DAI 227: Virilio Summary

Christopher Diaz-Mihell

David Cox, DAI 227

A summary of: “A Traveling Shot over Eighty Years” a chapter from “War and                                                                                                     

                             Cinema,” written by Paul Virilio.

            In this final chapter, Virilio re-introduces what he called a fusion of perception and warfare. He begins by bringing forth the use of searchlights in the Russian-Japanese battle of Port Arthur in 1904, describing those searchlights as war’s first projectors. From those searchlights on, Virilio describes the ever-growing pace of the development of observation and destruction.  Ultimately meeting one another to create the disaster at Hiroshima, which Virilio describes as a “flash, which literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became the war’s recording surface, its film” (Virilio, 70).

            Virilio continues on to later mention the wide variety of invisible weapons developed by the military to make things visible. For instance we saw the creation of radar picture. Virilio writes, “in the wars of old, strategy mainly consisted in choosing and marking out a theatre of operations, a battlefield, with the best visual conditions and the greatest scope for movement. In the Great War, however, the main task was to grasp the opposite tendency: to narrow down targets and to create a picture of battle for troops blinded by the massive reach of artillery units, themselves firing blind, and by the ceaseless upheaval of their environment” (Virilio, 70). Therefore we began to see the surveying of land and its wartime features, such as trenches, moving front lines, shell shock, and even the destruction of landmarks, all of which “impeded vision in one way or another,” and all of which lead to the usage of aerial photography.

            In conlusion you can see how closely related Virilio’s points are to our present time issue with War on Terror. Terrorism and its unseen threat is truly what tends to scare the most of us, very possibly being the reason the U.S. has turned towards increased levels of secrecy and spying.