Part of First Look 20/21
Saturday, July 31, 2021, 4:45 p.m.
Museum of the Moving Image - Bartos Screening Room

Dir. Eléonore Weber. France. 2020, 76 mins. Repurposing previously published infrared footage from American and French helicopter missions along the frontlines of the “global war on terror,” this hypnagogic essay film undertakes a deconstructionist phenomenology of the tactical gaze, simultaneously simulating and interrogating the perceptual and procedural conditions that govern real-life kill decisions. Measuring her critical perspective against the first-hand, operational perspective of unseen, unheard French pilot Pierre V., Weber lays bare the video-game logic of an ethics that shields the soldier and his masters alike from moral consequence. The degraded and diminished textures of these images constitute a literal fog of war, a visual representation of the structural ambiguities that permit imperialism. New York City premiere