Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation

Abstract

With constant stream of films about Vietnam War in 1970s and 1980s, films which attracted millions of viewers world over and seemed to give new significance to cinema as a public space for collective memory, it soon became obvious that war film genre had finally exhausted its critical potential. It has been argued in relation to films concerned with history that the sheer mass of historical images transmitted by today's media weakens link between public memory and personal experience. The past is in danger of becoming a rapidly expanding collection of images, easily retrievable but isolated from time and space. .. .' This tendency of photographic image to become isolated and through reproduction, variation, and unlimited dissemination ever more abstract, has been observed earlier (Bazin, Benjamin, Jiinger), and is a precondition for final disappearance of binary division between war films and anti-war films. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Gallipoli, and other films with an alleged anti-war commitment can be seen with equal justification as examples of a fascination with images of modem warriors, war technology, death, killing, and mass destruction. With end of a dear moral divide in war film genre, theses propounding a dose structural relationship between war and film have became popular. Paul Virilio, for example, argues that war and cinema are linked by a structural