War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception

by Paul Virilio, Patrick Camiller (Translator)

This rich and suggestive analysis of military “ways of seeing”
reveals the convergence of perception and destruction in the parallel technologies of warfare and cinema.

In this seminal work, Paul Virilio conducts a sweeping analysis of perception in an age of astounding visual impact. Through a technical history of weaponry, photography, and cinematography, an account of key war strategists and movie directors, and a narrative that places pin-up girls alongside satellite feeds and ranges from Hollywood to Hitler's bunker, Virilio shows how military “ways of seeing” have transformed the world as we know it.

Genres: Philosophy, Film, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Politics, Art

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

Reviews

[Jed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virilio is deeply schooled in the continental philosophical tradition, phenomenology in particular. Knowing this is important to why he approaches war as a sort of cinematic achievement. With the existence of the phenomena "bracketed" all we are left with is what we perceive of it. Cinema or television are how the overwhelming majority of us experience war and conflict in our era, very few have the entirely different experience which comes from the front lines. Since our experience of war is mediated through this form, an accurate understanding of what war is and has become must pay careful attention to this. War and Cinema is an attempt to do precisely that.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Typical Virilio, an intellectual I admire greatly and also struggle to keep up with, as he moves from idea to idea in quite unrelenting fashion. I won't say he convinced me of the War-Cinema linkage, but there is absolutely no doubt he made me think long and hard about how they developed in time. I haven't read Virilio for a few years, at least, so it took me a few pages to re-accustom myself to his style and presentation. He jumps back and forth in time and place and concept, never staying overlong in any one of them, maybe for fear his reader will get bored? Or maybe Virilio writes likes he thinks, and things just cme at him from so many angles that he just has to get them all down, but also find the time and knowledge to connect them all somehow. The book reminds me of how my conversations go, starting with a definite plan, then proceeding up with a completely different set of tactics and ultimately resulting in not quite remembering where I wanted to be but liking my destination all the same.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved Virilio's damning take on Hiroshima as the ultimate film, but I don't recall the book offering anything particularly conclusive as I don't consider the mutual development of technologies as presented in the text to be a proof of anything. I will say that I favored the sections that showed how cinema influenced war more than the sections on how war influenced cinema as they seemed to examine an ideational rather than a technical impact (granted the latter has ideational implications, the former came across as an analysis of an analysis which proved doubly engaging). Overall the information is interesting and so is how Virilio looks at everything, but it doesn't seem to make a definitive point.

[Kai · Rating 1 out of 5]

Scattered and unfocused. Virilio will pick up threads of an argument at random and move on by the next paragraph. He doesn’t build an argument so much as toss a scattershot of everything at the reader hoping it will stick. There are moments where a good and coherent argument for something could be made but it’s dropped almost as soon as it’s arrived. This book tries to say everything and ends up meaning nothing.

[Stephanie Hubert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Was expecting more for it to be about how war is represented in cinema, or how it influenced cinema, but it’s more the other way around. It’s about how cinema, film, and Hollywood played a part in the war. Read it in one sitting, but it was dreadful at parts, and the structure was all over the place. At one point we are talking about the lumière brothers, and then we jump to Kubrick’s film. I found the time jumps between sentences to be confusing. If the book would have been one linear chronological path, I think it would have been a better reading experience.

[Ivone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Por coincidência, hoje, triste aniversário do bombardeamento de Hiroshima, leio nas páginas finais deste livro:

"Lançada para explodir a cerca de 500 metros de altitude, a primeira bomba provocou efectivamente um clarão nuclear de 1/15000000 de segundo, um clarão cuja luz se infiltrou em todos os locais, nos edifícios, até às caves, deixando a sua impressão na pedra - cuja coloração se alterou devido à fusão de certos elementos minerais - mas, curiosamente, deixando intactas as superfícies protegidas. O mesmo aconteceu com as roupas e os corpos, onde o desenho dos quimonos tatuou a pele das vítimas...Se, segundo o seu inventor - Joseph Nicéphore Niépce -, a fotografia era nada mais do que um método de gravura pela luz , "fotogravura" em que os próprios corpos inscreviam os seus traços pelo efeito da própria luminosidade, a arma nuclear é simultaneamente herdeira da câmara escura de Niépce e de Daguerre e da câmara escura do projector militar. Já não é uma silhueta que surge no fundo das câmaras escuras, mas uma sombra, sombra que, por vezes, alcança as caves de Hiroshima. As sombras japonesas já não se inscrevem, como outrora, nas paredes de um "teatro de sombras" mas no ecrã, nos muros da cidade."

