Firepower: Herzog's Pure Cinema as the Internal Combustion of War
2006; Issue: 68 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoI. At the ostensible conclusion of 1991's Operation Desert Storm, the US's intangible, informational combat mission which time has only recently designated Gulf War I, CNN's real-time coverage of the events made a constant spectacle of the blazing infernos that were laying waste to as many as 500 Kuwaiti oil fields. In an interview the making of his cine-essay Lessons of Darkness (1992), Werner Herzog notes that CNN's coverage of the fires over-saturated public consciousness and disempowered the disaster. Psychic effects rendered fleeting, momentary, and soon enough forgotten, their consistently tabloid depiction saw television viewers become dangerously inured to the war's horrific images of environmental devastation. (1) Struck as much by the grandiosity of the fires as he was by the public's inert reaction, Herzog set out not only to record this momentous event for the memory of mankind, but also to stylize it in a way that would challenge the viewer to revision this war, all war, and how is represented. (2) Grounded in a rhetoric of cool meditative reserve, Herzog's resultant cine-essay depicts the invasion of Kuwait in a future tense, as a wound to burst rather than one already healed up and scarred over. Through an ironic quasi-documentary style which situates the landscape and its natural resources as the subject and object of military aggression, Lessons of Darkness argues for the environment as the cause of combat and its most overlooked victim. Important to note is that the film is not about Kuwait in 1991; Lessons of Darkness decidedly conceals the invasion within the conceit of a science-fictional document, one that pretends to be an objective account of an unnamed planet's apocalyptic finale. Herzog's film is as radical and iconoclastic an essay as Theodor Adorno imagined the form could possibly be. Neither fact nor fiction, document or narrative, the film obeys only its own internal logic, and so is inherently, insistently, self-reflexive. The tension of Lessons of Darkness is grounded not only in the damning subtlety of its argumentation, but also in its conscious refusal to identify, first, its Desert Storm context, and second, to concede to any model of generic classification beyond a typically Herzogian topographical resistance. Firepower is a structuring metaphor that can be simultaneously drawn out of Lessons of Darkness and also used to frame the film. The duplicity of firepower, the weaponry of the visual, is a fruitful way to conceptualize the crisis of representation implicit in any cinematic critique of war, wherein the aesthetic, rhetorical, and strategic distinctions between subject and object, theme and theory, shooter, shot, and stock are ultimately collapsed. Drawing upon Theodor Adorno's thoughts on the essay form, Lessons of Darkness is regarded here as a cinematic essay, one that situates Herzog both in direct opposition to the idea of firepower and as its most engaging practitioner. In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Paul Virilio articulates what this paper understands as Firepower: To fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to captivate him. (3) The complexity of all this, however, is that Virilio's subtle phrase applies not only to Desert Storm, Iraqi forces, and CNN, and but also to Herzog's contentious Lessons of Darkness, a film as spectacular and incendiary as the it sets out to challenge. Iraqi soldiers retreating from Kuwait used fire to wage ecological warfare and thus sabotage the enemy's resource-based economy, but also as a spectacle, a visual weapon with which to batter the psyches of the opposition. According to Virilio, war can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle ... the force of arms is not brute force but spiritual force. (4) While the coalition forces relied on a touchless, groundless, informational war, automated electronically and from afar, fire-as-power was Iraq's mode of spectacular violence and a last-ditch gesture of aggression. …
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