Clicking on Hitler: The Virtual Holocaust @Home”, in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer,  323-339. London: The Athlone Press, 2001.

^[5] USC Shoah Foundation is developing a hologram of survivor Pinchas Gutter. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an extensive digital archive: http://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/search-the-collections, and a virtual version of the Riga ghetto has been created (www.rgm.lv/map/). A quick search for “Holocaust” on YouTube often surfaces denial videos on the first page.

^[6] I Will Survive Auschwitz can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFzNBzKTS4I

^[7] Criticism of the video is covered in Tony Paterson, “Auschwitz ‘I will survive’ dance video is internet sensation”, The Independent, July 16, 2010, accessed December 15, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/auschwitz-i-will-survive-dance-video-is-internet-sensation-2027725.html

Responding to the Wiener Library Twitter debate, Emily Sample (@Justatwamp) states “their history, their choice how to remember!”, accessed February 5, 2015, https://storify.com/wienerlibrary/wldebate2015

^[8] Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?”, in Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang. New York: Homles and Meier, 1988,  220.

^[9] Elie Wiesel, “Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory”, The New York Times, June 11, 1989. accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-memory.html

^[10] Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005,  4.

^[11] Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York & London: Routledge, 1995,  256.

^[12]Ibid.

^[13] The distinction between television and online engagement is not to assume watching television is a passive activity, but rather to identify the specificities of the online experience as one which encourages more explicit activity on the part of the “user”, who can develop content.

^[14] Meghan McGlinn Manfra & Jeremy D. Stoddard, “Powerful and Authentic Digital Media and Strategies for Teaching about Genocide and the Holocaust”, in The Social Studies November/ December 2008, 260-264. Reading, “Clicking on Hitler”, 2001. Peter A. Sproat, “Researching, writing and teaching genocide: Sources on the internet”, in Journal of Genocide Research, 3:3,  451-561.

^[15] Jason Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos and Hitler hates Beckham: YouTube and the Future of Holocaust Remembrance” (paper presented at the Future of Holocaust Studies conference, Southampton and Winchester Universities, July 29-31, 2013),  2.

^[16] “Using Social Media in Holocaust Education”, 1.

^[17] “Using Social Media in Holocaust Education”,  2-4.

^[18] Paul Wells, Understanding Animation. London & New York, Routledge, 1998,  1 and Alan Cholodenko, The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation. Sydney: Power Publications, 1991, 15.

^[19] Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 4.

^[20] Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001,  1.

^[21] While the young producers do not specify their age, it would not be inappropriate to presume they are at secondary school because they refer to the production as an assignment for their “RE portfolio” (subject distinctions do not exist at primary).

^[22] Leasure quoted in “Lego Star Wars”, in Imagine 7, 2007,  2.

^[23] Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos”,  4.

^[24] The debate is discussed in detail, in English, in Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London & New York: Wallflower, 2008.

^[25] Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012,  5.

^[26] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000,  1.

^[27] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 42.

^[28] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 49.

^[29] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 1.

^[30] Jordana Blejmar, “Toying with History: Playful Memories in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios“, in Journal of Romance Studies Vol 13 (3) (2013), 44.

^[31] In fact, Tim Cole differentiates between the “myth” of the Holocaust and the historical event, claiming that while the former “may have drawn on the historical Holocaust […] it now exists apart from that historical event”. See Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, New York: Routledge, 1999, 4.

^[32] Ernst Van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust”, in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/ Recent Art, edited by Norma L. Kleeblatt. New York, New Jersey, New Brunswick & London: The Jewish Museum, New York & Rutgers University Press, 2000, 77.

^[33]  Ibid.

^[34] Ben Ripley’s film can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UOMzmj8xY

^[35] Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos”, 2.

^[36] Patricia G. Lange, Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2014, 20.

^[37] Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos”, 9.

^[38] Stephanie Benzaquen, “***Warning: much of the video footage shows people who have suffered greatly*** – looking at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Cambodia, on Flickr and YouTube”, in Media, Culture & Society, 2014, 16.

^[39] The author notes the potential impact researchers such as she might have had on these numbers by sharing these links publicly.

 

Notes on Contributor

Victoria Grace Walden is a PhD researcher and teaching fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Her thesis explores Holocaust film and the materiality of memory, she is interested in narrative depictions of the past, animation, archival re-appropriation, and the moving-image in museum spaces. She runs the international research group ‘The Holocaust, Contemporary Genocide, Popular Culture and Digital Technology’.

 

Bibliography

Baron, Lawrence. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

Benzaquen, Stephanie. “***Warning: much of the video footage shows people who have suffered greatly*** – looking at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Cambodia, on Flickr and YouTube”, in Media, Culture & Society, 2014, 1-20.

Blejmar, Jordana. “Toying with History: Playful Memories in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios“, in Journal of Romance Studies Vol 13 (3) (2013), 44-61.

Cholodenko, Alan. The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation. Sydney: Power Publications, 1991.

Cole, Tim. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Des Pres, Terrence. “Holocaust Laughter?”, in Writing and the Holocaust. Edited by Berel Lang. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988, 216-233.

Hansen, Jason. “Auschwitz is made of Legos and Hitler hates Beckham: YouTube and the Future of Holocaust Remembrance” (paper presented at the Future of Holocaust Studies conference, Southampton and Winchester Universities, July 29-31, 2013).

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Honess Roe, Annabelle. Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York & London: Routledge, 1995.

IHRA. “Using Social Media in Holocaust Education.” Accessed February 20, 2015. https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/media-room/stories/new-social-media-guidelines

Imagine, “Lego Star Wars”, 2007, 7.

Lange, Patricia G. Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2014.

