War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception by Paul Virilio

War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception Reviews

• 
  Jed

  Virilio is deeply schooled in the continental philosophical tradition, phenomenology in particular. Knowing this is important to why he approaches war as a sort of cinematic achievement. With the existence of the phenomena "bracketed" all we are left with is what we perceive of it. Cinema or television are how the overwhelming majority of us experience war and conflict in our era, very few have the entirely different experience which comes from the front lines. Since our experience of war is mediated through this form, an accurate understanding of what war is and has become must pay careful attention to this. War and Cinema is an attempt to do precisely that.
• 
  Stephanie Hubert

  Meh. Was expecting more for it to be about how war is represented in cinema, or how it influenced cinema, but it’s more the other way around. It’s about how cinema, film, and Hollywood played a part in the war. Read it in one sitting, but it was dreadful at parts, and the structure was all over the place. At one point we are talking about the lumière brothers, and then we jump to Kubrick’s film. I found the time jumps between sentences to be confusing. If the book would have been one linear chronological path, I think it would have been a better reading experience.
• 
  Michael A.

  Deftly and convincingly argues that photography/cinema influenced war and vice versa, which in turn distorted our perception into delirium.
  
  "There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception - that is to say stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects. A well-known example is the Stuka or Junker 87, the German dive-bomber of WW2 that swept down on its target with a piercing screech designed to terrorize and paralyse the enemy. It was completely successful in this aim until the forces on the ground eventually grew used to it."
  
  "For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye .... war is cinema and cinema is war."
  
• 
  Jacob

  I loved Virilio's damning take on Hiroshima as the ultimate film, but I don't recall the book offering anything particularly conclusive as I don't consider the mutual development of technologies as presented in the text to be a proof of anything. I will say that I favored the sections that showed how cinema influenced war more than the sections on how war influenced cinema as they seemed to examine an ideational rather than a technical impact (granted the latter has ideational implications, the former came across as an analysis of an analysis which proved doubly engaging). Overall the information is interesting and so is how Virilio looks at everything, but it doesn't seem to make a definitive point.
• 
  Lewis Manalo

  This books tracks the parallels between the evolution of cinema with the development of warfare technologies. The first movie camera was based off of the technology of the Gatling gun, and today, with more unmanned drones being manufactured than piloted planes, combat has become more video game than war game.
  
  This book isn't that up to date with current technologies, but the evolution of the way we see is already there in the text. WAR AND CINEMA is definitely more film theory than the reader of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is looking for, but if you're into cinema/media studies or psychology, this book is quite enlightening.
• 
  Scot

  A fantastic look at the pairing between war and cinema and how the two feed upon one another. This is one of those books that you could read and study and go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole critically examining all that you know on each topic and uncovering greater and greater links between the two. I found myself stopping between chapters to watch old silent movies or talkies that I have missed to get a better understanding of what Virilio was so masterfully revealing to the reader. I doubt that there are many modern day philosophers and thinkers that are this versed in both popular culture, what we can glean from it, and who sound such an important alarm as to a need to change the direction we are devolving. I can't recommend the Virilio canon enough and would recommend this one as an early read in your run if you are fascinated by either war or cinema.
• 
  Karl Hallbjörnsson

  Read earlier this year. I don't care very much for this kind of text—constant namedropping and a non-linear argument make for a poor reading experience. I felt like I was being bombarded with film titles and names I don't recognize or care for. I can see how the connection between the cinematic broadly construed and warfare is an important one to acknowledge and explore. But this kind of book isn't my cup of tea, I guess.
• 
  Daniel Binns

  An at times bewildering but incredibly rewarding journey through the histories of weaponry and cinematic technologies. Virilio is now one of my favourite philosophers; at once a great conversationalist and accessible writer, but foremost a thinker on a higher plane, seeking not to confuse but rather to enlighten.
• 
  Jessica Zu

  Only read assigned chapters. Reading as essays, I enjoy them. Reading as academic research, it sucks.
• 
  Peter

  my favorite book that I’ve read by virillo thus far. his subjects are always interesting, but for me he struggles with making coherent points. this book was certainly the clearest. he makes interesting connections between camera technology and warfare - of particular interest are his connections between war and the movie industry
• 
  Nathan Anderson