Gosto do trabalho de Virilio sobre a relação entre o desenvolvimento dos meios de transporte e comunicação, das armas de guerra e a aceleração que caracteriza as sociedades actuais. Sabia que o cinema, e em particular, Hollywood desempenha o seu papel no framing que nos é proposto acerca dos conflitos mundiais mas desconhecia a profundidade da relação entre as duas indústrias. Virilio estabelece aqui um paralelismo.entre a história do cinema e da guerra no Ocidente, em particular as duas grandes guerras do século XX e relata detalhes dessa relação e episódios históricos muito elucidativos. O livro é de 1984 mas permanece actual e é interessante lê-lo com os olhos de hoje.

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deftly and convincingly argues that photography/cinema influenced war and vice versa, which in turn distorted our perception into delirium.

"There 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. A well-known example is the Stuka or Junker 87, the German dive-bomber of WW2 that swept down on its target with a piercing screech designed to terrorize and paralyse the enemy. It was completely successful in this aim until the forces on the ground eventually grew used to it."

"For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye .... war is cinema and cinema is war."

[Scot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic look at the pairing between war and cinema and how the two feed upon one another. This is one of those books that you could read and study and go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole critically examining all that you know on each topic and uncovering greater and greater links between the two. I found myself stopping between chapters to watch old silent movies or talkies that I have missed to get a better understanding of what Virilio was so masterfully revealing to the reader. I doubt that there are many modern day philosophers and thinkers that are this versed in both popular culture, what we can glean from it, and who sound such an important alarm as to a need to change the direction we are devolving. I can't recommend the Virilio canon enough and would recommend this one as an early read in your run if you are fascinated by either war or cinema.

[Lewis Manalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books tracks the parallels between the evolution of cinema with the development of warfare technologies. The first movie camera was based off of the technology of the Gatling gun, and today, with more unmanned drones being manufactured than piloted planes, combat has become more video game than war game.

This book isn't that up to date with current technologies, but the evolution of the way we see is already there in the text. WAR AND CINEMA is definitely more film theory than the reader of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is looking for, but if you're into cinema/media studies or psychology, this book is quite enlightening.

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read earlier this year. I don't care very much for this kind of text—constant namedropping and a non-linear argument make for a poor reading experience. I felt like I was being bombarded with film titles and names I don't recognize or care for. I can see how the connection between the cinematic broadly construed and warfare is an important one to acknowledge and explore. But this kind of book isn't my cup of tea, I guess.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read assigned chapters. Reading as essays, I enjoy them. Reading as academic research, it sucks.

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ocularcentric philosophical (empirics are all treated as grist) account of the relationship and eventual merging of the cinematic and military gazes that eventually concludes that as vision and weaponry meld, as “the projectiles’s image, and the image’s projectile form a single composite” (104) what emerges is not just a new form of warfare, but a new epistemology of war, informed by the simulation of warfare. The psychedelic sublime lurks over the text from the first page (“terrorism insidiously reminds us that war is a symptom of delirium, operating in the half-light of trance, drugs, blood and unison”) to the last (“subliminal light of incomparable transparency”).

