Lens and Barrel

In Paul Virilio's book, War and Cinema, he talks about the similarities between cinema and war--how in the 20th century they both were made into spectacles.

One of his points that changed the way that I thought about war and diazotization was his mention of Mussolini's son's account of bombing a group of Abyssinian Galla tribesmen. He describes the changing of images: a group of men to the "flowering rose" of the explosion with almost more distance than with which we may watch a movie. To quote from page 19, "one form suddenly dissolves before the war pilot's eyes, and in an extraordinary fade-out/fade-in another form appears and reconstitutes itself." I thought that this distanceing-in-war-through-comparision-to-entertainment was only as old as video games. It appears that I was mistaken.

(A note about the picture. I took it on Palm Sunday 2005 at a demonstration at Bethlehem Checkpoint against Israeli restrictions of Palestinian entry to Jerusalem. West Bank Palestinians need a permit to go to the holy city but this permit is only issued for medical reasons, almost never for religious ones.)