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Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine (2003) is a video installation which analyses how what Farocki calls ‘the operational image’ reconfigures our visual regimes. The ‘operational image’ allows machines to operate ever more autonomously and to perform their tasks with no need for human supervision. Farocki links the birth of such operational images to the missiles with integrated cameras used during the Gulf War (1991) and therefore to military purposes. Eye/Machine poses a paradox: operational images generate a process of abstraction in which the image depicted (in the case of the war, the battlefield) gets detached from its indexical dimension, appearing as abstract and unreal. However, such detachment can be reversed when these images are recontextualised and reframed within an exhibition space, since that places them within a human experiential framework. Images, and our perception of them, are part of what Judith Butler calls the ‘extended materiality of war’. Thus, war is not only fought in the battlefield, but also at the level of the senses.
This book analyses British news media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It describes the analytical framework that serves as the basis for theoretically informed and systematic analysis of wartime media performance. The book synthesises a range of models, hypotheses and explanatory variables to set out a framework composed of three models of news media performance: the elite-driven model, the independent model and the oppositional model. It provides three case studies which, in different ways, illuminate each model of news media performance in wartime. The three case studies include the case of Jessica Lynch, the case of Ali Abbas and the case of the anti-war movement. The book then presents an account of how the relationship between foreign policy, news media and war might be expected to operate, based on current theoretical understanding. In order to place British coverage of the invasion in context, the book offers brief summaries of the structure and character of Britain's television news services and its press. The book provides an analysis of the ways in which the news media's visual depictions of the war reinforced supportive coverage. It is devoted to documenting and analysing evidence for negotiated and oppositional coverage. The book also examines the representation of civilian casualties, military casualties and humanitarian operations across both television and press, three subject areas that generated a good deal of media criticism.
Introduction In the first episode of the German television drama Charité (2017), two young nurses rush a patient through the corridors of the Charité hospital in Berlin alongside staff surgeon, Dr Emil Behring (Matthias Koeberlin). The year is 1888, and Behring has not yet formulated his Nobel Prize-winning diphtheria antitoxin, but even as a humbly trained military surgeon, his ego is
), he manages to contain the plague within the area by placing it under military quarantine, with ‘an armed man every two hundred meters’. Morata, a member of the local council and an associate of Zúñiga, appeals to the other members of the council (the Veinticuatro) by invoking the prestige of the city and a feud with another major Spanish port (Cádiz) as a reason to withhold information about the plague: ‘If we make this
Hastings, England during World War II – historian Siân Nicholas argued that the show was more relatable, and thus garnered a number of twenty-first-century viewers, because it appealed to the struggles of people on the British home front ( Nicholas, 2007 ). Instead of centring the story on the military and battles, it focuses on everyday people, inverting the traditional World War II narrative. Similarly, Harlots removes
feminocentric focus on their plights and achievements in a world hostile to women’s intellectual pursuits, it fails to understand Branwell’s illness in relation to how it affected him . Representing male mental illness within the context of and result of military service is the subject of Dan Ward’s chapter on the work of screenwriter Stephen Knight. Although separated by a century, the backstories of the male characters in Knight’s Taboo
in their plotting. Both have a military background: while Shelby and his brothers were among the many working-class conscripts in the Great War, Delaney was given over into the service of the East India Company as a cadet by his father at a young age. The most significant similarity Delaney shares with Tommy, as far as the concerns of this chapter extend, is that he has undergone traumatic experiences which leave him haunted, with Tom Hardy
the task ahead. At the front of the line (‘on point’, as Ted specifies in military nomenclature), Father Billy is smoking a cigarette without his hands as he keeps watch, evocative of soldiers in war films needing their hands for weapons and stability, but eager for the steadying and familiar effects of a smoke. Without looking behind him he raises his right arm silently, indicating for the line of priests/soldiers to halt. The camera follows Ted as he moves from the back of the line of crouching priests to the front, asking each man sotto voce if he's all right
‘realities’ of ongoing military campaigns. The Battle of the Somme (1916), famously, combined documentary footage with reconstructions of specific events for the purposes of cinematic entertainment. Small though the genre might be, given the long history of violent conflict as a subject for feature films the diversity of the genre is unsurprising. Indeed, war films struggle against their classification as
and her scant knowledge of the song’s lyrics point to this position. Leo is clearly recovering but a return to the village for good is not an option. Her recovery will be marked by a return to Madrid to start again on her own and a burgeoning relationship with Ángel, a man whose very name highlights his blended masculinity and femininity, as opposed to soldier ex-husband’s Paco, a nickname for Francisco, evoking the most notorious military man of all, General Francisco Franco. Almodóvar may be idealising La Mancha in general in this film, and female solidarity in