The Great War sits as the crux of the argument, as cinematic art develops as a technology of war, though Virilio moves forward to its further realization in World War II and Vietnam, where “total visibility made the space of war translucent and its military commanders clairvoyant.” (97) In this sense the book reads very much as a product of the late Cold War, with it’s omnipresent sense of the possibility of total destruction via the visual will, but also dated since it perhaps anticipates but of course cannot yet analyze the way in which the visual spectacle of war would be radically remade in the 1990s during the Gulf War — war as spectacle, staged by and for what the X-Files’s Agent Mulder would call “the military-industrial-entertainment complex” — and later even more in the live-streaming of combat and eventually the violence of non-state actors, Everyman potentially his own live-action soldier-cum-war-photographer, epistemically collapsing the lines between reality, simulation, and disinformation.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

the supply of bullets must be supplemented by the supply of images (the logistics of perception). according to virilio, war reaches its height in the functional and the phenomenological convergence or the "fateful confusion" of eye and weapon, best exemplified by the infrared laser aided missile tech in which the missile is literally guided by the pilot's gaze.
there is also a co-incidence of war and cinema, as cinematic sensibility has increasingly come to substitute regular perception since the invention of photography, for the very simple reason that our ordinary faculties of perception can no longer keep up with the dizzying speed of war. warriors have no choice but to live war AS cinema.
the advent of nuclear weapons threatens to close the world off as a total cinema unto itself, so that no only soldiers who are fighting at the front-lines but also non combatants and civilians become spectators in their own right.
with speed (instantaneous communications technologies) comes the annihilation of spatial and temporal distance.

content wise, the first two chapters didn't really work for me. virilio's theoretical observations really start to pick up pace starting from chapter 4, though he could have done a better job drawing all the threads together at the end of each chapter instead of leaving his pithy observations suspended in a space of disjointedness.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

my favorite book that I’ve read by virillo thus far. his subjects are always interesting, but for me he struggles with making coherent points. this book was certainly the clearest. he makes interesting connections between camera technology and warfare - of particular interest are his connections between war and the movie industry

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In the summer of 1982, the Israeli preventive war in Lebanon, baptized
‘Peace in Galilee', drew on all the resources of the scientific arsenal:
Grumman 'Hawkeye' aircraft-radar capable of simultaneously locating two hundred and fifty targets for F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers; and, above all, the remote-piloted 'Scout' automata, with a wing-span of less than two metres, which were massively and systematically deployed for the first time in the history of battle. This toy craft, worthy of Ernst Jünger's Glass Bees, was a veritable Tsahal's eye fitted with TV cameras and thermal-image systems. As it skimmed the rooftops of the besieged city of Beirut, flying over the most exposed Palestinian districts, it provided images of population movement and thermal graphics of Palestinian vehicles for Israeli analysts sitting at their video consoles more than a hundred kilometres away. In the autumn of 1982, the United States established a military high command for space and announced the impending launch of an early-warning satellite.”

“Having checked these data against the permitted itineraries, the computer could immediately alert the police if the person wearing the 'tracking bug' went elsewhere or tried to remove it. Although the original idea was to use it for prisoners on parole, this system of electronic incarceration finally enabled a kind of prison reform. The cell would be replaced by a tiny black box, by confinement to the shadows through the stage direction of everyday life.”

“Narcotics were to become the plague of the US expeditionary corps Vietnam. From the beginning, they suffered from the hallucination technological combat-delirium, which blurred the distinction between the real and the imaginary. In this war of images, Broughton writes:
Unfortunately, the groups known as photo interpreters are not always of the highest level of skill or experience, and their evaluation quite often does not agree with that of the men doing the work. I have bombed, and seen my troops bomb, on specific targets where I have watched the bombs pour in and seen the target blow up, with walls or structures flying across the area, only to be fragged right back into the same place because the film didn't look like that to the lieutenant who read it way back up the line. I have gone back on these targets and lost good people and machines while doing so, and found them just as I expected, smashed. But who listens to a stupid fighter pilot?

People used to die for a coat of arms, an image on a pennant or flag; now they died to improve the sharpness of a film. War has finally become the third dimension of cinema.”

“Pre-flight synchronization test of camera and aircraft speeds at Mount Farm, ensuring that the rhythm of machine-gun fire will automatically determine the spacing of photographs and thus leave the pilot free to navigate.”