McGlinn Manfra, Meghan & Jeremy D. Stoddard. “Powerful and Authentic Digital Media and Strategies for Teaching about Genocide and the Holocaust”, in The Social Studies November/ December 2008, 260- 264.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Paterson, Tony. “Auschwitz “I will survive” dance video is internet sensation”, The Independent, July 16, 2010. Accessed December 12, 2014.  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/auschwitz-i-will-survive-dance-video-is-internet-sensation-2027725.html

Reading, Anna. “Clicking on Hitler: The Virtual Holocaust @Home”, in Visual Culture and the Holocaust. Edited by Barbie Zelizer. London: The Athlone Press, 2001, 323-339.

Richardson, Alasdair. “Holocaust Education: An Investigation into the Types of Learning that Take Place When Students Encounter the Holocaust”{PhD thesis, University of Winchester, 2012}.

Saxton, Libby. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London & New York: Wallflower, 2008.

Sproat, Peter A. “Researching, writing and teaching genocide: Sources on the internet”, in Journal of Genocide Research, 3:3, 451-561.

Van Alphen, Ernst. “Playing the Holocaust”, in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/ Recent Art, edited by Norma L. Kleeblatt. New York, New Jersey, New Brunswick & London: The Jewish Museum, New York & Rutgers University Press, 2000, 65-79.

Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation. London & New York: Routledge, 1998.

Wiener Library, #WLdebate 201 – How Useful is Social Media for Keeping the Memory of the Holocaust Alive. Accessed February 4, 2015. https://storify.com/wienerlibrary/wldebate2015

Wiesel, Elie. “Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory”, in The New York Times, June 11, 1989. Accessed December 15, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-memory.html

Witt, Michael. Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Young, James E. At Memory”s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000.

 

Filmography

Band of Brothers [TV], (Phil Alden Robinson et al., 2001).

Countdown [TV], (Armand Jammot, 1982-).

Holocaust [TV], (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1978).

The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014).

 

YouTube Videos

I Will Survive Auschwitz, [uploaded by] The Secluded BLADE  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFzNBzKTS4I

Lego animation on the ways of torture in sobibor death camp, Ben Ripley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UOMzmj8xY

Lego Holocaust, Circle Productions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V48NBbm2mc

 

 

 

 

The figure of the body in narratives of war has long served to crystallize ideas about collective violence and the value or futility of sacrifice, often functioning as a symbol of historical transformation and renewal or, contrastingly, as a sign of utter degeneration and waste. As a number of recent studies have shown, the power of somatic imagery to shape cultural perceptions of war has had a decisive impact on the way wars have been regarded in history, and has sometimes influenced the conduct of war as it unfolds. In American war photography and film, the imagery of the body in war provides a particularly rich field of expression, articulating a layered record of violence and emotion, and the changing cultural frames through which it is perceived – a shifting iconography of war that is reinscribed, like a palimpsest, with each iteration. As Mikhail Bakhtin has written in a related context, photographic images of war “remember the past”, and make their resources available for new uses in the present.^[1]

With Restrepo (2010), a documentary feature about a US combat team stationed in Afghanistan, and the accompanying book of photographs entitled Infidel, war photographer Tim Hetherington and writer Sebastian Junger provide a concentrated illustration of how genres serve as “organs of memory” for culture. In compositions and dramatic scenes that recall the long history of war photography and film – and that reach further back to the work of Goya and Rembrandt in subject matter and in styles of lighting, pose, and framing – their work calls on the memory of past representations to provide a new perspective on the wars of the present. With their concentrated focus on the body in war, Restrepo and Infidel also mark an intervention into contemporary debates in the emerging doctrine of “bodiless war” or virtual war – what is known in war policy circles as the “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). In contrast to the decorporealised, bloodless war culture promoted and even celebrated in many contemporary theories of war, Restrepo and Infidel implicitly dramatise the limitations of so called “optical war” in many current conflict zones, emphasising the body of the soldier as a critical site of representation and meaning.^[2]

As A.O. Scott puts it: “[T]hough it is composed in the prose of hand-held video, Restrepo has the spare, lyrical force of an elegy, inscribing a place for its characters in a tradition of war poetry stretching back to the epics of the ancient world.”^[3] Viewed through the long lens of genre, Hetherington and Junger’s images are particularly valuable for the new questions they ask about the iconography of violence, vulnerability, and the embodied politics of war photography and film in a period caught between images of extraordinary corporeal violence and the persistent Western dream of “war at a distance”.

Restrepo is a record of the time in which Hetherington was an embedded photographer with the 80 man Battle Company in the Hindu Kush, the heart of the tribal areas in Afghanistan. Hetherington made five trips over the course of a year to the outpost Restrepo, sometimes with the journalist Sebastian Junger, and sometimes on his own. At one point, he was wounded and forced to leave Afghanistan to be treated. The isolated outpost that serves as the setting of both his film and the book, Infidel, was named in honour of the medic for Battle Company who was killed soon after arrival in Afghanistan. A few months after the 2010 Academy Awards ceremony, where Restrepo lost out to the documentary Inside Man, Hetherington was killed by an explosive while covering another war in Libya.

Two major concepts inform this essay: the concept of “genre memory”, originally set forth by Bakhtin, and the idea of “pathos formulas” as a recurring motif in the history of art. Both frameworks share the trait of describing a certain iconicity, a repetition of representational patterns throughout cultural history. The critical concept of genre memory primarily focuses on narrative patterns, which for Bakhtin serve as “organs of memory” for culture, the crystallisation of past social experiences – structures that “remember the past, and make their resources available for the present”.^[4] Telescoping Bakhtin’s work on the novel to 21st century pictorial forms, our essay explores the way the genres of war film and photography carry the imprint of the historical period in which they first emerged as a strong form – in the work of Thomas Edison and Alexander Gardner, among others – and retain the layered record of their changing uses.

