The War on Film: Reanimating the Post-9/11 Viewer in the Prisoner, Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair

We have done nothing. ... Yes, you see that in camera. --Yunis Khatayer Abbas The war in Iraq, officially launched in March 2003, has become most filmed war in cinema's 114-year history. In its first six years, there have been news photos and footage, videorecordings of hostages and their executions, civilian-shot images, Army photos and images of air-strikes and other attacks, leaked photos and video-camera recordings of prisoner humiliation and abuse in Abu documentary films, and feature films. (1) The audience for those films about war, at least those shown at theatres or released on DVD, has been remarkably small. Even this paper's focus, documentary The Prisoner, Or: How Planned To Kill Tony Blair (2006-07) (2), although it followed directors' critically-acclaimed Gunner Palace (2005), saw limited release in United States and in Canada, only coming out on DVD in many cities; directors' third Iraq war documentary, Bulletproof Salesman (2008), has not yet even been picked up for distribution in North America. Not only did polls find that, two years after horrific photos were released, in the summer of 2006 ... a majority of respondents hadn't heard of Abu Ghraib, but in cineplexes or rental stores, given opportunities to see more of war ... American audiences appear markedly averse. (3) Critics have focussed on an American, even North American (Canadian soldiers have been in Afghanistan since 2002), audience that hasn't been willing to watch war through a film lens. But what if that is because they have been so used to watching war through a camera all along? SETTING THE STAGE: FROM FALLING TOWERS TO HUMAN PYRAMIDS Jeff Birnbaum, a company president and a former fire chief and emergency medical technician, remembers what saw on September 11, 2001 because of what he says seems almost like a 'videotape in my head': (4) The sight was amazing. was just totally awestruck. ... have seen plenty of death in my life, and burned bodies and so forth, but this was incredible. ... [Near South Tower,] stood there for a second in total awe, and then said, 'What F[uck]?' honestly thought it was Hollywood. Birnbaum later cried at images of death on TV, was plagued by nightmares, and talked to a priest at a counseling center. But his initial reaction was a kind of whoa! cool! sense of awe, and felt what saw did not just resemble a movie, but was a Then there is memory of Lakshman Achuthan, who escaped from Tower 1, reported in The New York Times next day: I looked over my shoulder and saw United Airlines plane coming. It came over Statute [sic] of Liberty. It was just like a movie. (5) The collapse of towers and killing of thousands may have been unthinkable, article's headline puts it, even unimaginable, but it was not, apparently, uncinematic. Cinema replaces imagination here, mind's eye and memory become cameras, and New York City is screen onto which a disaster- or war-film is projected. Movies provided precedent, especially three years earlier, when Armageddon (1998; dir. Michael Bay) showed meteors striking World Trade Center. And most people saw planes strike towers on TV, over and over, in slow-motion replays, on all kinds of networks (I first caught horrible news on MuchMusic). Bill Schaffer notes, Viewers around world found themselves cast in role of real-time witnesses with one Australian TV network miniaturizing moment of impact as a small animated icon permanently displayed in corner of screen, automatically resetting itself at end of each momentary cycle (6); did this repetition benumb viewers, creating a kind of atrocity boredom? Five years later, then, stage seemed largely set for a wide non-response to Abu Ghraib photographs. …

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