War and cinema emerged together in the twentieth century not as separate phenomena but as fundamentally intertwined technologies of perception and control. Cinema did not simply document warfare. Visual technologies became weapons systems, and military requirements shaped cinematic form. Understanding modern conflict requires grasping how cinema and war function according to shared logics.
Paul Virilio’s analysis establishes that military force has always depended more on deception and psychological mystification than physical violence alone. Sun Tzu’s ancient principle that “military force is based upon deception” reveals warfare’s essential character. What changed in the twentieth century was the technological capacity to systematically manipulate perception through visual media.
The logistics of perception
Logistics of perception names the systematic organisation of visual information for military purposes. Just as armies require ammunition supplies, modern warfare demands continuous flows of images. Aerial reconnaissance during the First World War established this paradigm when cameras mounted on aircraft provided essential intelligence.
Photography transformed battlefields from spaces commanders could observe directly into territories requiring mediated representation. Artillery had made terrain unpredictable. Direct observation became impossible. Photographs and later film became necessary for understanding what was actually occurring across vast mechanised battlefields.
The logistics of perception operates through supply lines of images parallel to material supply chains. Intelligence gathering, photographic processing, image interpretation and distribution to command centres constitute infrastructure as essential as roads or railways. Without continuous visual information flows, modern military operations cannot function.
Derealization and technological mediation
Derealization describes how technological systems progressively distance combatants from direct experience of warfare. What begins as physical combat between visible opponents becomes abstraction mediated by screens, instruments and electronic systems.
Ernst Jünger provided crucial testimony about industrial warfare’s derealization effect. He described feeling alienated from his own body during artillery bombardment, as if viewing himself through binoculars. The landscape became transparent like glass. This psychological state intensified with each technological innovation.
Pilots experienced spatial disorientation so profound they could swear they were banking at extreme angles whilst flying level. The weightlessness Jünger felt during First World War artillery reproduced itself through technological vertigo. Combatants became imprisoned in electronics’ closed circuits, suffering possession analogous to primitive warfare’s hallucinatory states.
Cinema both documents and produces this derealization. Film represents warfare through fragmentation and montage that mirror actual combat experience under technological conditions. Simultaneously, cinema trains populations to experience reality through technological mediation, preparing them psychologically for modern warfare’s abstracted character.
Cinema as weapons system
Cinema crossed from propaganda tool into weapons system category once visual technologies could create psychological effects rivalling physical destruction. Colour film became explicitly militarised during the Second World War. Goebbels recognised that American Technicolor possessed superior psychological power, motivating Nazi investment in improving Agfacolor stock.
The Wehrmacht attached cameramen to each platoon. These Propaganda Companies coordinated film, army operations and propaganda into unified systems. Events hundreds of kilometres distant in enemy territory became radio news the following day. Genuine newsreel footage provided basis for films designed to sow terror and demonstrate military superiority.
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will exemplified cinema’s full integration into military power. The 1934 Nuremberg congress was staged entirely for the film. Everything was decided by reference to camera requirements. The event existed to be filmed rather than the film documenting an event.
Nazi architect Albert Speer understood cinema’s relationship to architecture and warfare. His theory of the value of ruins proposed designing buildings anticipating their destruction. This cinematic thinking recognised that structures exist to be seen in various states including ruination. Speer’s searchlight architecture for Nuremberg rallies became dress rehearsal for bombardment’s theatre.
The camera obscura as military architecture
Camera obscura as military architecture traces how fortifications and bunkers function as optical instruments. Medieval fortress design positioned defenders to observe whilst remaining concealed. Narrow vents allowed sight whilst protecting observers.
The camera obscura principle structures military vision. Enclosed spaces with limited apertures control what can be seen and from where. This architectural logic prefigures cinematic framing and perspective. Both operate through selective visibility and calculated concealment.
Nineteenth-century developments in ballistics and aerial observation transformed this relationship. Reconnaissance balloons made traditional fortifications visible from above. Armies responded by burying strongholds underground. The invisible camera obscura became deaf and blind, dependent on perception logistics and electrical communication.
Command centres during the Second World War resembled huge theatre halls. Inner walls became screens covered with gridded maps whose ceaseless animation logged troop movements. The war room received endless information from scattered points, radiating commands into defined operational universes. This transformed military command into cinematic practice of editing distributed images into coherent narratives.
Aerial perspective and reconnaissance
Aviation fundamentally altered military perception. Reconnaissance aircraft provided perspectives impossible from ground level. The landscape below appeared as objects under glass in a museum. Pilots became “icy scientists” conducting laboratory experiments on war.
Aerial photography revealed enemy movements invisible to ground observers. Yet military command often refused to trust vertical panoramic vision over horizontal perspectival vision. French high command dismissed Lieutenant Chery’s 1940 reconnaissance reports of German armoured divisions, leading directly to catastrophic defeat.
This conflict between perspectives reveals profound tensions in how military institutions process visual information. Direct human observation carries authority that photographic evidence struggles to displace, despite photographs’ superior informational content. Cinema and aerial reconnaissance share this problem of persuading audiences to trust mediated vision over direct experience.
