About the lecture:
 

The Vietnam War is often described as the first ‘television war’. But the first ‘motion picture war’ was the Second World War. This is not to claim that combat footage was invented in the Second World War—that milestone was reached during the Spanish-American War at the end of the previous century— but it was the first war in which motion pictures became the preeminent means by which both members of the public, and military strategists, perceived the conflict.  This new ‘logistics of perception’, as Paul Virilio termed the process through which war is perceived, had a profound impact.  It changed how politicians, intelligence officers, and military strategists understood and therefore planned the war.  It shaped the general public’s conception of the conflict, and ultimately, at the Nuremberg Trials, it played a significant role in condemning many of the Nazi defendants to the gallows, and in the process helped set the standards for international criminal law and human rights legislation today.

This paper will tell this story through a history of the US Office of Strategic Service’s (OSS) Field Photographic Unit, a group of over 300 Hollywood filmmakers who placed their services at the disposal of America’s wartime military and intelligence staff.  They filmed in every theatre of operation, producing training, reconnaissance and propaganda films.  They co-ordinated the Allies’ filming of the D-Day landings, they won an Academy Award for the dramatic combat colour footage they shot at the Battle of Midway, and they went ashore in North Africa during Operation Torch.  They helped produce America’s first truly global visual reconnaissance archive, and they worked directly with the prosecutorial staff at Nuremberg to demonstrate Nazi crimes against humanity.  Ultimately, through this history, this paper seeks to explore the interrelationship between warfare and the means by which we perceive it.