SAARUTU · Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground
Paul Virilio's War and Cinema (Guerre et cinéma I: logistique de la perception, 1984; this English translation 1989, its preface signed 30 March 1988) refuses the division of labour that keeps military history in one room and film history in another. Its wager is that the two are not adjacent developments that occasionally borrow from one another but a single one: the industrialization of perception advancing in step with the industrialization of destruction, until the eye and the weapon come to perform the same function.
The problem the book enters is that perception looks like a neutral backdrop to war, the mere seeing that precedes the shooting. Virilio's counter-claim is that the seeing is already the shooting. He dates the compounding of the modern perceptual weapon to the 1914–18 war, when the reconnaissance camera in the cockpit became a sighting device and the image began to overtake the object it recorded:
Pages 1–2On board an aeroplane, the camera's peep-hole served as an indirect sighting device complementing those attached to the weapons of mass destruction. It thus prefigured a symptomatic shift in target-location and a growing derealization of military engagement. For in industrialized warfare, where the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image was starting to gain sway over the object, time over space. Soon a conflict of strategic and political interpretation would ensue, with radio and then radar completing the picture. As it laid the ground for a veritable logistics of military perception, in which a supply of images would become the equivalent of an ammunition supply, the 1914–18 war compounded a new 'weapons system' out of combat vehicle and camera — a kind of advanced cinema dolly, one might say.
That is the whole book in compression. The name Virilio gives the process is the logistics of perception, and he treats it as the permanent double of the older war machine, never its late arrival. The through-line the reconstruction below follows is the progressive fusion of eye and weapon across the century: from the reconnaissance camera, through the picture-palace and the propaganda ministry, to the moment on the book's last pages when the guided missile's image and the image's projectile become a single composite, and the instruction that closes the book, "Scan. Freeze frame." (page 111), reads at once as an order to a camera and an order to a weapon. Virilio marks the scope himself: this is the opening installment of a larger project, and he twice declines the film historian's task, which is registered in its place below.
The preface builds the entire apparatus in miniature, and it is where the book's operative vocabulary is set. Virilio opens on aerial reconnaissance in the First World War, where artillery so constantly remade the ground that the general staff had no other way to keep its picture of reality current than the camera aloft (page 1). From there he moves to the contemporary endpoint, the real-time command centre that watches a planetary conflict, and names the new administrative organ:
Page 2The central electronic-warfare administration — such as the so-called '3Ci' (control, command, communication, intelligence) in place in each major power — can now attend in real time to the images and data of a planetary conflict. Thus, alongside the army's traditional 'film department' responsible for directing propaganda to the civilian population, a military 'images department' has sprung up to take charge of all tactical and strategic representations of warfare for the soldier, the tank or aircraft pilot, and above all the senior officer who engages combat forces.
The move that gives the preface its title is the projection forward to a war in which the projectile is superseded by the look. Virilio stages it as a gun-duel in which reflex beats firepower, and delivers the formula the rest of the book will vary:
Page 2Rather like in a Western gun-duel, where firepower equilibrium is less important than reflex response, eyeshot will then finally get the better of gunshot. It will be an optical, or electro-optical, confrontation; its likely slogan, 'winning is keeping the target in constant sight'. 'Winning' here means the status quo of a new balance of forces, based not on explosives and delivery systems but on the instant power of sensors, interceptors and remote electronic detectors.
He recruits Merleau-Ponty to fold the whole question of the war's subject into the question of the perceiving subject, then turns the borrowed sentence toward the automation of sight, where the perceiver is no longer a human being:
Pages 2–3As Merleau-Ponty once wrote: 'The problem of knowing who is the subject of the state and war will be of exactly the same kind as the problem of knowing who is the subject of perception.' However, it is not human observers or military analysts themselves who will have this ubiquitous and surgically precise vision: rather, a 'sight machine' aboard an intelligent satellite will automate perception of enemy territory in the finest detail, helping the missile's 'expert system' to reach its decision at the speed of electronic circuitry.