The construct of “pathos formulas,” as defined by culture historian Aby Warburg, indexes the universal images of emotional expression and gesture that form a consistent language of art. Giorgio Agamben defines the pathos formulas of Warburg as “an indissoluble intertwining of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content.”^[5] Warburg’s Mnemosyne project, or Bilderatlas, serves a function similar to genre memory in demonstrating a migration of expressive forms across time and cultures. Colleen Becker notes: “Just as much as it leads its viewer down a particular path of visual cultural heritage, the Bilderatlas is a map of worlds within worlds that is as reliant on the interpreter’s own repository of knowledge and subjective point of view as it is on an equally biased collective cultural memory”.^[6]

In order to highlight Hetherington and Junger’s contribution to the genre of war photography and film, and to suggest what we think are some of the key influences on their work, we begin by discussing a small selection of early war films and war photographs that have become part of the sedimented memory of history and nation over the last 150 years. We argue that the visual iconography of war that emerged in the earliest examples of war photography and film informs and shapes contemporary work, and sets a framework for current discussions of risk, vulnerability, and the value or futility of embodied violence.

A History of Violence: Battle Photography in the American Civil War

The emergence of war photography in the work of Alexander Gardner and Matthew Brady in the American Civil War provides a powerful illustration of the close connection between aesthetic form and the history of violence that war film and photography evokes and appropriates. In these images, we find an early and immediate recognition of the power of violence to create aesthetically striking works. Early war photographers developed a distinct set of visual codes and conventions that centred on the aftermath of battle, the carnage of battle, and that also made use of aesthetic principles inherited from painting. Gardner called these scenes of battlefield death “a terrible beauty.”

Battle photography in the Civil War period was very restricted because of the weight of the equipment, the time it took to make an exposure, and the difficulty of developing the glass plate negatives in a battlefield setting. The immediacy we have come to associate with battlefield photography – the close-ups and visceral imagery of struggle in the thick of the action – was not possible given the long exposure times and the extreme difficulty of transport. The subject matter and the framing of these works, however, was also shaped by a set of formal constraints: according to the photography historian Joel Snyder, Civil War battlefield photography was motivated by the desire to show an unmanipulated, unnarrated view, usually in long shot, of the places and effects of war.

[T]he Civil War photographs utilize a set of formal devices that work to assure the audience of the absence of a ‘narrator’, or of an agent who is directing the attention of the audience. This is accomplished by adopting a ‘standard’ point of view, by emphasizing clarity and formal detail, by moving back and showing everything, in short, by creating a form that has the effect of denying that the photographer had devised any form at all. The Civil War photographs were viewed as having no form of their own, or, more accurately, as having the form of the subjects they depicted.^[7]

In Gardner’s Civil War photographs of the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg, however, we find much that is echoed in later battle photography, and much that is unique to that period.^[8]

 

 

Gardner’s work, which was exhibited in New York City in 1862, had a profound impact on the viewing public. It was the first time that many civilians had seen the effects of battle, the actual death and destruction of war. It was a popular exhibition, and sobering. The New York Times wrote that it ‘”was like the exhibit had set a few dripping bodies fresh from the field in front of the sauntering flaneurs of Broadway’ bringing home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war”.^[9] The exhibit deeply affected the North’s sense and understanding of war. Richard Lowry has written that Gardner’s work created a new “public sphere” of witnessing, giving rise to critical questions about the costs of war, the value of war, but also, its emotional power – its “terrible beauty.” Gardner called his images “views”, the 19th century word for landscapes, and the word “views” brings to the fore the shock of images of the dead inscribed in an ordinary terrain – alongside fences, churches, in fields and woods. As Lowry writes, “Gardner uses the land as his canvas, fences, trees, horizon lines, ditches, the contour of the ground, fix the bodies and the detritus of battle in space”.^[10]

This is a key sentence, as it highlights the aesthetics, the interior framing of Gardner’s images of war. Although he compared himself at one point to the gravediggers that appear in his photographs – and in some ways, he was in competition with them, rushing to get to the bodies before the gravediggers had done their work – he was clearly influenced by the landscape painters of the period.

 

 

Gardner also photographed the officers, the staff, and President Lincoln on his visits to the battlefields. Many of the soldiers pictured in the officers’ portraits are named, as if they wished their cultural status to be acknowledged. In the juxtaposition of these two types of war photos, Gardner also underlines a theme that will be seen throughout the genre – the anonymous enlisted men, and the anonymous dead, standing in for the generalized experience of war, against the named men of rank and privilege, with their particularized identities and histories.^[11]

 

 

Gardner’s photographs were circulated and exhibited at a time when doubt and anxiety about the war was rising, and as the numbers of dead and maimed was increasing. For everyone, Gardner’s images helped the country understand what it was looking at. Not only did he introduce the country to a new way of seeing war, he discovered for himself what would become a compelling theme throughout his war career: the profound social and psychic disruptions of death and the labor of healing.^[12]

A very different reading of war photography in the Civil War period, however, is given by Kathy Newman.^[13] In a study of battlefield photographs and the extensive photographic catalogues of wounded soldiers taken by Union doctors, Newman foregrounds what she calls the “embodied politics of war and photography.” Paraphrasing Elaine Scarry, she writes: “During and after the Civil War, photographic representation of corpses in the landscape was an important mechanism of legitimation by means of appropriation.” Newman argues that Gardner’s “landscape of death, the romantic softness … serves to neutralize the Civil War’s ‘images of rupture,’ both the literal rupture of limbs as well as the figurative rupture of the nation.”^[14] Although these images clearly argue against the brutality of the American Civil War, they also serve “to contain the horror of war, and to contain the role that horror played in the construction of the nation-state”. Images of death and injury, she writes, contributed to the foundation of a creation myth.^[15] The medical photographs of wounded soldiers, like the battlefield photographs of Gardner and others, appropriate the violence of war in order to convert it, in Newman’s words, to redefine the embodied politics of war as the “heart of the (second) birth of our Nation.”

