Documenting Virtual War

This paper draws upon contemporary studies of military imaging to illustrate the shift in the execution of warfare from embodied human interaction toward the virtualising distanciation of technological mediation and remotely-operated, networked warfare. Considering the viability of a range of documentary forms for evidentially capturing this evolution, the author argues that the cinema vérité mode which dominated filmmakers’ responses to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – with its grounding in subjective, embodied experience – fails to engage with the wider technological context and perhaps problematically validates an unchanging, realist vision of war contrary to virtualising trends. Conversely, it is contended that the proliferation of hybrid documentary/fiction modes may constitute a creative adaptation to digital mediations of war, as exemplified by the formal and intermedial innovations of Redacted. Finally, two documentaries that specifically engage with military simulations – Tony Gerber/Jesse Moss’ Full Battle Rattle (2008) and Harun Farocki’s Serious Games (2009-10) – are extensively analysed in terms of their diegetic and formal contributions to documenting the technological virtualisation of war.