Paul Virilio - War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception

This essay investigates the systematic use of cinema techniques in the conflicts of the twentieth century. It is an approach that has never been adopted before, or hardly ever. Yet the strategic and tactical necessities of cartography were known long ago, and in the line from the emergence of military photography in the American Civil War to todays video surveillance of the battlefield, the intensive use of film sequences in aerial reconnaissance was already developing during the First World War. The general staffs had no other means of regularly updating their picture of reality, as artillery constantly turned the terrain upside down and removed the topographical references crucial to the organization of battle.

On board an aeroplane, the cameras 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 After the Second World War, it became possible to sketch out a strategy of global vision, thanks to spy-satellites, drones and other video-missiles, and above all to the appearance of a new type of headquarters. The 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 armys 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.

Leaving aside the systematic use of simulators in preparations for land, sea and air missions, we should also mention the radical change in nuclear deterrence itself with the recent East-West disarmament initiatives. The gradual elimination of medium- and short-range theatre weapons, and their replacement by light, smart missiles such as the Midgetman, Stinger or Smart-Gun, are the harbingers of a final shift that will probably lead in turn to the disappearance of these latest weapons too. What will take their place will be directed-beam weapons using laser energy charged particles or electro-magnetic forces, which will function at the speed of light, after the fashion of the high-resolution cameras aboard military observation satellites.

When that stage is reached, probably at the end of the century, the deterrence strategy geared to nuclear weapons will give way to one based upon ubiquitous orbital vision of enemy territory: Rather 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. As 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 missiles expert system to reach its decision at the speed of electronic circuitry

With this assumption of cybernetics into the heavens, we seem to have moved far away from military cinematography Yet the innovation of eyeless vision is directly descended from the history of the line of aim. The 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. Significantly the word faith is no longer used in this context in contemporary French: the ideal line appears thoroughly objective, and the semantic loss involves a new obliviousness to the element of interpretative subjectivity that is always in play in the act of looking.

If we tried to write a history of this line of force, of this perceptual faith, it would have to take account of quite a few vicissitudes, particularly since the invention of photography in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by cinema, and then by videos, computer graphics and the active optics of the synthetic image.