Birth of a Genre

Unlike the complex and dialectical messages that coalesce around Civil War photography, the public sphere that developed around the earliest war films had a very different valence and offered a different set of reading positions. The war film – perhaps the first great genre of film – emerged in the late 1800’s as a vehicle of patriotic fervour, framing the body of the soldier as a symbol of cultural transformation, the rise of a new imperial America. Film was used to whip up enthusiasm for the Spanish America War in 1898, a war for which there was no real point or purpose. Film production companies discovered that there was a huge audience for these war “actualities”. It has been argued, in fact, that war films “saved” the film industry in America, generating interest and enthusiasm in a medium that already by 1898 was becoming boring and predictable and was losing audiences. Some companies renamed themselves – Edison’s Biograph Company became The War-Graph, another studio renamed itself the War-Scope – in order to capitalize on the war fever that they had helped generate. The showing of “war actualities” was often the highlight of a mixed programme of vaudeville skits, musical numbers, and comic routines.^[16]

In these early film “actualities”, we can see the basic elements of the war film genre: the soldiers’ farewell to the civilian world; life in the camp; horseplay; ordinary work details; scenes of preparation for battle and marching; battle scenes; and scenes centred around the burial and mourning of the dead.^[17]

 

 

In many ways, the Spanish American War was a media event, created in large part by the media, with enthusiasm for the war generated by newspapers (as seen through the “yellow journalism” propagated by William Randolph Hearst in particular), and by films, which promoted the war energetically. Film crews were sent to Cuba to record what war action they could, but because of the weight of the equipment, and the difficulty of developing the film in a battlefield setting, most of the film material consists of troops in camp, on parade, embarking and disembarking boats, and of blatant reenactments, such as the Raising of Old Glory Over Morro Castle, which depicts a flag being raised in front of a poorly painted backdrop. Even Georges Méliès, who had an American production company, got in on the act, staging a sinking of the Maine – the instigating event of the war – in an aquarium.

As part of the rise of a nascent visual culture in the United States, the media event of the Spanish American War was an attempt to create a new national consensus, a new sense of social unisonance, putting to rest the divisions of the Civil War between North and South. These themes were, importantly, clustered around a new national ideal of masculinity. With Theodore Roosevelt taking the lead, the American male was being constructed, in 1898, as a figure suited for a new “imperial” role in the world: athletic, fit, active, and white.^[18]

Thus, against the enervated “city types” who had left the farm and the work of physical labour behind in favour of office jobs and intellectual work, a new ideal of the male body took shape during the build-up to the Spanish American War. Disciplined and physically powerful, the male enlisted man was the emblematic figure of this type, frequently pictured with heavy machinery as part of the mise-en-scène, or depicted in the costume and equipment of military life – a construction of masculinity reinforced by the mise-en-scène of war.

 

 

In her essay, “The Gender of Empire”, Kristen Whissel demonstrates that these films helped shape an American national identity around the ideal of a white, militarized masculinity and thus established codes of virility suitable for a new Imperial America. Against the “overcivilized” masculinity ushered in by modernity, war could uncover a latent “masculine primitive”, allowing young men to engage in what Roosevelt called “the strenuous life”. Whissel argues that homosociality, the display of mechanized bodies, and the celebration of disciplined behaviour coincided with the “cult of the body” that was developing during the period. Soldiers, sometimes partially nude, were shown with military props such as canteens, rifles and knapsacks, as well as the machines of war – tanks, battleships, and artillery guns. Whissel notes that the emphasis on mundane activities allowed the camera “to focus and linger over the image of native white masculinity as it made itself into a new embodiment of national-imperial identity”.^[19] The “bodily rhetoric of soldiery” of war films suggested the men’s active participation in the construction of a martial masculine ideal, while female audiences were inscribed into chivalric fantasies of rescue and protection.^[20] Indulging in a vision of unity and order, spectators of the time could share the genre’s imagination of power, mastery, and control over disparate populations, and over “technological modernity”.^[21]

The contrast between Gardner’s Civil War photographs and Edison’s war actualities of the Spanish American War illuminates the range of messages that coalesce around the body in war. In Edison, for example, the body of the soldier is conceived as a symbol of historical transformation and renewal; in the work of Gardner, by contrast, the bodies of the dead and wounded appear primarily as emblems of war’s utter waste and degradation. In a major study of Modernist literary responses to the catastrophic violence of World War I, Sarah Cole describes the representation of war’s violence in terms of themes of enchantment and disenchantment. Enchanted violence, she writes, is conceived as either the “germinating core of rich symbolic structures”, or the emblem of grotesque loss. “To enchant, in this sense, is to imbue the violent experience with symbolic and cultural potency; to disenchant is to refuse that structure, to insist on the bare, forked existence of the violated being, bereft of symbol”[22].

