War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception - Tapa dura

From the synchroized camera/machine-buns on the biplanes of World War I to the laser satellites of "star wars", the technologies of cinema and warfare have developed a fatal interdependence. Hiroshima marked one conclusion of this process in the nuclear "flash", which penetrated the city's darkest recesses, etching the images of its victims on the walls. Since the disappearance of direct vision in battle and the replacement of one-to-one combat by the remote and murderous son et lumiere of trench warfare, military strategy has been dominated by the struggle between visibility and invisibility, surveillance and camouflage. Perception and destruction have now become co-terminous. Paul Virilio, a radical French critic of contemporary culture, explores these conjunctions from a range of perspectives. He gives a detailed technical history of weaponry, photography and cinematography, illuminating it with accounts of films and military campaigns. He examines in parallel the ideas of strategists and directors, along with the views on war and cinema of writers from Apolinaire to William Burroughs. And he finds further fruitful sources of reflection in the history of cinema architecture of the wartime popularity of striptease and the pin-up.