| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Radical Thinkers 4) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
One of the most original thinkers of our time. --Liberation
Product Description
A rich and suggestive analysis of military ways of seeing, revealing the convergence of perception and destruction in the parallel technologies of warfare and cinema.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is about the interrelated technological developments of war and cinema, how they have been driven by the military imperative of needing to represent the battlefield in order to make operational decisions.
The battlefield is a field of perception for the general and weapons are tools of perception. Nothing now distinguishes the function of the weapon and the function of the eye: observation and destruction develop at the same pace. The soldier's 'obscene gaze' patterns the chaos of vision in particular ways, orders everything. Yet this is done at a distance so that more often than not the enemy is invisible and all that is seen is the image; so there's a 'disintegration of the warrior's personality' - the pilot's experience is of being cocooned in the cockpit surrounded by displays. Nothing is real; battle is indistinguishable from training.
Virilio charts the osmosis between industrialised warfare and photography/cinema. The need to see a distant enemy spurred the research and development. He provides many interesting examples of common cinematographic techniques and how, in the early years, several directors and cameramen also worked in the military sphere. There was a need to record and film war and this process has been unstoppable, from aerial balloon photography to satellites. It is also a matter of a wider cultural spillover, however, for he refers to the picture palaces of the 1930s as cinema-cathedrals of the military state and to dictators as film directors. Above all, these changes over the past century have also changed the way we perceive the world, foreshortened and pre-ordered everything.
A fascinating book which makes one think. Full of little gems of information and observation.
The battlefield is a field of perception for the general and weapons are tools of perception. Nothing now distinguishes the function of the weapon and the function of the eye: observation and destruction develop at the same pace. The soldier's 'obscene gaze' patterns the chaos of vision in particular ways, orders everything. Yet this is done at a distance so that more often than not the enemy is invisible and all that is seen is the image; so there's a 'disintegration of the warrior's personality' - the pilot's experience is of being cocooned in the cockpit surrounded by displays. Nothing is real; battle is indistinguishable from training.
Virilio charts the osmosis between industrialised warfare and photography/cinema. The need to see a distant enemy spurred the research and development. He provides many interesting examples of common cinematographic techniques and how, in the early years, several directors and cameramen also worked in the military sphere. There was a need to record and film war and this process has been unstoppable, from aerial balloon photography to satellites. It is also a matter of a wider cultural spillover, however, for he refers to the picture palaces of the 1930s as cinema-cathedrals of the military state and to dictators as film directors. Above all, these changes over the past century have also changed the way we perceive the world, foreshortened and pre-ordered everything.
A fascinating book which makes one think. Full of little gems of information and observation.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
12 of 20 people found the following review helpful
a short parallel history of war and cinema
11 Oct 1997
Format:Paperback
War and Cinema, violence and spectacle. Hitler watching "Gone with the Wind" with Lenni Reifenstahl and Albert Speer. A brilliant study full of intuition on the development of war technologies in 20th century and the way they were influencing and influenced by vision and perception technologies.
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