In many art works, however, these themes are folded together. In the war photographs of Gardner, for example, the ghastly imagery of violent death was rendered, as Gardner himself called it, as a “terrible beauty” through the aestheticising use of landscape and framing. Although Gardner captures the grotesque imagery of war’s violence – swelling heaps of bodies, the eyes of the dead staring whitely into space – the aesthetic placement of the body in a landscape conceived as a “canvas” gives the representation of death a pictorial aspect. It becomes a “view” in Gardner’s word, framed by the branches of trees arching upward, or by other features of the battleground. Similarly, in the portraits of wounded and maimed soldiers taken in the Union hospitals, the attention to framing, to the folds of drapery and the contemplative facial expressions of the subjects, both the violence of war and it’s aesthetic appropriation is evident. The men’s bodies are rendered with an artistic, attentive softness. Violent death and injury is depicted here as both disenchanted and enchanted.

The intertwining of enchantment and disenchantment in representations of violence in war can be traced throughout the history of art. As Alex Danchev says, “Every war photographer has Goya on his shoulder,”[23] a statement that calls to mind Goya’s extraordinary series of images entitled ” Disasters of War,” and “The Follies” – perhaps the greatest, most searing examples of how art trades on the power of violence, appropriating its force, neither embracing it nor turning away.^[24]

 

 

From Gardner’s “Terrible Beauty” to Steichen’s “Body at Risk”

A few decades later, the aestheticising of bodies in war was given a very different affective charge. Edward Steichen’s World War II photographs, taken aboard the USS Lexington, were framed as an attempt to “concentrate on the little guy”, to provide a visual record of a sentiment – that the machines of war would be obsolete one day, but men never would be”.^[25]

 

 

Steichen, who started his illustrious career as an art photographer, and then became famous as a fashion photographer for Vanity Fair, was made the commanding officer of the Navy photographic corps in World War II at the age of 62. In his images, we see a complex mix of iconography, emphasising sailors at rest, at work, and in various poses of masculine performance. The postures, the uniforms, the tattoos, the behavioural details and gestural codes seem to turn these photographs into an anthropological survey of the men in their natural habitat – the ship at sea. Steichen’s study is like a view of an unknown species, captured in a moment of isolation.

Steichen’s attempt to find a style appropriate to the grim business of war is paradoxically articulated through the pictorialist compositions of his images, the fashion-spread performative maleness of some of the tattooed figures. The major theme here is the open display of fraternal affection and physical cohesion that the images communicate. How then, we might ask, in this display of sailors’ bodies with no evident martial attitude or military iconography, is the war present at all? How does the body at risk, and the discourse of enchanted and disenchanted violence come into play in these portraits?

The theme of the body at risk is expressed in two ways. The first is through the external frame, the known historical context that informs these photos. The war is here in the imagery, the uniforms, and in the framing discourse that attends these images. Many of these portraits have also been annotated with words about the soldier’s subsequent death or injury. The second way the shaping violence of war is expressed, however, is through the internal frame of the sailors’ figure behaviour – specifically, in the deeply moving and somewhat unsettling imagery of male camaraderie, the close physical contact of one soldier with another. Writing about a different conflict, the author Sebastian Junger has spoken of the “truth of combat as a form of bonding,” that war is the “only chance men have to love each other unconditionally”.^[26]

The affectionate, physical dimension of war can be visualised as a process, a transition from civilian to military life. As Hermann Kappelhoff has shown, the Hollywood war film can be broken down to several narrative and affective constellations as temporal figurations, which he calls “pathos scenes”, building on the pathos formulas of Warburg. One of the pathos categories that can be applied to Steichen’s images is entitled “transition between two social systems”. Kappelhoff describes scenes that include rituals of integration into the community of the troop, or centre on images of quotidian moments of military life, which, in turn, mirror the domestic structures of civilian life.^[27] Regardless of the differences between photography and film, it is this process, this emerging of an alternate male society that Steichen tries to capture. His images express both a certain point within this development and imply a complex transition from one state to another.

Patricia Vettel-Becker refers to the enchanting appeal of Steichen’s photographs as a “homosocial romance of male bonding”.^[28] The images, however, acquire a very different meaning in the context of his 1945 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Power in the Pacific: Battle Photographs of Our Navy in Action on the Sea and in the Sky. Despite Steichen’s belief that presenting a “real image” of war to the public could contribute to “ending the specter of war”, the combat pictures his unit had taken were woven into a heroic, transformative narrative. The introductory wall text for Power in the Pacific reads:

Here is the war in the western seas, and here are the men who fight it. Here are the tools of the warrior’s trade—the guns, the ships, the airplanes. Here is the force that America sent into Far East waters—Midway, Saipan, Guadalcanal, the beach of bloody Tarawa, Lingayon Gulf, and Guam and Truk, and far-off gloomy Formosa. Yesterday these men were boys; today they are seasoned warriors. Yesterday the airplanes were but lines on a thousand blueprints; today they sting the air with death, and shake the earth with blastings. Yesterday the ships lay stacked in piles of shapeless metal; today they cleave the trackless sea, belching steel and brimstone against the slimy swamps, the mountain caves, the jungle.^[29]

 

 

Genre Memory in the Work of Tim Hetherington

In the work of Tim Hetherington, the themes of touch and intimacy are joined to the imagery of masculine violence in an explicit way. In his film biography of Hetherington, Junger says that the core question that haunted Hetherington had to do with question of “young men in power, young men in violence, and how young men see themselves in war”. Prompted by Hetherington’s photographs, he asks if war is part of the “hard wiring” of young men and stresses the way young men “see themselves in ways that are informed by images of other soldiers in war”.^[30]

In drawing on the genre memory of war representation, however, Hetherington and Junger’s work also brings into relief a key dimension of war that has so far not received critical attention – what the geographer Derek Gregory describes as the “corpography” of war. “By ‘corpography’ I mean a mode of apprehending, ordering and knowing the battle space through the body as an acutely physical field in which the senses of sound, smell, taste, and touch were increasingly privileged (over the optical-visual register of cartography) to produce a somatic geography or a corporeality”.^[31]

Detailing the bodily experiences that characterize 20th century combat, Gregory draws on soldiers’ memoires, letters, and literary accounts to highlight and recover the texture of sensory experience in three very different settings: the trench warfare of World War I, where the senses of touch, smell, and hearing were far more critical to survival than vision; the desert campaigns of World War II; and the rainforests of Vietnam. He further argues that war in the contemporary period in the Middle East is equally defined by corporeal engagement.

