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
3 - ‘5,000 feet is the best’: Drone Warfare, Targets and Paul Virilio's ‘Accident’
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
5,000 feet is the best. I love it when we're sitting at 5,000 feet. You have more description, plus at 5,000 feet I mean, I can tell you what kind of shoes you're wearing from a mile away … There are very clear cameras on board…. I mean if someone sits down, let's say, on a cold surface for a while and then gets up, you'll still see the heat from that person for a long time. It kind of looks like a white blossom, just shining up into heaven. It's quite beautiful.
INTRODUCTION
The above are the words of the drone operator recorded in Omer Fast's short experimental drama documentary entitled 5,000 Feet Is the Best (2011) which premiered first at Venice Biennale in 2011. The words demonstrate the operator's extraordinary disavowal of the purpose of his mission – which is to kill. They also demonstrate the operator's apparent seduction by the beauty of the technology deployed – without giving it much thought what that beauty is connected to – namely death.
In the week of 7 November 2015 UK and US newspapers reported triumphantly that the ISIS ‘madman Jihadi John’ had been killed by a drone attack in Syria. ‘It looks like we smoked that son of a bitch’, asserted the New York Post (Steinbuch and Schram 2011), in a tone that even some of the Post's readers would have found uncomfortable.
Two days later the massacre in Paris took place – 130 innocent people were killed by ISIS terrorists. The juxtaposition of the two incidents – not directly linked but nonetheless connected – throws into sharp focus the issues at stake: the questionable morality of the use of a drone vis-à-vis the absolute immoral horror of innocent civilians slaughtered deliberately by Islamist fundamentalists in the heart of Europe. How does one even begin to process in an artistic way the horror of the times we live in?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Disappearing WarInterdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World, pp. 34 - 55Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017