www.open.ac.uk/ccig/
CCIG Workshop, War & Visuality - 10 & 11 June 2010
Abstracts
Roland Bleiker (Queensland) bleiker@uq.edu.au
‘Visualizing War: Politics Between Image and Text’
The relationship between visual images and war is both significant and complex. Politicians are
acutely aware of this ever since shocking images of the Vietnam War had devastating effects on
domestic and international support for US foreign policy. But images can also play a key role in
rallying people, or the international community in general, behind particular actions. This is, for
instance, why the UN Secretary General urged photojournalists to produce more images of the
crisis in Darfur: to draw public attention to the urgent need for political action. Recent
technological developments have further intensified this process. The visual is meanwhile a
battle field itself, with various parties - from states to international organizations and terrorist
groups - employing old and new media sources to win the hearts and minds of target
populations.
The purpose of this paper is to engage some of the scholarly challenges associated with
understanding these complex relationships between visuality and war. What methods do we use
to read and interpret images and the often multiple messages they convey? How exactly do
images, and the emotions they engender, shape individual viewers, groups and policy debates?
How can we assess these influences in a way that provides us with reliable, perhaps even
empirically measurable information? And how do we, in a more general sense, translate visual
data into verbal expressions that can provide meaningful insight and form the base of scholarly
discussions and policy deliberations.
Suzzanah Biernoff (Birkbeck College) s.biernoff@bbk.ac.uk
‘The averted gaze: facial injury in WWI Britain’
The horror of facial mutilation was evoked in journalism, poems, memoirs and fiction
during the Great War. This paper explores civilian, aesthetic and medico-military
responses to facial injury, using Francis Derwent Wood’s portrait masks as a point of
departure. Wood is best known for his war memorials, but he was also responsible for the
Masks for Facial Disfigurements Department at the 3rd London General Hospital in
Wandsworth, and published his work in the Lancet. Surprisingly little has been written
about this historical example of ‘sci-art’ collaboration, although it certainly captured the
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imagination of contemporary journalists. ‘Magical results are being achieved,’ reported
The Times in August 1916, ‘by the provision of masks perfectly counterfeiting the lost
section of the physiognomy.’ The aim of the paper is to place Wood’s work in its cultural
context, and to explore the role of art and artifice in the reconstruction of identity and
‘humanity’.
Nicholas Harrison (King’s College London) nicholas.harrison@kcl.ac.uk
‘Yesterday's mujahiddin: Sources of Islamic inspiration in Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers’
Since it was first screened in 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers has prompted fierce
hostility and deep admiration among widely divergent audiences, including (it seems) the CIA and
various terrorist organizations. This paper will launch off from negative reactions to the film
expressed in May 2004 in the influential cinema journal Cahiers du cinéma, whose critics seemed
particularly worried by the film's treatment of religion and the possible inspiration it might provide
to today's Islamists, in Algeria and beyond. The paper will examine closely the film's allusions to
Islam – allusions that, as the Cahiers critics noted, have been invisible to many audiences, yet to
others may seem incendiary – explaining them by reference to historical sources and to a recent
interview with the film's producer and star, Saadi Yacef. In this way, questions emerge about the
uses to which Islamic energies were put by the FLN (Front de libération nationale) at the time of
the Algerian war of independence, as well as about the role of the film in capturing that material.
Andrew Hill (The Open University) a.hill@open.ac.uk
‘War & Beauty’
What can beauty tell us about war? Beauty is a category that figures as marginal to
contemporary conceptions of war and conflict. This paper scrutinises how the ways beauty
functions and beauty’s effects serve to illuminate war. The paper scrutinises beauty’s role as
casus belli, beauty’s status as a target or lure, and beauty’s capacity to offer a means of defence
and source of protection. In so doing a range of conflicts are surveyed including World Wars I &
II, the War on Terror and the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Sebastian Kaempf (The University of Queensland) s.kaempf@uq.edu.au
‘Waging War in the New Media Age’
By the 21st Century, the emergence of new media technology has fundamentally started to
transform not only the means through which contemporary war is being waged but also war's
visual representation.
Contemporary war has a new frontline, one where war is no longer fought physically but virtually
and where the actors involved on both sides have replaced bombs and bullets with weapons in
the form of bites and bandwidths.
This paper investigates these changes in the
military-media-entertainment industries and their ethical implications for the 'War on Terror'. In
particular, the paper examines the growing use of digital images and internet videos as strategic
weapons employed by the US military and its adversaries in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck College) g.koureas@bbk.ac.uk
‘Visualising the Invisible: constructing and remembering the image of the terrorist during the War
of Independence in Cyprus 1955-1959’
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Recent debates and representations of terrorism point to an ahistorical society in which terrorism
provides an ‘unexamined and seemingly natural motivation in the construction of plots’ (Jameson
1984) Terrorism is also one of those phenomena that have surfaced as a Post-War cultural
debate thus creating specific structures of feeling associated with the image of the terrorist. Most
importantly, the visuality of the terrorist had always been problematic because of the perceived
invisibility of the terrorist. On another but parallel level the definition of terrorism itself is
problematic in terms of what constitutes a terrorist act depending usually on a relational position
of power and hegemony.
The paper aims to address these issues by concentrating on the image of the ‘terrorist’ as it was
constructed during the war of independence from British colonial rule in Cyprus during 19551959 in order to discuss the representation of the terrorist in visual and literary cultures and resurface the wounds of memory that are associated with such events rather than concentrating on
the wounds of the acts of terrorism that tend to veil the historical specificities of the events.
In more detail the paper will compare and contrast the memory of the event within the Imperial
War Museum, London and the National Museum of Struggle, Nicosia in order to examine in more
detail the visuality of the terrorist within the two sites of the conflict. Images in the media, news
reels, literary and fine art production will be used in order to demonstrate the construction of an
evil, invisible and de-masculinised ‘terrorist’ from the British perspective and the construction of a
heroic and hyper-masculinised heroic figure from a Cypriot perspective. The paper will conclude
with the ways in which the memory of the event has been used/abused in Cyprus since the
establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960 and the erasure of the event from British
memory cultures.
Vicky Lebeau (University Sussex) v.a.lebeau@sussex.ac.uk
'Michael Haneke: war and the audio-visual'
Philip Shaw (University Leicester) ps14@leicester.ac.uk
'Sublimity and Suffering in Romantic Military Art'.
The paper will focus on representations of the sublime in military art of the mid 18th and early
19th centuries. It will pay particular attention to how prints, paintings and sketches in the early
part of this period use the sublime to depict the sacrifice of the noble, officer hero (e.g. West's
'The Death of General Wolfe', 1770) and how this image is challenged by later artists who take
as their focus the sufferings of ordinary soldiers and their dependents (e.g. Wright's 'The Dead
Soldier', 1789, and Turner's 'The Field of Waterloo', 1818).
Birger Stichelbaut (Ghent University) birger.stichelbaut@ugent.be
‘In Flanders Fields - an aerial perspective’
During World War One millions of aerial photographs were taken by all fighting countries. Aerial
photographs were taken all over these different theatres of war (the Western Front in Belgium
and France, Eastern Front, Gallipoli, Palestine, Isonzo, etc…), documenting a cultural landscape
from which the relicts often remain visible as scars on the landscape.
The aerial photographs which were taken during the conflict provide an unparalleled record of
both the progress of the war and the destruction of the landscape. Until recently these
remarkable records of World War One have only been used a simple illustrations. This paper
explores how thousands of these images are now converted into a primary source on their own,
providing a unique bird’s eye view of the conflict landscape of World War One.
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