The structures of feeling that I have been (un)earthing have not been left behind by later modern war, buried in the mud of the Western Front, baked in the sands of the Western Desert, or burned in the napalm-soaked forests of Vietnam. Through the circulation of military imagery and its ghosting in video games, it is too easy to think of contemporary warfare as optical war hypostatised: a war fought on screens and through digital images, in which full motion video feeds from Predators and Reapers allow for an unprecedented degree of remoteness from the killing fields. It becomes tempting to think of the wars waged by advanced militaries as ‘surgical’, even – a bizarre conjunction – body-less … And yet, for all their liquid violence, today’s wars are still shaped and even confounded by the multiple, acutely material environments through which they are fought and which they, in their turn, re-shape.^[32]

It is here, we suggest, that the work of Hetherington and Junger marks an intervention in the contemporary cultural imaginary of war, dramatizing the limitations of so called “optical war” or “bodiless war” in the conflict zones of Afghanistan. The concentrated attention to the touchscape of modern war in their work, moreover, provides a fresh perspective on older traditions of visual representation, illuminating the genre codes of war photography and film in a new way. The visual and acoustic design of Restrepo, in particular, captures the haptic geography of combat in a remote mountain outpost in the Korengal Valley. The film highlights the concentrated experience of sound and touch, providing a first-person account of the way the body inhabits contested space, the way the intensities of war confuse and overwrite the sensory codes of vision, and the compensatory drive of somatic mastery, which is projected in vivid displays of masculine athleticism in the relative safety of the enclosure.

What Steichen called “the machinery of war” is all but absent in these images. Like Steichen, Hetherington expresses the brotherhood of the men in directly physical, gestural forms – in close physical contact, in the “bloodying” of new men, and in the tattoos they give each other with a tattoo gun they have brought up to the camp.

 

 

The history and memory of battle, moreover, are inscribed directly on the bodies of the soldiers pictured here in the form of tattoos, which become the indexical signs of combat, a tactile record of vulnerability and extreme experience that in many ways is at the heart of war and war representation. As Gregory describes it, “in order to survive ground troops had to invest in modes of apprehension that extended far beyond the visual; they remained not only vectors of military violence but also among its victims; and their bodies have to be comprehended as intensely physiological and affective organisms”.^[33]

 

 

The tattoo photographs that are such a prominent feature of the book Infidel express a particularly complicated set of messages. In some cultures, tattoos are seen as magical, a form of protection, and a way of warding off death. Popular in times of historical transition and crisis, tattoos serve as a talisman and as an alternative way of inscribing the self in history. Sailors were commonly tattooed, both as a way of memorializing the places they’ve been to and also as a form of identification. The sailor’s tattoos would be recorded in the ship’s manifest. If they were washed overboard, their tattoos would be the only way their bodies could be identified.

In Restrepo, the body becomes an icon of war itself, a form of memorial inscription. Several soldiers, in addition to elaborate pictorial images, tattooed the names of their fallen brothers on their arms. As Vettel-Becker notes, tattoos can be regarded as “emblems of membership in a sacred brotherhood; their application is conceived as an initiation rite, the achievement of manhood through violence and pain, which is endured with the support of other men”.^[34] Steiner, one of the soldiers stationed at O.P. Restrepo, says this about the two tattoos of winged bullets on his chest:

Vinnie drew up this bullet with wings on it and I told him to give it to me when he ordered his tattoo gun. At the time in Afghanistan I had been hit two times, so he did two of them. They hold meaning to me. The tattoos that I have that was done in Afghanistan by a guy that I fought with – you know, we hurt together, we stuck together – I am prouder of these tattoos than any of the fifteen others I have.^[35]

Depictions of war in Restrepo and Infidel revolve around touch – the heat, cold, and dirt, the intense exertion, the texture of skin. Although Hetherington’s images of white, muscular soldiers may be compared to the displays of imperial masculinity celebrated by Edison in his War-Graph actualities, and by Roosevelt in his appeal to the brave “game boys” of military adventure, they also relay the heightened sensuality of Steichen’s World War II sailors to a contemporary war setting. Scenes that contain a high quotient of violence – the firefights with insurgents, the roughhousing, the bloodying of new recruits – are here juxtaposed with shots of soldiers sleeping and other scenes of quiet reflection.

 

 

In these images, also, genre memory is evoked – a genre memory that reaches back to older traditions of pictorial art. Hetherington’s “Sleeping Soldiers,” perhaps the most striking and unusual works in this catalogue, picture soldiers regressing from their hardened military identity to a state of incautious boyishness, abandoning the reality of war for a few hours of peaceful dreaming. Like Caravaggio’s “Sleeping Cupid”, who has put his bow and arrow to rest, the young men are caught “off duty”, reminding us, in these quiet, contemplative frames, of their fragility.

 

 

 

The use of chiaroscuro and soft focus accentuates the sense of pathos the images communicate, reinforcing a palpable elegiac mood in which the violence of war, its grotesque waste and loss, is bracketed out in favour of the imagery of enchantment, where war becomes again poetic and metaphoric.

