Disappearing War

Christina Hellmich is Associate Professor in IR & Middle East Studies at the University of Reading Dr Lisa Purse is Associate Professor in Film in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading.

• IllustrationsContributorsAcknowledgments1. Introduction: Film and the epistemology of war, Christina Hellmich & Lisa Purse 2. Good Kill? U.S. soldiers and the killing of civilians in American film, Cora Sol Goldstein3. ‘5000 feet is the best’: drone warfare, targets, and Paul Virilio’s ‘accident’, Agnieszka Piotrowska 4. Post-heroic war / the body at risk, Robert Burgoyne 5. Disappearing bodies: visualising the Maywand District murders, Thomas Gregory 6. The unknowable soldier: the face of Freddie Quell, James Harvey-Davitt 7. Visible dead bodies and the technologies of erasure in the war on terror, Jessica Auchter 8. Ambiguity, ambivalence and absence in Zero Dark Thirty, Lisa Purse9. Invisible war: broadcast television documentary and Iraq, Janet Harris10. Nine cinematic devices for staging (in)visible war and the (vanishing) colonial present, Shohini Chaudhuri11. Afterword: Reflections on knowing war, Christina Hellmich

From mainstream news coverage of conflict to the use of close-ups in The Master this searching edited collection explores the dialectic between the seen and the unseen in the contemporary war film. The contributors tackle the question of whether the myriad changes to war and the representation of war – via embedded reporting, drones, virtual reality and so on – constitute a deep ideological erasure. Their insights are intellectually and ethically illuminating and advance our understanding of the cultural imagination of war in important ways.