Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Cinema and the Epistemology of War
- 2 Good Kill? US Soldiers and the Killing of Civilians in American Film
- 3 ‘5,000 feet is the best’: Drone Warfare, Targets and Paul Virilio's ‘Accident’
- 4 Post-heroic War/The Body at Risk
- 5 Disappearing Bodies: Visualising the Maywand District Murders
- 6 The Unknowable Soldier: Ethical Erasure in The Master's Facial Close-ups
- 7 Visible Dead Bodies and the Technologies of Erasure in the War on Terror
- 8 Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Absence in Zero Dark Thirty
- 9 Invisible War: Broadcast Television Documentary and Iraq
- 10 Nine Cinematic Devices for Staging (In)visible War and the (Vanishing) Colonial Present
- 11 Afterword: Reflections on Knowing War
- Index
7 - Visible Dead Bodies and the Technologies of Erasure in the War on Terror
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Cinema and the Epistemology of War
- 2 Good Kill? US Soldiers and the Killing of Civilians in American Film
- 3 ‘5,000 feet is the best’: Drone Warfare, Targets and Paul Virilio's ‘Accident’
- 4 Post-heroic War/The Body at Risk
- 5 Disappearing Bodies: Visualising the Maywand District Murders
- 6 The Unknowable Soldier: Ethical Erasure in The Master's Facial Close-ups
- 7 Visible Dead Bodies and the Technologies of Erasure in the War on Terror
- 8 Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Absence in Zero Dark Thirty
- 9 Invisible War: Broadcast Television Documentary and Iraq
- 10 Nine Cinematic Devices for Staging (In)visible War and the (Vanishing) Colonial Present
- 11 Afterword: Reflections on Knowing War
- Index
Summary
The contemporary visual technologies of the war on terror are as much about invisibility as visibility, as much about what is moved out of sight or rendered visually taboo, as about what images are circulated and rendered hyper-visible. This chapter seeks to conceptualise erasure, by focusing on how images of dead bodies circulate in the war on terror. Rather than focus on soldier bodies, as often form the basis of such framing, I seek instead to understand the framing of what is seen and unseen in dead enemy bodies.
Why should we look at images in the discussion of erasure? Discussions of photography frequently focus on understanding how images are made and the narratives of what is left out in the decisions surrounding what is visually depicted (Sontag 2001, Sliwinski 2011). Beyond this, securitised images become dispersed through the schemas of viewing associated with cinema and other mechanisms of display, which often act as a filter for what can or should be viewed. From Facebook to Twitter, contemporary technology has shifted the frame, wherein war is rendered hyper-visible; at the same time these visualities are managed via a technology of erasure that blurs parts of images, and removes others from our line of sight, so as to manage the context under which the visual encounter occurs.
This chapter uses the cases of Muammar Qaddafi and Osama bin Laden to explore the purposes for which particular dead bodies are rendered (in)visible, and further, the visual politics of the encounter with the bloody body in a political context where bodies are often key sites inscribed with and resistant to power. To do so, I argue that obscenity is mustered as a visual and political tool, to both place a taboo on the viewing of certain dead bodies, and invite the viewing of others. Obscenity here provides the framing concept for visual engagement, precisely because what constitutes or is suggested to constitute the obscene is a political decision, one which generates particular erasures and legitimates particular narratives.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Disappearing WarInterdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World, pp. 111 - 130Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017