  3/5
• 
  Nat

  I'm trying to figure out how to untangle the cinematic mess that constitutes colossal war epics like The Longest Day, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Midway, and A Bridge Too Far. There's a ton of useful thoughts in here, which reads more like a commonplace book than a sustained argument. One helpful observation concerns the need for a "wholly simulated experience" from which to think about the complexities of modern battle (you can't just directly observe the skirmish like Barry Lyndon in the Seven Years' War). That leads to the control centers of, e.g., Sink the Bismarck!, Dr. Strangelove, Wargames and the satellite video feed of the SAS attack on the desert camp in Patriot Games and its continuing role in drone footage, where film/video becomes thematized as a military tool. But those colossal war epics are an attempt, I think, to give modern battle its due, representing it not just at the squad level, but showing commanders making operational decisions, code-breaking, reconnaissance, resistance fighters, battles in multiple towns, everything taking place across hundreds of miles, etc. etc. A whole history of combat is invoked by using tons of stars, each bringing a "combat record" of previous war movies and Westerns (Henry Fonda, John Wayne...). But these colossal war epics are pretty much universally failures as films--they're too long, you can't identify with any characters, and unless you know the history they come across as totally fragmented, and so on. But I'd like to try to argue that they fail as films because they're trying to capture something way beyond the experience of combat--they're aiming at an objective "view from nowhere", capturing a sample of all combatants and decision makers. Maybe Rashomon is the right precedent for understanding these movies (including why they're so boring).
• 
  Aung Sett Kyaw Min

  the supply of bullets must be supplemented by the supply of images (the logistics of perception). according to virilio, war reaches its height in the functional and the phenomenological convergence or the "fateful confusion" of eye and weapon, best exemplified by the infrared laser aided missile tech in which the missile is literally guided by the pilot's gaze.
  there is also a co-incidence of war and cinema, as cinematic sensibility has increasingly come to substitute regular perception since the invention of photography, for the very simple reason that our ordinary faculties of perception can no longer keep up with the dizzying speed of war. warriors have no choice but to live war AS cinema.
  the advent of nuclear weapons threatens to close the world off as a total cinema unto itself, so that no only soldiers who are fighting at the front-lines but also non combatants and civilians become spectators in their own right.
  with speed (instantaneous communications technologies) comes the annihilation of spatial and temporal distance.
  
  content wise, the first two chapters didn't really work for me. virilio's theoretical observations really start to pick up pace starting from chapter 4, though he could have done a better job drawing all the threads together at the end of each chapter instead of leaving his pithy observations suspended in a space of disjointedness.
• 
  Tosh

  Paul Virilio is a very interesting 'critic' (can't think of a better word for him at the moment) who in this particular book comments on the nature of war as some sort of film production - and you can see this happening on the news via CNN, etc.
  
  I remember watching CNN when the U.S. dropped bombs in the first gulf war, and it was totally abstract. It was like watching an avant-garde film from the early 60's. And later when you have the computer imagery of what was happening but without the blood, pain, etc. It's really obscene. And that is one of the reasons why I don't watch TV anymore - and Virilio points out what I feel has actually some truth in it.
• 
  Dipa Raditya

  There's a relationship between speed, power and perception. When war gives post traumatic perception about how the images work, this book gives a perspective about how to relate all the elements that shaped modern cinema. From camera technology to cinematography.
• 
  Leonard Houx

  At first, I was all "OMG, THIS IS AMAZING!" Then I was all "meh."
• 
  david

  absolutely, mindblowingly perfect.
  this book summarizes the obfuscation of my consciousness lately
• 
  Steen Ledet

  Wonderful discussion of the confluence and mutual constitution of war and cinema, in the form of logistics of perception or the distribution of sensibilities.
• 
  j.knab

  I'd be in a position to give this book more stars if I were smarter.
• 
  Julian

  so much fun
  
  non-dromomaniacs beware
• 
  Julien L

  Interesting for the parallels of development between war and film technologies, useful as a theoretical framework for approaching military thought in social reality. How is our image of war and everyday life as a kind of war mediated through the medium of film is the kind of question this book seeks to ask. Of course, like all french philosophers, the prose is 40% incomprehensible gibberish but the concept of mediating conflict through the moving image is an interesting one.