How can one claim to make a film about war, let alone a short one? To make a film ‘about’ anything always results in approximation.

Engagement with this very failure, though, can initiate complicated entanglements with doubt that open a possibility for politics. Often, a specific subject is most forcefully discussed when attention is paid to matters of concern rather than matters of fact.[1] While film may allude to replicating events, images, locations and questions, it is always constructed through filters of subjectivity.

Thomson and Craighead’s A Short Film about War uses the structural language of documentary film, working with material relating to conflict gathered during 2007 and 2008 from publicly accessible archives on the Internet, proposing a means of describing war from pre-existing images and descriptions. War is a contention of power relations, asserted through both actions, and transmission of those actions; as communication technologies evolve so does the representation of war.

Thomson and Craighead’s film studies the ways in which the dissemination of war has shifted as the user-generated realm of the Internet extends information sources out from institutions to individuals. The unfurling of less unified reporting structures offers no less subjectivity than those from mainstream and official channels.

This ten-minute double-screen projection interrogates the impossibilities and resistances of the representation of war in the complex technologically driven networks that form contemporary communication. The left-hand screen shows a collection of images from Flickr, uploaded by individuals who choose to preserve and spread evidence of a particular personal and political present. The right hand screen logs the source of these images: Istanbul, Nepal, Santa Monica, Texas, Baghdad, Ramallah, Walt Disney World. Details of date, time, GPS location and uploader scroll across the screen in a list of provenances to the ‘truth’ of images. Interspersed with these empirical texts are opening lines of accounts from civilian and military bloggers who describe their experiences of conflict. Longer extracts of these letters-to-an-unknown-public, read by different voices, form the soundtrack, resulting in a three-tiered narrative structure that communicates most loudly between the information flows.

This record of subjective documentary points to the operations of technology as a process capable of organising and shifting social relationships via power structures, resistance and the construction of assumptions.[2] With technological advancements, be they in the ever-linked military or communication spheres, come economies of scale and the affirmation of a vast system that speaks louder than any one individual. Somehow, rationality comes to hold more power than intuitive, or even emotional, responses to the-way-things-are under the conditions of war.

A Short Film about War begins to the left with images of Atlanta airport. To the right, image details are logged, followed by a blog that spirals out into the voiceover. The writer announces his desire to express the intertwining of his hatred for the army and his separation from his wife. The confessional is a personal therapeutic solution to one man’s grief, but the concerns are of a global political nature.

The images pull out to a bird’s eye view of the globe, sourced from Google Earth, returning to rest on a street-stall in Ramallah. The possibilities of hovering above the globe creates fictional possession of knowledge, replicating the desires for visual control that led industrial revolution urban centres to construct panoramic viewing structures.[3] A useless monument to the power of technology, Google Earth is infinitely fascinating, yet not illuminating. It makes material the imaginations of science fiction that can only be understood by relating the unknown to familiar points, travelling in the abstract from a computer hooked up to a high bandwidth connection.

Like all documents, these views are fictions that are keen to seduce with promises of fact that turn the camera into a doubly culpable mechanism that captures and influences reality as it plays back particular versions of experience. Thomson and Craighead's film points to a concern with this double culpability as it in turn doubles the subjectivity of found material into a montage revealing the impossibilities of making a short film about war.

Footnotes:

[1] Bruno Latour, ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’ in Critical Inquiry 30 2004.

[2] See Herbert Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’ in Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers from Herbert Marcuse edited by Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge1998).

[3] Roland Barthes, ‘The Eiffel Tower’ in The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies, translated by Richard Howard (Berkley: California University Press 1997).

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator and writer based in London. She is Senor Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths. Between 2005 and 2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum, commissioning work by Dan Holdsworth, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Lawrence Weiner, Simon Patterson, Renée Green and Jeremy Millar. In 2009 she curated the exhibitions Joachim Koester: Poison Protocols and Other Histories at Stills, Edinburgh and Economies of Attention from the Arts Council of England Collection. In 2010-11 she will co-curate with Tom Morton British Art Show 7 and edit Failure, published by MIT Press / Whitechapel Art Gallery.

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