 

 

Conclusion

Brian Castner has characterized the Afghanistan war as a “stage without a play”, arguing that it has yet to acquire the narrative contours – the clarified plot-line, the shaping focalisation, the well-drawn dramatis personae – that gives wars their cultural salience. In his review essay on John Renehan’s novel, The Valley, Castner writes, “If World War II is the Good War, Korea the Forgotten War, Vietnam the Bad War, and Iraq the New Bad War, then Afghanistan, it would seem, is the Lonely War. Or maybe the Ignored War. It is, at least, the Undescribed War”.^[36] Without a narrative through line, the war in Afghanistan has so far been underrepresented – for the most part, it has played itself out in an artistic vacuum. The few Western authors who have written fictional narratives set in the Afghanistan War, for example, have resorted to surprisingly traditional narrative paradigms – comparing the conflict to the Greek epics, with The Iliad serving as a principle intertext, or more compellingly, to the American frontier Western, in which the stark and alien landscape of Afghanistan serves as a contemporary version of the Monument Valley of John Ford. In the words of Brandon Willits, “Americans have always wanted a frontier to test themselves against. It’s that Frederick Jackson Turner idea”.^[37] And as another author, Kevin Maurer, says, “Afghanistan is far more riveting than Iraq because it’s a whole different world. Baghdad is a Middle Eastern city, but it is a modern city. In Afghanistan that barely exists … you can go get lost in Afghanistan, you can be on some hill on some outpost. In Iraq you were never that far out”.[38] As Castner concludes, “Afghanistan, ancient and fresh … challenges us for a new treatment.”^[39]

Our discussion of the imagery of the body at risk in war photography and film has centred on the idea of genre as an “organ of memory”, a way of seeing the world that carries experience from one generation to another, and from which new potentials emerge. Genres, as Bakhtin has written, are the “residue of past behaviour … the crystallization of earlier interactions”. They “resume past usage” and redefine present experience in an additional way.^[40] War films and war photography provide a particularly vivid example of the way the past can shape new potentials in the present. The violence of war, its intensified emotion, and even the geopolitical context in which it occurs are retained in the genre forms of war film and photography, which provide something like an emotional archaeology of the past – a multi-layered record of violence and emotion and the shifting cultural frames through which it is perceived. The particular “ways of seeing” afforded by the eyes of genre, however, also provide a powerful resource for artistic innovation.

Hetherington and Junger’s work is a case in point: standing against the dream of bodiless war, their films and photographs claim a place for embodied war in the current cultural imaginary, which is dominated by the ideology of “war at a distance”, of so called “hygienic” or virtuous war.^[41] Foregrounding the body of the soldier as a medium of sensory experience and as a body at risk, their work recalls the long history of war photography, painting, and film, dramatizing the importance of the figure of the body in narratives of war, and the power of somatic imagery to shape cultural perceptions of conflict. In Restrepo and Infidel, haptic experience and embodied vulnerability unfold as the central fact of war, the heart of warfare. Here too, however, a certain cultural imaginary is invoked, visible in Junger’s discussion of “young men in war” and of the “hard wiring” of young men for the violence of war, a theme that sacrifices any consideration of context, as if war was an existential constant. Nonetheless, in this framing of contemporary western war, centred on the haptic geography of combat, we can see an initial sketch, an introduction, to a critical understanding of the corpography of war in the current period.

 

 

---

[1] For discussion of the concept of “genre memory,” see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 278 – 297. See also Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Revised Edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

[2] See, for example, Edward Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare”, Foreign Affairs (May/June 1995) and Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Christopher Coker, The future of war: the re-enchantment of war in the twenty first Century. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

[3] A.O. Scott, “Battle Company: Loving Life, Making War,” The New York Times, June 24, 2010. Accessed May 15, 2015.

[4] See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. See also Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Revised Edition.

[5] Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, translated and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 90.

[6] Colleen Becker, “Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as methodological paradigm,” Journal of Art Historiography, Number 9, December 2013, 11. Also see Elisabeth Bronfen, Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

[7] See Joel Snyder, “Photographs and Photographers of the Civil War,” in The Documentary Photo as a Work of Art (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago, 1976), 20.

[8] See Richard Lowry, The Photographer and the President: Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Gardner, and the Images that Made a Presidency (New York: Rizzoli, 2015).

[9] Anon. “Brady’s Photographs; Pictures of the Dead at Antietam, The New York Times, October 20, 1862, accessed May 15, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/1862/10/20/news/brady-s-photographs-pictures-of-the-dead-at-antietam.html

[10] Richard Lowry, “Dead Bodies and a Standing President: Alexander Gardner’s ‘Terrible Reality’,” Presentation at the University of St Andrews, June, 2013.

[11] This thesis is developed at length in Lowry, The Photographer and the President.

[12] Lowry, “Dead Bodies and a Standing President”.

[13] Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 6:2 (1993), 63—85.

[14] Newman, “Wounds and Wounding”, 69.

[15] Newman, 65, 75.

[16] See James Castonguay’s study on the Spanish American War and its reception: http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/war/recep1.htm

[17] See Robert Eberwein, The Hollywood War Film (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 5.

[18] See Kristen Whissel, “The Gender of Empire,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 141—165.

[19] Whissel, 152.

[20] Ibid., 158.

[21] Ibid., 159.

[22] Sarah Cole, At the Violet Hour (London: Oxford University Press, 2012), 43.

[23] Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 37.

[24] See Alex Danchev, “Infidels and miscreants: love and war in Afghanistan,” International Affairs, 87: 2 (2011), 435–443.

[25] Steichen in an interview with Wayne Miller (1954). In Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of our Day, Ed. James Nelson. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958), 41.

[26] Sebastian Junger, War (New York: Twelve Hachette Book Group, 2010).

