1. BLIND SPOTS AND UNSETTLING EMOTIONS: Cinematic de/orientations in the war documentary Armadillo Niina Oisalo Doctoral Student, Media Studies University of Turku

2. Armadillo (2010, DK) Dir. Janus Metz & cinematographer Lars Skree followed young Danish soldiers before, during and after military mission in Afghanistan Observational style, alternating between heavily stylized scenes (music/sound, camera, editing) and ’raw’ footage (e.g. material from the soldiers’ helmet cameras) – distance/intimacy Debate in Denmark: ’peace keeping’ – war, ‘our belligerent boys’, the military investigation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta5tT0d86A8

3. The unsettling SET UP ’Trauma art’ sustaining sensation rather that communicating meaning –Jill Bennett: Empathic Vision 2005 How to orientate in the post-9/11 world? –Sara Ahmed: Queer Phenomenology 2006 Awkwardness, ambiguous feelings caused by Armadillo Resisting habituation and distancing from war – failure of imagination and empathy (Sylvester 2014; Sontag 2003)

4. Post-9/11 AESTHETICS, ETHICS in media & war film tradition World War II combat film as genre (Basinger 2006): Combat scenes as dramatic peaks; group of men lead by a hero; audience in ennobled by the same experience ‘Virtual’ war in the flow of mass media images since the Gulf War (Baudrillard 1995, Virilio 1989), images as weapons (Mirzoeff 2005) Post-9/11 aesthetics (ref. Pisters 2012) in Iraq War films: Battle of screens Affective truth, subjective pov, ‘messy war’  Putting bodies back to the images/imagination of war

5. DE/ORIENTING with Armadillo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo08t4Q1g9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo08t4Q1g9k Deorientating – no release for the audience, ambivalent figures of soldiers with questionable morals, motivations Orientating – human bodies, characterizations Music, sound & camerawork both orientating and deorientating Ethico-affective engagement – aesthetic sensations and meaning- giving merges Watching war – feeling war – performing war – the mediated experience of war

6. Points of CONTACT Transaction between spectator and film --- the ‘outsides’ and ‘insides’ come into contact – the subjective experience takes a form with which the viewers can engage, although not necessarily name it Bennett (2005): ‘empathic vision’ The transgressive eyes of a soldier piercing the screen – alludes to trauma ‘in the making’, but uniqueness of the experience remains unrepresentable

7. What about the BODIES? Intimacy between the soldiers and through the camera with the spectator – embedded stance? Inviolable Danish soldiers and indifferent enemy bodies – crumbles along the film’s narrative ‘The body that is no longer the same’ – Rasmus’ body serves the narrative of a soldier’s psychological change during war

8. Literature Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others Basinger, Jeanine (2006) ’ The World War II Combat Film: Definition’, in Slocum, David J. (ed.) Hollywood and War: The Film Reader Baudrillard, Jean (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place Bennett, Jill (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, Contemporary Art Colman, Felicity (2009) ’Affective Imagery: Screen Militarism’ in Holland, Smith & Stivale (eds) Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2 – The Time-Image Gaines, Jane M. (2015) ’Second Thoughts on ”The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition’, in in Juhasz & Lebow (eds) A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film Lebow, Alisa (2015) ’The Unwar Film’, in Juhasz & Lebow (eds) A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2005) Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture Pisters, Patricia (2012) Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others Sylvester, Christine (2014), ‘Bodies of War’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 16: 1, pp. 1–5