War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception by Paul Virilio

Author:Paul Virilio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media Studies, Performing Arts
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Imposture of Immediacy

Once the optical telegraph came into operation in 1794, the remotest battlefield could have an almost immediate impact on a country’s internal life, turning upside down its social, political and economic field. The instantaneity of action over a distance was already an accomplished fact. Since then, as many people have noted, geographical space has been shrinking with every advance in speed, and strategic location has lost importance as ballistic systems have become more widespread and sophisticated. This technological development has carried us into a realm of factitious topology in which all the surfaces of the globe are directly present to one another.60

After the war of movement of mechanized forces, the time came for a strategy of Brownian movement, a geostrategic homogenization announced at the end of the last century in Mackinder’s theory of the single ‘World Island’ into which various continents arc supposedly contracting. (One is reminded of the w'ar in the Malvinas, whose remoteness did not dampen the British ardour for Antarctic contraction.) With the great universal or colonial exhibitions, it was no longer necessary for people to travel to distant lands; the faraway could be presented to them as such, on the spot, in the form of more or less obsolescent scale models. The transport revolution made itself felt less in the desire for exoticism than in a new endogeny. In breaking open one’s normal surroundings through a lightening trip to dreamlands, one could conjure away the trip and not even know one was travelling.

The Disney Corporation (which the French have consulted for the ghostly Universal Exhibition of 1989) took over the idea for Disneyland and then for EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype of the Community of Tomorrow). Walt Disney, speaking on 15 November 1965 at a memorable press conference held in the great lounge of Orlando’s Cherry Plaza, described EPCOT as ‘a new town of revolutionary design where we will try to solve the communication ami environmental problems posed for inhabitants of the cities of the future’. Disney died suddenly thirteen months later, after the bulldozers had begun work on the eleven thousand hectares of Florida swampland purchased in l964, an area larger than that of San Francisco.

It is significant that Disney 's successors decided to solve the ‘communication problems’ of the city of the future by erecting the ‘Showcase of the World’. Here past, present and future are telescoped together, and the five continents, represented by assorted visual relics of monuments and real objects, lie overlapping on the narrow shoreline of an artificial lake. The buildings and the perfectly copied cars and trains are a fifth of the normal size — a scaling down that Disney saw as the essence of dream creation — and ‘cinema knowledge’ here repeats the strategist’s negation of dimensions.

When the offer of a trip ‘Around the World in Eighty Minutes’ shone in lights outside cinemas in the thirties, it was already clear that film was superimposing itself on a geostrategy which for a century or more had inexorably been

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.