The conceptual heart of the preface is the reading of the gunsight as a geometry of belief. Virilio recovers the French name for the sight's reference axis and makes the loss of the word itself part of the argument, the disappearance of "faith" registering a new obliviousness to the interpretation always at work in looking:
Page 3The act of taking aim is a geometrification of looking, a way of technically aligning ocular perception along an imaginary axis that used to be known in French as the 'faith line' (ligne de foi). Prefiguring the numerical optics of a computer that can recognize shapes, this 'line of aim' anticipated the automation of perception — hence the obligatory reference to faith, belief, to denote the ideal alignment of a look which, starting from the eye, passed through the peep-hole and the sights and on to the target object.
The book's governing pairing, the watching machine set permanently beside the war machine, is stated on page 4, and with it the identity that the whole book will drive toward, the eye's function collapsing into the weapon's:
Page 4Thus, alongside the 'war machine', there has always existed an ocular (and later optical and electro-optical) 'watching machine' capable of providing soldiers, and particularly commanders, with a visual perspective on the military action under way. From the original watch-tower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote-sensing satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye's function being the function of a weapon.
The preface's anchor citation, the sentence Virilio treats as the plain statement of the new situation, is attributed to W. J. Perry:
Page 4'If I had to sum up current thinking on precision missiles and saturation weaponry in a single sentence,' said W. J. Perry, a former US Under-Secretary of State for Defense, 'I'd put it like this: once you can see the target, you can expect to destroy it.'
From Perry's formula Virilio derives the inversion that structures the contemporary scene: if to be seen is already to be lost, then concealment, not firepower, becomes the thing to invest in. This is where deterrence turns into an "aesthetics of disappearance," and where Stealth is read not as a weapon among weapons but as a weapon whose very existence must stay uncertain to function:
Page 5The inversion of the deterrence principle is quite clear: unlike weapons which have to be publicized if they are to have a real deterrent effect, Stealth equipment can only function if its existence is clouded with uncertainty. This 'aesthetics of disappearance' introduces a disturbing element of enigma into relations between the blocs, gradually calling into question the very nature of nuclear deterrence.
The preface then names the concept the subtitle promises and states the thesis-sentence the book exists to prove:
Page 5We can now better understand the crucial importance of this 'logistics of perception' and of the secrecy that surrounds it. A war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles). In a technicians' version of an all-seeing Divinity, ever ruling out accident and surprise, the drive is on for a general system of illumination that will allow everything to be seen and known, at every moment and in every place.
It closes on its declared scope, the explicit marking of the book as a first volume with a sequel promised:
Page 5This first volume seeks to show the recent origins of this project and to follow the twists and turns of its development. A subsequent book will look more closely at the latest results in this domain.
The chapter takes its title from Sun Tzu and argues that war has never left its magical, pre-scientific ground, because its purpose is not simply to destroy the enemy but to produce a spectacle that captivates him. Virilio opens on contemporary terrorism precisely to show the archaism inside the modern, the media-fed image of the sacrificial victim throwing war back to its origins in sympathetic magic:
Page 7When underground militants — Irish or Basque, Action Directe or Red Brigades — use outrages, murder or torture to gain publicity, feeding the media with photos of their sacrificial victims, the act of internal war throws back to its psychotropic origins in sympathetic magic, to the riveting spectacle of immolation and death agony, the world of ancient religions and tribal gatherings. Terrorism insidiously reminds us that war is a symptom of delirium operating in the half-light of trance, drugs, blood and unison.
From there he states the identity that founds the book: destruction and perception are not two jobs a weapon does but one. The Stuka's terror-siren is his first case, the weapon engineered to be heard and feared rather than only to strike. This is the chapter's load-bearing thesis, and the whole argument of the book rests on it:
Page 8There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception — that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (dated by Virilio to the 6th and 9th of August 1945) are read not primarily as detonations but as the perfection of the perceptual weapon, the point where moral shock outruns mechanical effect. He borrows Einstein's late figure to name it:
Page 8By demonstrating that they would not recoil from a civilian holocaust, the Americans triggered in the minds of the enemy that information explosion which Einstein, towards the end of his life, thought to be as formidable as the atomic blast itself. The principle of deterrence had already seen the light of day.