“the means of communication and identification employed in modern warfare become ways of blocking history. The new media allow the viewer to sense the differential time-span borne by each technological object. The effect is a startling temporal relief, such that the engine of war restores the material war-time of military-industrial propaganda in which we are the involuntary protagonists.”

“In March 1983 President Reagan signed ‘National Security Directive 75’ which though not published, has been substantively quoted in the Los Angeles Times. Its author, Richard Pipes, is a former adviser on the USSR for the National Security Council. Among other things, this directive outlined the so-called 'Project Democracy' - in reality, an appeal for greater propaganda efforts to accompany US economic sanctions and rearmament. The administration accordingly asked for a credit of 85 million dollars in films, books and means of communication to promote democracy in general and free trade unions in particular, the manna to be distributed mainly in Western and Eastern Europe. Once again, Congress did not fail to release major resources, which were soon swept up.”

“During the First World War, D.W. Griffith was the only American filmmaker authorized to go to the front to shoot propaganda footage for the Allies. Son of a Civil War veteran, Griffith had previously worked in the theatre and, in the summer of 1914, had filmed the great battle scenes of Birth of a Nation just as Europe was plunging into a real war. In this film, the battlefield appears in a long-distance shot taken from a hilltop, the director being in the position of Pierre Bezukhov, the hero of King Vidors and Mario Soldati's War and Peace (1955), as he contemplates the fighting at Borodino with all the risks of direct vision. In fact Griffith filmed 'his war' less as an epic painter than in the style of those stage-managers who meticulously note down the slightest movement to be performed in the theatre. Karl Brown has related: 'Every gun emplacement was known.
Every motion of every section of the crowd.”

“Abel Gance made no mistake when he wrote in , just as he was finishing Napoleon: 'All legends, all mythology and all myths, all founders of religions and all religions themselves look forward to their Luminos resurrection, and the heroes are jostling at our doors to enter.' He further noted: 'Here we are, wondrously flashed-back into the time of the Egyptians.”

[Rafael de Campos]

"Ainda ontem morria-se por um brasão, uma imagem em um estandarte ou uma bandeira, mas a partir de agora morre-se para aperfeiçoar a nitidez de um filme, a guerra torna-se enfim a terceira dimensão do cinema"

[Leonard Houx · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first, I was all "OMG, THIS IS AMAZING!" Then I was all "meh."

[Gulliver's Bad Trip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guerra e cinema aqui não são parte de uma dialética mas são tratados como símiles. Nos dois ou três últimos séculos o desenvolvimento do primeiro se realimenta no, e faz parte do, desenvolvimento do segundo e vice-versa. Não há síntese, portanto, apenas a dissimulação de ambos na realidade. A guerra chegando no ponto dos conflitos mundiais e as assim chamadas 'cold wars' almeja não só o potencial de destruição da realidade mas da sua total substituição. No cinema, da mesma forma, a virtualização total provém da preocupação de se fazer 'reboots' e 'remakes' não apenas dos filmes dito 'históricos' entre outros mas, sim, inclusive, dos próprios eventos históricos. Fica implícito, infelizmente, que o cinema como a 'sétima arte' não passava de uma exceção ao invés da regra. Basta analisar o padrão blockbuster das últimas décadas para não haver mais dúvidas de como a propaganda permanece unânime mesmo que não mais com o mesmo formato ou, até mesmo, efetividade da sua inauguração feita for D. W. Griffith. Ao longo do texto, como é típico de Virilio, há várias menções 'cinéfilas' de filmes que vão desde a Era de Ouro hollywoodiana até os primeiros filmes europeus entre a Alemanha e a Itália. A maior parte deles já está em domínio público e acessível pela internet, hoje em dia.

[Mtume Gant · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s fascinating, because while Virilio makes some incredible connections between war and cinema, you can tell he’s limited by an analysis that seeks to detachment rather to an analysis, it causes him to miss very logical conclusions. How do you talk about war and not the response to it by those inflicted? He talks of states but never mentions imperialism? Not talk about how Guerrilla Warfare was a response to hyper visibility? There is just a nihilism in this text that does a disservice to what he very strong uncovers.

