Cinematic Corpographies

Eileen Rositzka

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110579710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Writing on the relationship between war and cinema has largely been dominated by an emphasis on optics and weaponised vision. However, as this analysis of the Hollywood war film will show, a wider sensory field is powerfully evoked in this genre. Contouring war cinema as representing a somatic experience of space, the study applies a term recently developed by Derek Gregory within the theoretical framework of Critical Geography. What he calls "corpography" implies a constant re-mapping of landscape through the soldier's body. These assumptions can be used as a connection between already established theories of cartographic film narration and ideas of (neo)phenomenological film experience, as they also entail the involvement of the spectator's body in sensuously grasping what is staged as a mediated experience of war. While cinematic codes of war have long been oriented almost exclusively to the visual, the notion of corpography can help to reframe the concept of film genre in terms of expressive movement patterns and genre memory, avoiding reverting to the usual taxonomies of generic texts.

1Introduction

There is much more to be said about losing oneself in worldly space than can be referenced – or remedied – by recourse to the abstract objectivity of a map.

Vivian Sobchack 1

Nowhere becomes the notion of a measurable landscape more evident and decisive than on the battlefields of war. The strategic planning and effective progress of battle action heavily relies on the soldier’s ability to evaluate and make use of the given territory, which encompasses cognitive processes of abstraction and anticipation, as well as attuning the body to different geographical conditions. The sense of vision therefore plays a major role in seeing and comprehending combat events, since “metaphors of sight constantly surface in our claims to know something: the emphasis on observation, on evidence (from the Latin videre meaning ‘to see), and the common use of ‘I see’ when we mean ‘I understand.’”2 Nevertheless, it seems paradoxical to talk about war and “the soldier’s body” without actually acknowledging the impact of battle on all its senses – without accounting for the thundering sounds of explosions, the smell of smoke, or considering how it feels to wade through mud and water, especially when the actual objective, or the enemy, is more or less invisible.

Likewise, when it comes to analyzing how spaces of military conflict are perceived and mediated through cultural practices, this omission turns out to be even more paradoxical when we leave the primary framework of war and turn our attention to what has long been an established philosophical position: Within a larger phenomenological context, visual perception is embedded into a considerably more complex interplay of cognitive activity and sensuous processes. That is, regarding the body’s relationship with its environment, vision lies at the heart of what could be conceived as a somatic experience of space and landscape: It predestines a cartography, a sense of orientation, that not only works in terms of mathematical coordinates, but first and foremost by navigating the body through a given space in order to implant its own presence into its surroundings. This navigation is thus not about seeing or understanding geographical conditions independent of our physical existence, but more about creating a certain space while interacting with it – a perspective which connects our senses to both geography and history:

Geography is no longer ruthlessly partitioned from History; time and space are no longer absolutes but defined in relation to people, events and objects, and these are not located ‘in’ time and space but enter into the co-production of time-space; and ‘physicality’ now carries a much livelier, more sensuous charge.3

Now this conception, in turn, can be used to mark a paradigm shift in the theoretical discourse of war representation, as events of war always designate distinct focal points and ruptures within historical experience. Indeed, the interdependencies between concrete bodies and concrete battle circumstances have come to be discussed more extensively. No longer is military conflict reduced to the primary of vision (as it has been from the very first accounts of optical warfare to the many Virilian analyses of modern “screen wars”, or even to the discussions of war and video games), but is considered affecting all senses, as a condition shaping and being shaped by human bodies.

It is exactly this historically grounded production of somatic experience I seek to apply onto forms of audiovisual representations of war, and – more precisely – onto war cinema. In this study, I explore the ways the sensory experience of combat is staged as a corporeal apprehension of space in the Hollywood war film. Placing an emphasis on films that foreground tactile and sonic experience in battle as a key dimension of symbolic meaning in the depiction of war, I move beyond the emphasis on optics and weaponized vision that has largely dominated contemporary writing on war and cinema in order to highlight the wider sensory field that is powerfully evoked in this genre. As a cinematic field, however, it can only be explored if it presupposes a sense of direction and movement – a dynamic navigational process undergone by the explorer (i.e. the character, and, ultimately, the spectator); a process in which sensuous perceptions become graspable as aesthetic figurations.

In my conception of war cinema as staging a somatic experience of space, I am applying a term recently developed by Derek Gregory within the theoretical framework of Critical Geography, or, more precisely, Human Geography. What he calls “corpography” establishes a direct connection between notions of cartography and nature to the physical perception of war, conveyed through first-hand accounts of battle experience (notes, letters of soldiers, poems, and other forms of written memory). Although Gregory accounts for the important role the sense of vision plays in seeing and comprehending combat events, he addresses the dysfunctionality of military maps for the individual soldier in a battle zone, who has to rely on his tactile and acoustic perceptions instead to gain a sense of orientation. War, in this sense, implies a constant re-mapping of landscape through the soldier’s body.

