Extra Credit Thematic Essay
Megan Billman

Director Deborah Scranton has pioneered a new method of filmmaking: directing from a distance, or "virtual filmmaking". She created her documentaries, "The War Tapes" (2006) and "Bad Voodoo's War" (2008), by giving cameras to soldiers deployed to Iraq and directing them via e-mail and instant messenger. Footage captured by the soldiers was sent to Scranton's home in New Hampshire where it was edited. In this essay I will relate the practice of "virtual filmmaking" to existing theories of virtualization, in an attempt to shed light upon the significance of this methodology in the context of critical film studies. In Virtuous War, James Der Derian asserts that while virtualization enables the effects of proximity (the ability to attack) through unprecedented perceptual mobility, this transformation also enables the denial of death. I assert that in film- making as in war- making, virtualization has the potential to enable virtual mobility and the effects of unprecedented proximity, and yet may also encourage denial (in this case denial of the cinema apparatus) and result in misguided claims to objectivity and realism. I will conclude by relating Scranton's responses to these challenges, which is, appropriately, to remain loyal to the local and specific, to the personal and the subjective.

Of our newly mobile mode of war- making, Der Derian writes, "Virtual war is the ability to choose [any] spot on a map and effect damage upon it or the people residing there." This mobility is crucial not only to offensive attacks but also to military training. Reflecting upon a trip to the US military training camp at Fort Irwin, Der Derian describes the efforts undertaken to "take American troops as close to the edge of war as the technology of simulation and the rigors of the environment will allow."(3) Our virtual mobility enables the effects of proximity. It "collapses the distance between here and there, near and far" (10).

Mobility and proximity have been crucial concerns for filmmakers and critics since the evolution of the medium in the late nineteenth century. The camera enabled a revolution in perception, offering the average individual the chance to 'see' events and places far from her everyday reality. Dziga Vertov wrote of the transformation effected upon him by film. "Starting today," he wrote, "I am free forever of human immobility” (Virilio, 20).

In making "The War Tapes" and "Bad Voodoo's War", Scranton was more mobile that Vertov could have ever imagined. Twenty-one soldiers filmed for her and cameras were "mounted on gun turrets, inside dashboards and [on] POV mounts on their Kevlar helmets and vests" (thewartapes.com). Thus Scranton was (virtually) able to participate in raids, make dangerous night passages across mine-laden roads, and spend time in the unit's barracks.

Der Derian identifies the ways in which virtualization enables the denial of the traumatic dimensions of war. He writes, "virtuous wars promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars" having the "power to commute death, to keep it out of sight, out of mind" (xv-xvi). In drawing parallels between this theory of the virtual war, and dominant frameworks in critical film studies, I am struck by the relation between the denial of death by the soldier and the denial of the cinema apparatus by the spectator. In the same way that the virtualization of war facilitates the denial of the traumatic fact of mortality, the virtualization of filmmaking encourages the spectator's denial of the cinema apparatus and her mistaken identification with the look of the camera. The relation between denial, misrecognition and cinematic identification is not new. However, it seems to me that in the age of virtualization it is easier to suspend disbelief than ever before.

The virtualization of filmmaking facilitates the denial of the director to such an extent that, during a recent Global Media Lab, Prof. Der Derian was led to wonder whether Scranton was in fact, “showing the path to [her own] disappearance” (GML 4/9). Scranton replied that her methodology in no way diminishes the significance of the director. She sees it as her task to “amplify the voices of the soldiers” and to provide a context and framework for the audience to understand their stories. Though she does not appear in "The War Tapes," her intervention is foregrounded in "Bad Voodoo's War," which includes shots of her seated at her computer messaging with the soldiers, and collecting tapes from her mailbox.

Der Derian asserts that virtualization has rendered the relationship between reality and representation highly ambiguous. He writes, "virtuality collapses the distance between fact and fiction" (10); It “represents a convergence of the means by which we distinguish the… original from the reproduced” (xx). In the field of literary criticism, academics have, for many years, gone to great lengths to articulate the degree of proximity between the filmic text and reality. In his seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin describes the promise that mechanical reproduction holds for the individual "to get closer to the original by way of its likeness, its reproduction"(2). Claims to realism have been particularly contested in relation to documentary whose very name expresses an ontological assumption that film can show the truth in a transparent way (Silverman).

If we equate proximity with access to objective reality it would seem that virtual filmmaking, which enables the spectator to get ‘closer’ to the subject than ever before, might enable unparalleled access to the real. Scranton, however, staunchly refuses the possibility of objectivity in film, asserting that the notion of critical distance is "an incredibly egotistical construct" as "everyone brings their life experience" to their work. She is hopeful that we might catch glimpses of reality in “"contrasting ground-level narratives" but maintains that "it is only when we are human beings first that we approach that truth."

Virtual war- making and virtual film- making represent manifestations of the "urge to expand the range of vision and detection," to “push back… the limits of investigation, in both time and space " (Virilio, 75). At this moment in which “the surfaces of the globe are [effectively] directly present to one another”(Virilio, 46) it is more crucial than ever that we remember that war does kill and that representations are mediated.

References:
Allen, Tim. "Perceiving Contemporary Wars," 1999
Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy," 1996
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 1935
Aufderheide, Patricia."Your Country, My Country: How Films About The Iraq War Construct Publics" in The Journal of Cinema and Media - Volume 48, Number 2, Fall 2007, pp. 56-65
Der Derian, James. Virtuous War, Westview Press, Oxford 2001
Jenkins, Henry. "Worship at the Altar of Convergence," in Convergence Culture, New York University Press, New York, 2006
Musser, Charles."Film Truth in the Age of George W. Bush" in The Journal of Cinema and Media - Volume 48, Number 2, Fall 2007, pp. 9-35
Silverman, Michael, class notes, Cinematic Coding and Narrativity.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema, Verso, London, 1989