So my thoughts it’s check out the text but make sure you have a materialist methodology to sift through what becomes inert by Virilio’s approach.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Rest never comes for those transfigured in war. Their ghosts continue to haunt the screens."

This gets deep to where it briefly hints the history of the obsession of the light from the gun. A chemically reaction to put fear and trauma into our thoughts. Flash! History is war and cinema inspires the creation of fiction. And fiction is dreamt from the realities of war and evolves into new and brighter ways for a smarter terror, perfecting itself. Or maybe, just maybe the other way around.

[Miles Trujillo]

Lot to think about! It’s about the shared telos of military technology and cinematic storytelling. Both of them work to represent their object in a way that supersedes the enlightenment hegemony of linear time and space; it supplants the scientific method of cause and effect with the divine method of creation and formation of the earth, geometrically and topologically, to assert national will in the battle for imperial dominance.

[Daniel Binns · Rating 4 out of 5]

An at times bewildering but incredibly rewarding journey through the histories of weaponry and cinematic technologies. Virilio is now one of my favourite philosophers; at once a great conversationalist and accessible writer, but foremost a thinker on a higher plane, seeking not to confuse but rather to enlighten.

[Nathan Anderson]

3/5

[Giulio]

Nella versione italiana edita da "Lindau"
- Guerra e cinema. Logistica della percezione;

[Nat]

I'm trying to figure out how to untangle the cinematic mess that constitutes colossal war epics like The Longest Day, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Midway, and A Bridge Too Far. There's a ton of useful thoughts in here, which reads more like a commonplace book than a sustained argument. One helpful observation concerns the need for a "wholly simulated experience" from which to think about the complexities of modern battle (you can't just directly observe the skirmish like Barry Lyndon in the Seven Years' War). That leads to the control centers of, e.g., Sink the Bismarck!, Dr. Strangelove, Wargames and the satellite video feed of the SAS attack on the desert camp in Patriot Games and its continuing role in drone footage, where film/video becomes thematized as a military tool. But those colossal war epics are an attempt, I think, to give modern battle its due, representing it not just at the squad level, but showing commanders making operational decisions, code-breaking, reconnaissance, resistance fighters, battles in multiple towns, everything taking place across hundreds of miles, etc. etc. A whole history of combat is invoked by using tons of stars, each bringing a "combat record" of previous war movies and Westerns (Henry Fonda, John Wayne...). But these colossal war epics are pretty much universally failures as films--they're too long, you can't identify with any characters, and unless you know the history they come across as totally fragmented, and so on. But I'd like to try to argue that they fail as films because they're trying to capture something way beyond the experience of combat--they're aiming at an objective "view from nowhere", capturing a sample of all combatants and decision makers. Maybe Rashomon is the right precedent for understanding these movies (including why they're so boring).

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Virilio is a very interesting 'critic' (can't think of a better word for him at the moment) who in this particular book comments on the nature of war as some sort of film production - and you can see this happening on the news via CNN, etc.

I remember watching CNN when the U.S. dropped bombs in the first gulf war, and it was totally abstract. It was like watching an avant-garde film from the early 60's. And later when you have the computer imagery of what was happening but without the blood, pain, etc. It's really obscene. And that is one of the reasons why I don't watch TV anymore - and Virilio points out what I feel has actually some truth in it.

[Dipa Raditya · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a relationship between speed, power and perception. When war gives post traumatic perception about how the images work, this book gives a perspective about how to relate all the elements that shaped modern cinema. From camera technology to cinematography.

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely, mindblowingly perfect.
this book summarizes the obfuscation of my consciousness lately

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful discussion of the confluence and mutual constitution of war and cinema, in the form of logistics of perception or the distribution of sensibilities.

[j.knab · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd be in a position to give this book more stars if I were smarter.