From the First World War to WWII and the Vietnam War, Gregory traces the corpography of war as a more visceral and sensuous form of what Raymond Williams would have called a “structure of feeling.”4 The writings he draws on for the purposes of his study share a common ground in being products of an “intersubjective and trans-formative process” – a process “rooted in human bodies as bio-physical forms becoming intimately entangled with other bodies and other bio-physical forms.”5 Defined by Gregory as a “co-production of nature and military violence,”6 corpography (and the way it is represented throughout media history) not only reveals repetitions from one theater of war to another but also reversals, echoes, silences, parallels and departures in the perception of war and continues to structure the somatic and cultural implications of modern warfare.7

Consequently, these contingencies and shifts also influence, and are performed by, cinematic representations of war. To my mind, Gregory’s assumptions – although they don’t directly aim at challenging theoretical accounts of film and media studies – articulate the missing link between already established theories of cartographic film narration, and ideas of (neo)phenomenological film experience, as they also imply the involvement of the spectator’s body in sensuously grasping what is staged as a mediated experience of war. More than that, the notion of corpography can help to reframe the concept of film genre in terms of expressive movement patterns (as done by Hermann Kappelhoff8) and embodied history / genre memory (as exemplified by Robert Burgoyne9), avoiding reverting to the usual taxonomies of generic texts. For the question here is not so much whether a specific war is represented accurately or authentically (one would have to refer to an ideal audiovisual image in this regard) – instead, it must be investigated how the body of the spectator, that is, their concrete sensuous world, establishes spatiotemporal correlations with the (historical) events of war depicted on screen. Therefore, this approach does not entail an interpretation of the filmmaker’s intention, nor does it generalize and reduce the experience of individual spectators to one possible way of reacting to the films in question. The object of this study, then, is not an empirical or historical spectator; rather, it presumes the film viewer’s active participation in the interaction with the expressive qualities of audiovisual images, and, in this case, images of war that are shaped by specific genre poetics. Naturally, since film can never be an absolute reproduction of battle experience, it is much more a reflection on sensuous perception itself, an interface relating the audience physically to an idea or a memory of war, rather than to the reality of combat. Thus, like every work of art, a film provides its viewers with a number of sensory coordinates that invite them to move along, and be moved by, the parcours that is cinematic experience.

While cinematic codes of war have long been oriented almost exclusively to the visual, i.e. cartography and the overview, Gregory’s study of somatic imagery and spatial apprehension in war-related history, literature, and poetry testifies to a paradigm shift in the theoretical discourse of war representation. No longer is military conflict reduced to the primacy of vision (as it has been from the very first accounts of optical warfare to the many Virilian analyses of modern “screen wars,” or even to the discussions of digital images, and the relation between war and video games), but is considered affecting all senses, as a condition shaping and being shaped by human bodies – which implies an understanding of space not as a medium over which war is conducted, but as a medium through which war is conducted, making bodies “both vectors and victims of military violence.”10

I therefore demonstrate in my study that the war film can essentially be qualified as a genre that, throughout the history of cinema, has been elaborating on the corpographic and symbolic role of the body in military conflict, and has continuously shaped the ways spectators sensuously engage with war and its cinematic dimensions of affect. As a first step, and in order to situate Gregory’s concept within the realm of cinema and media studies, I will provide a literature review of recent academic works that have explored the relationship between cartography and film (especially those by Tom Conley and Giuliana Bruno), and of texts approaching audiovisual representations of war in terms of genre poetics and affect (with a special emphasis on Hermann Kappelhoff and Robert Burgoyne).

My case studies will reveal the transformations the Hollywood war film has undergone in terms of somatic staging patterns and genre poetics, analysing audiovisual representations of combat in relation to the varying historical, territorial, and technological conditions of war that provoked palpable changes in the cultural perception of military conflict. Ultimately, I argue that descriptive investigations of narratives and plot constellations fall short in taking into account what I would consider a constitutive factor of cinematic experience, and of war cinema in specific: the body as both an aesthetic concept and sensuous link between film and spectator. In my phenomenological approach to the war film genre, I will therefore identify stylistic devices, aesthetic compositions, and expressive movements that, in establishing a specific relation between filmic space-time and the spectator, make up the cinematic corpography of war.

Each chapter of this book focuses on a different war, covering WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the so-called “War on Terror” after 9/11, isolating the Hollywood war film in its respective cultural-historical context and tracing both representational consistencies and shifts in each case study. My analysis thus intends to show that cinematic depictions of war as a somatic experience change over time, while still maintaining the genre imprint of the past.

1.1Cartographic Cinema, Embodiment, and the Navigating Spectator

In conducting a study on what I have come to term cinematic corpography, I do not assume that the concept of navigating filmic space through the senses is self-evident. The idea itself is a conglomeration of not only different scholarly disciplines (geography, philosophy, and film / media studies) but also of different perspectives on spatial perception and subject positions within their respective theoretical frameworks. Thus, in order to be able to set and use corpography as an analytical tool for describing certain staging patterns of the Hollywood war film, that is, to provide an alternate approach to the genre as such, an explanation of the word itself must go beyond Gregory’s specified definition. It must certainly clarify in what ways cinema can enable us to orientate ourselves within filmic space in the first place, and, last but not least, given that the term’s etymology represents an amalgam of corporeality and aspects of cartography, it has to be made clear what conceptions of spectators, bodies, and navigational processes actually inform corpography as a characterization of film staging and film viewing.

What cannot be overlooked as a development in film studies is “the growing premium attached to the locational properties of the moving image, and the concomitant processes of spatial and temporal navigation – historiographical, ontological, geographical, archaeological, architectural – that these make possible.”11 Here, Les Roberts identifies five thematic areas of cinematic cartography: maps and mapping in films; mapping of film production and consumption; movie mapping and cinematographic tourism; cognitive and emotional mapping; and film as spatial critique. While most of these clusters can hardly contribute to an understanding of cinematic corpography, the theme of mapping in films as well as the more spectator-oriented matter of cognitive and / or emotional mapping localize ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Measuring the Trenches: Corpographies of the First World War
• 3 From Above and From Within: Aerial Views and Corpographic Transformations in the WWII Combat Film
• 4 Dismembering War: Touch and Fragmentation in Anthony Mann’s MEN IN WAR
• 5 Uncharting Territories: The Vietnam War’s Shattering of the Senses
• 6 ZERO DARK THIRTY: Corpographies of the War on Terror
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Subject index
• Name index
• Film index