The middle of the chapter treats deterrence as dogma rather than strategy, weapons that are "active elements of ideological conquest" even unused (page 8). The Cold War cinema enters here as evidence, not decoration: the generals now saying a nuclear war would be survivable are, for Virilio, reciting a film script, and he quotes it:
Page 9A number of generals are now saying that, after all, 'a nuclear conflict would not be the end of the world', repeating twenty years later the argument of General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove: 'I don't say we wouldn't get our hair mussed, Mr President, but only ten to twenty million casualties — depending on the breaks.'
Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, announced on 23 March 1983, is folded into the same logic, the weapons programme that is first of all a genre of spectacle:
Page 9Most of the specialists who were asked about the project immediately talked of it as Star Wars, science-fiction cinema. But the necessary element of spectacle has behind it a thoroughly concrete programme on which the Pentagon will spend around a billion dollars a year.
The move culminates in Carter's farewell address, which Virilio positions as a continuation of Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex, and which he quotes at length for the way it renders nuclear war as an image of accelerated apocalypse:
Pages 9–10It may only be a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed or miscalculation lets loose this terrible force. In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War Two would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War Two every second — more people killed in the first few hours than in all the wars of history put together.
The chapter then delivers its most portable general claim, the redefinition of the history of battle as a history of perception, from which follows the striking consequence that a true war film need not show a war at all:
Page 10The history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception. In other words, war consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in appropriating the 'immateriality' of perceptual fields. As belligerents set out to invade those fields in their totality, it became apparent that the true war film did not necessarily have to depict war or any actual battle. For once the cinema was able to create surprise (technological, psychological, etc.), it effectively came under the category of weapons.
The chapter's long historical case is colour film as a spoil of war, what Virilio names "logistical piracy." Goebbels, having seen recent American colour films salvaged by the German navy from intercepted Allied ships, judged the German process shameful beside Technicolor and drove the improvement of Agfacolor:
Pages 10–11Thus it was no accident that colour films multiplied during the Second World War — indeed, in Germany they were the direct result of acts of logistical piracy. Early in the war Joseph Goebbels, minister for propaganda and 'patron' of the German cinema, banned the showing of the first film in Agfacolor, Women Are Better Diplomats (Frauen Sind Doch Bessere Diplomaten), on the grounds that the colour was depressing and of wretched quality. In fact, he had had the opportunity to see very recent American films — particularly Gone with the Wind — which the German navy had salvaged from intercepted Allied ships.
The colour campaign runs through Veit Harlan's The Golden City (1942), von Baky's Agfacolor Baron Münchhausen (1943), and Eisenstein shooting a sequence of Ivan the Terrible, Part Two on captured Agfacolor stock, with UFA traced back to its 1917 wartime founding and its dependence on Krupp and the arms industry (page 11). It arrives at Kolberg, made in 1943–44 at eight-and-a-half million marks and premiered on 30 January 1945 in the still-held Atlantic fortress of La Rochelle, which Goebbels wanted to be, in the words Virilio quotes, "the greatest of all time, a spectacular epic outrivalling the most sumptuous American super-productions" (page 12).
The American side of the same argument runs through the Pentagon's direct role in production and the wartime conscription of directors: Huston, Litvak, Buñuel shooting for the US Army in 1942, and Capra moving from his inter-war satires to the didacticism of the orientation series (which Virilio names "Why We Are Fighting," 1942–45), with Fred Astaire's numbers read as "disguised calls for a new mobilization" (page 13). The chapter closes by pulling the argument back to Marey and the origin of motion-analysis in military research, via Napoleon's maxim that the capacity for war is the capacity for movement:
Pages 13–14E. J. Marey, himself a medical physiologist and disciple of Claude Bernard, placed the chronophotography that he had invented at the service of military research into movement. Fred Astaire's persistent charm doubtless stems from this unsuspected fusion/confusion of 'science' and dance.
Astaire is not a digression but the chapter's closing proof that the perceptual weapon works on the audience as much as the enemy: Marey photographing birds, horses, and silver-striped human subjects "was making the body disappear into a momentary agglomeration of sense-data" that "dispels perceptual awareness and induces hypnosis or similar pathological conditions" (page 14), and the tap-dancing pirated from that laboratory still works on the viewer, "one of the best remedies there are against the dark" (page 14).
End of the preview
You have read the opening of War and Cinema. Create an account to unlock the full SAARUTU brief and the rest of the research library.
