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Disappearing War
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World
Edited by Christina Hellmich and Lisa Purse
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Book Presentation:
Illuminates the extent to which people, images and experiences are erased from cultural representations of contemporary warfare
The battles fought in the name of the ‘war on terror’ have re-ignited questions about the changing nature of war, and the experience of war for those geographically distant from its real world consequences. What is missing from our highly mediated experience of war? What are the intentional and unintentional processes of erasure through which the distortion happens? What are their consequences?
Cinema is a key site at which questions about our highly mediated experience of war can be addressed or, more significantly, elided. Looking at a range of films that have provoked debate, from award-winning features like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper, to documentaries like Kill List and Dirty Wars, as well as at the work of visual artists like Harun Farocki and Omer Fast, this book examines the practices of erasure in the cinematic representation of recent military interventions. Drawing on representations of war-related death, dying and bodily damage, this provocative collection addresses ‘what’s missing’ in existing scholarly responses to modern warfare; in film studies, as well as in politics and international relations.
Contributors
• Jessica Auchter, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
• Robert Burgoyne, University of St Andrews
• Shohini Chaudhuri, University of Essex
• Cora Sol Goldstein, California State University, Long Beach
• Thomas Gregory, University of Auckland
• Janet Harris, award-winning documentary producer/director
• James Harvey-Davitt, Anglia Ruskin University and University of Greenwich
• Christina Hellmich, University of Reading
• Agnieszka Piotrowska, award-winning documentary filmmaker and theorist
• Lisa Purse, University of Reading
About the authors:
Christina Hellmich is Associate Professor in IR & Middle East Studies at the University of ReadingDr Lisa Purse is Associate Professor in Film in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading.
Press Reviews:
From mainstream news coverage of conflict to the use of close-ups in The Master this searching edited collection explores the dialectic between the seen and the unseen in the contemporary war film. The contributors tackle the question of whether the myriad changes to war and the representation of war – via embedded reporting, drones, virtual reality and so on – constitute a deep ideological erasure. Their insights are intellectually and ethically illuminating and advance our understanding of the cultural imagination of war in important ways.– Guy Westwell, QMUL
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> From the same authors:
Action Cinema Since 2000 (2024)
Dir. Chris Holmlund, Lisa Purse and Yvonne Tasker
Mediating War and Identity (2020)
Figures of Transgression in 20th- and 21st-century War Representation
Dir. Lisa Purse and Ute Wölfel
> On a related topic:
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