Electronic warfare and automated vision
Radar represented culmination of making the invisible visible. Watson-Watt’s electromagnetic screening created an invisible barrier in the atmosphere. Aircraft appeared as luminous blobs on darkened screens. What occurred in photographic darkrooms now happened in skies above England.
Electronic systems progressively replaced human perception with automated detection. Night vision, thermal imaging, and satellite reconnaissance transcended traditional optical limitations. Darkness, distance, and natural obstacles became transparent to technological vision.
The confusion of eye and weapon marks warfare’s contemporary character. Laser-guided missiles, infrared homing systems, and video-equipped projectiles integrate optical sensors with explosive ordnance. Seeing a target and destroying it become unified technological operations.
Smart weapons employ cameras transmitting observations to pilots and ground controllers. Nothing distinguishes weapon and eye functions. The projectile image and image’s projectile form single composites. Old ballistic projection succeeded by light projection, where guided missiles’ electronic eyes create life-size film projection.
Simulation and training
Military simulation evolved from traditional manoeuvres to large-scale electronic games. Flight simulators enabled continuous combat training using synthetic imagery indistinguishable from actual operations. Pilots trained not on aircraft instruments but on image sequences.
The Nevada Desert Red Flag exercise simulates exposure to Soviet defence systems using authentic equipment. Mojave Desert facilities employ laser engagement systems where weapons project infrared rays with ballistic characteristics approximating real ammunition. Microprocessors calculate impacts and communicate results to headquarters.
Video disc technology enables tank pilots to train in digitised urban environments. By manipulating playback, operators navigate street combat scenarios without leaving training facilities. Simulation has replaced traditional preparation, creating military practice where electronic models precede and shape actual operations.
This represents cinema’s absorption into military infrastructure. War becomes preparation for war becomes simulation becomes indistinguishable from entertainment. The technologies developed for military training migrate into consumer markets whilst entertainment technologies inform military applications.
The star system and military logistics
Cinema’s star system emerged directly from military conditions. Before 1914, film actors remained anonymous. After warfare encounters with military technology, cinema created stars precisely when optical illusion confused with survival illusion.
The pin-up emerged during wartime as idealised body disconnected from natural dimensions. Stars’ images could be expanded like screens or folded like posters. Marilyn Monroe, discovered by US Army photographer during Korean War, embodied this logic. Her power lay in pictures always in exile from immediate natural dimensions.
This system served military functions beyond morale. It created standardised, reproducible human types serving industrial requirements. Stars became “fellow-creatures” rather than individual humans. They surrendered real traits to become inorganic individuals whose private lives were contractually constrained.
Total war and continuous performance
Total war eliminated distinctions between military and civilian zones, combatants and non-combatants. War became continuous performance operating day and night with no rest. This transformed civilian populations into spectator-survivors of permanent conflict.
Strategic bombing brought war home to cities. Air-raid alert systems created situations where millions simultaneously experienced danger through radio warnings. Without space to retreat, populations’ only protection was time given by advance notice. The Allied air assault became spectacular son-et-lumière, atmospheric projection designed to confuse populations.
Nuclear deterrence extended this logic absolutely. Frontiers now pass through city centres. Streets become permanent film sets for cameras documenting global civil war. American television broadcasts war footage continuously without script or comment, presenting raw material of vision.
The commercialisation of audiovisual technology destroyed cinema’s capacity to shape society through unified vision. The collective spectator fragmented into millions of individual consumers. Cinema lost its initiatory value as communal experience. With neutron bombs threatening civilian populations directly, even urban hostages lost strategic value.
Political implications
The convergence of cinema and warfare poses severe challenges for democratic politics and human agency. When military operations occur through remote sensing and automated systems, traditional accountability mechanisms fail.
Decision-making increasingly operates through technological mediation that introduces its own distortions. Photo interpreters’ evaluations contradict ground personnel observations. Pilots die improving film sharpness rather than achieving strategic objectives. The confusion between image and reality becomes absolute.
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative announced in 1983 proposed extending warfare into space through automated systems operating beyond human temporal and spatial scales. This represents culmination of technological militarisation where traditional strategy becomes obsolete.
Understanding contemporary conflict requires recognising that wars are fought not primarily through physical violence but through control of perception. The appropriation of perceptual fields, management of spectacle, and psychological shock of images constitute actual battlefields. Cinema emerged from warfare’s requirements for perceiving and controlling territory through visual mediation.
Connections to psychopolitics
The relationship between war cinema and psychopolitics operates at multiple levels. Both involve systematic exploitation of psychological and perceptual capacities. Military propaganda shaped populations for warfare. Contemporary psychopolitics shapes subjects for capitalist production.
The techniques developed for military purposes migrate into civilian control mechanisms. Surveillance systems, tracking technologies, and behavioural prediction all descend from military applications. The digital unconscious enabled by Big Data analytics employs methods perfected through aerial reconnaissance and signals intelligence.
Cinema’s capacity to create unified audience experience served military mobilisation. Its fragmentation into individualised consumption reflects neoliberal transformation of collective subjects into isolated consumers. Understanding these parallel developments illuminates how technologies of control operate across military and economic domains.