Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Documentary footage exists of wars in the late 1890s. But the First World War was the first to be extensively filmed and the films viewed by mass audiences. Cinema became part of war’s imaginary. Dissolving views and basic animations were familiar from magic lantern shows. But as the moving image began to move in more sophisticated and mesmerising ways, cinema transformed the ontology and phenomenology of modernity. This paper contrasts two different kinds of writing which conjoin screen and war. The first, the radical book series ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ (1923-31) imagined the future of many subjects over 110 short volumes, a number of them devoted to or discussing war. The first, Haldane’s Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, opens with avowedly cinematic shots of men and war machines. Liddell-Hart’s Paris; or, the Future of War imagines speculative thought about war as, precisely, ‘projection’ – the future as blank screen on which the writer visualizes. Cinema and emerging television technology promised the future in all aspects of life, from news to entertainment to work video-conferencing. James Jeans’ Eos, on Astronomy, is star-struck by the night sky as ultimate, cosmic, movie. Cinema’s ability to dissolve time and space could seem liberating and creative. The other kind of writing tempers that view with more traumatic possibilities. Cinema’s fascination with violence takes spectators out of places of safety into the imagination of destruction. When Ford Madox Ford writes about the psychological effects of war (in novels and memoirs) he is drawn to imaging a protective screen; as if the intangibility of cinema could withstand the violence solid walls could not. The sceen becomes a metaphor for how civic and domestic spaces can no longer protect people; a metaphor which simultaneously reveals how precarious the prewar illusion of architectural and social solidity was; how violence already permeated the domestic and social interiors.