[27] See the following webpage: Empirische Medienästhetik. Database “Mobilization of Emotions in War Films.” Categories. Transition between two social systems. Freie Universität Berlin. Languages of Emotion, 2011, accessed May 15, 2015,
http://www.empirische-medienaesthetik.fu-berlin.de/en/emaex-system/affektdatenmatrix/kategorien/uebergang/index.html

[28] Patricia Vettel-Becker, “Destruction and Delight: World War II Combat Photography and the Aesthetic Inscription of Masculine Identity,” Men and Masculinities, 5 (2002), 82.

[29] Museum of Modern Art, Power in the Pacific. Wall text, exhibition records. New York: Museum of Modern Art Photographic Archives, 1945.

[30] Junger’s film biography of Tim Hetherington, Which Way is the Front Line from Here? (2013), is a powerful and disturbing memorial project. Hetherington, as the title of the film suggests, was interested in the most extreme combat conditions and experiences. What Junger says about soldiers becoming addicted to the intensity of the experience of combat, described later in this essay, appears to apply equally well to Hetherington.

[31] Derek Gregory, “Corpographies”, accessed May 15, 2015, http://geographicalimaginations.com/2014/07/16/corpographies

[32] Derek Gregory, “The Natures of War,” Geographical Imaginations, 2014, 65, accessed May 15, 2015, https://geographicalimaginations.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/gregory-the-natures-of-war-november-2014.pdf

[33] Gregory, “The Natures of War”, 63.

[34] Vettel-Becker, 86.

[35] Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, Infidel (London: Chris Boot, 2010), 172.

[36] Brian Castner, “Afghanistan: A Stage Without A Play,” LA Review of Books, October 2, 2014, accessed May 15, 2015, http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/afghanistan-stage-without-play

[37] Brandon Willits, quoted in Castner 2014.

[38] Maurer quoted in Castner 2014.

[39] Castner 2014.

[40] Morson and Emerson, 293.

[41] See for instance James Der Derian, “Virtuous War/Virtual Theory,” International Affairs 76: 4. (2000), 771-788.

 

Notes on Contributors

Robert Burgoyne is Chair in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. His work centres on historical representation and film, especially on war in film and photography. His recent books include The Hollywood Historical Film (2008); Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History: Revised Edition (2010) and The Epic Film in World Culture (2011).

Eileen Rositzka is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews. In her dissertation she examines the war film genre in terms of how its notion of the cinematic positioning, or ‘reterritorialisation” of the body is modified throughout film history. Her research mainly combines aspects of cartography and embodiment, and takes a “corpographic” approach to genre as such.

 

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science.” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, translated and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen, 89-103. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Burgoyne, Robert. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History. Revised edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Becker, Colleen. “Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as Methodological Paradigm.” Journal of Art Historiography 9 (2013), 1-25.

Castner, Brian. “Afghanistan: A Stage Without A Play.” LA Review of Books, October 2, 2014. Accessed May 15, 2015. http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/afghanistan-stage-without-play

Castonguay, James. “The Spanish-American War in United States Media Culture.” In Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, edited by J. David Slocum. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Coker, Christopher. The Future of War: the Re-enchantment of War in the Twenty First Century. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Cole, Sarah. At the Violet Hour. London: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Danchev, Alex. “Infidels and Miscreants: Love and War in Afghanistan.” International Affairs 87: 2 (2011), 435–443.

—– On Art and War and Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Der Derian, James. “Virtuous War/Virtual Theory.” International Affairs 76: 4. (2000), 771-788.

Eberwein, Robert. Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Eberwein, Robert. The Hollywood War Film. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2009.

Gregory, Derek. 2014. “The Natures of War.” Accessed May 15, 2015. https://geographicalimaginations.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/gregory-the-natures-of-war-november-2014.pdf

Hetherington, Tim and Sebastian Junger. Infidel. London: Chris Boot, 2010.

Junger, Sebastian. War. New York: Hachette, 2010.

Kappelhoff, Hermann. “Sense of Community: Die filmische Komposition eines moralischen Gefühls.” [Sense of Community: The Filmic Composition of a Moral Feeling.] In Repräsentationen des Krieges. Emotionalisierungsstrategien in der Literatur und in den audiovisuellen Medien vom 18. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert [Representations of War: Emotionalizing Strategies in Literature and Audiovisual Media from the 18th to the 21st Century], edited by Søren R.Fauth, Kasper Green Krejberg, and Jan Süselbeck, 43–57. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. (Translation kindly supplied by the author.).

Lowry, Richard. The Photographer and the President: Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Gardner, and the Images that Made a Presidency. New York: Rizzoli, 2015.

Luttwak, Edward. “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare.”, Foreign Affairs, May/June (1995).

Luttwak, Edward. Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Newman, Kathy. “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 6:2 (1993), 63-86.

Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Scott, A.O. “Battle Company: Loving Life, Making War” New York Times Movie Review, June 24, 2010. Accessed May 15, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/movies/25restrepo.html?_r=0

Snyder, Joel. “Photographers and Photographs of the Civil War,” in The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860–1876, edited by Joel Snyder and Doug Munson, 17-22. Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Gallery, The University of Chicago, 1976.

Steichen, Edward. Interview by Wayne Miller (1954). In Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of our day, edited by James Nelson, 35-43. New York: W. W. Norton, 1958.

Vettel-Becker, Patricia. “Destruction and Delight: World War II Combat Photography and the Aesthetic Inscription of Masculine Identity,” Men and Masculinities 5 (2002), 80-102.

Whissel, Kristin. “The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity, and Edison’s War Actualities.”In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

 

Filmography

Restrepo (Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, 2010).

Which Way Is The Frontline From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (Sebastian Junger, 2013).