{"id":5618,"title":"States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies Demobilizations: Anesthetics, Dreams, and Nightmares excerpt","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/states-emergency-documentaries-wars-democracies","version":"31f1752be43230d4f269332b155f23bbba8056d753e73a78feade75daf51c04f","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4421825+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Patricia R. Zimmermann"}],"authorKeys":["Zimmermann, Patricia R."],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"University of Minnesota Press","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1012","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/states-emergency-documentaries-wars-democracies.","publication":"Patricia R. Zimmermann. States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies Demobilizations: Anesthetics, Dreams, and Nightmares excerpt. University of Minnesota Press. 2000.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5618.ris"},"links":[{"label":"University of Minnesota Press","url":"https://www.upress.umn.edu/","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":23408},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":79},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":827},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC1012","generated":false,"characters":80}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Demobilizations: Anesthetics, Dreams, and Nightmares However, verbal language and spoken testimonies do not hold exclusive rights to war traumas and the aftermath of war as it spreads through psyches and bodies, realigning them and disturbing them, reverberating into the future after the bombs have been dropped. Sounds and image traces do not retreat, but repeat in dreams and nightmares. They burrow deep, tunneling into the psyche, history, and archives. Wars leak into other languages besides speech; the image itself and its montage with other images speak. As Felman and Laub observe, \u0022The breakage of the verse enacts the breakage of the world.\u0022 (66) There are many tapes and films about the aftermath of wars that draft alternative, nonrealist-based formal practices to demobilize the aerial attacks of the war machine. If the war machine has swept the image up into the air with sophisticated technology, these works skyjack various high technologies, such as video image processing, computer effects, multichannel installations, and optical printing, to excise the image from its speed-driven compulsion during war. The archival and imagined visual remains of war are slowed down, reduced, shredded, separated, multiplied in an attempt to resuscitate the dulled senses and to establish new hybrid spaces between maker, the racialized others of war who had been figured as enemies, and a reimagined, restored geographic terrain. Surveying the poetics of documentary, Michael Renov has uncovered a \u0022repression of the formal or expressive domain.\u0022 (67) He demonstrates, however, that the expressive and aesthetic potential of documentary has emerged in various historical works ranging from Man with a Movie Camera (1929) to Unsere Afrikareise (1967). However, these works mining the forgotten spaces after nations enact cease-fires do not only invoke expressive, aesthetic strategies to summon emotional responses and desires in spectators-a textual strategy associated with the avant-garde. In these works, formal interventions decompose the realist image to assault the racialized process of \u0022othering\u0022 that produces enemies. These technical strategies and complex montages, then, chip and pound and excavate at the process of racialization, of othering, of hatred itself, jarring and jabbing into its dichotomies, its binaries. Historically, demobilizations of war imagery to recapture the senses from the immobilizations of the shock of war and combat have emerged almost exclusively in postwar independent productions, as aftershocks reverberating within the filmic text itself. However, it is important not to overstate the case for this sort of work, as this strategy of immersion in the senses is exceptional and unusual rather than typical. Although many of these works have employed archival footage as visual verification of the horrors of wars, their editing and argumentation reposition the images themselves as inadequate explanations for immoral acts like the Nazis\u0027 genocide of Jews or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Often described as works with high levels of formal interventions into a realist-bound documentary language infusing war with emotion and subjectivity, these works in fact move beyond form and emotion by opening up the catastrophic event, the event beyond comprehension, to the senses of smell, touch, taste, and pain. For example, in Listen to Britain (1942), perhaps one of the most arresting and understated propaganda films of World War II, the sound of tanks and bombs is drowned out by classical music played by soldiers. In each shot, the war does not overwhelm daily life, but becomes part of it: a man carries a helmet to work, soldiers play classical music or sing in music halls, tanks enter a shot of children playing. The excesses of war-the loud noises of bombs, the militarizations of daily life-are drowned out by singing and concerts, signaling the fortitude of the British to carry on. The sound track and visual compositions do not simply displace the war, they provide a new space to hear and see outside the war. In Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955), the much-celebrated intercutting between black-and-white archival images of the Nazi concentration camps and color tracking shots of the postwar serene, parklike camps functions similarly, jarring each image out of spectacle. Night and Fog relentlessly annihilates the overdrawn spectacle of the camps and the Holocaust through a voice-over that reclaims imagination and resistance for those incarcerated in the camps and slaughtered. The voice-over supplies details and proximity rather than generalization or statistics, and this detail revives the sense of the internees: fingernails scratched on ceilings, hunger, fear, dolls and toys fabricated out of scraps. Hiroshima-Nagasaki: August 1945 (Erik Barnouw, Barbara Van Dyke, Paul Ronder, and Akira Iwasaki, 1970) also recasts archival footage in order to move from the overwhelming scale of war into the body itself. Constructed from a Japanese cameraman\u0027s footage, which the U.S. government had suppressed for nearly twenty-five years-the film is structured as a series of visual contradictions between bombed-out buildings and the victims of the bomb: sequences of the destruction of buildings are followed by close-up shots of the victims in a pas de deux that moves the spectator from outside to inside, from space to bodies. (68) Hiroshima-Nagasaki opens with a Japanese woman who survived the H-bombs describing her experience over shots of destroyed buildings, a landscape of near total destruction. The film thus begins not with the bomb, but with a survivor, marking her interior landscape as one that continues in spite of the annihilation of the exterior landscape. An atonal, avant-garde music track also propels this movement away from the visual spectacle of the images into a psychic space that reclaims the horror of the images. Like Night and Fog, Hiroshima-Nagasaki emphasizes details that chart the senses, in an attempt to reposition the dropping of the bomb from the ground: images of permanent shadow inscribed into the wood, burned victims attended to in hospitals, kimono burns on a woman\u0027s body, hair coming out. The voice-over describes the sensory deprivation of the bombing: no one knew what had happened; fifty thousand people died; in the center, there was no sound. The film builds toward the body in pain; the voice-over describes how radiation sickness overtook the victims. Near the end of the film, the voice-over underscores the film\u0027s structure of contradictions between landscapes and people: \u0022Vegetation grew wildly, stimulated by atomic radiation. . . . as people died, the city was covered in flowers.\u0022 Like Night and Fog, in which the images of emaciated bodies bulldozed into piles is one of the last shots of the film, Hiroshima-Nagasaki also inverts the horror by ending with a shot of a nuclear explosion. In each piece, the most horrifying spectacle concludes the film, rather than opens it, an argumentative strategy in which the senses outlined earlier in each film infuse the image and consequently defuse its spectacle by positioning spectators within a new rubric of sensory attachment. Susan Buck-Morss, in her breathtaking article \u0022Aesthetics and Anesthetics: Walter Benjamin\u0027s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,\u0022 demonstrates how modernity has recruited visuality to blunt all senses, to anesthetize the body from all that is social and, eventually, political, aestheticizing war and anesthetizing people in a movement that is ultimately fascistic. War, the shock of battle, the factory system, narcotizing drugs, anesthesia for surgery all \u0022numb the organism\u0022 and \u0022repress memory.\u0022(69) Buck-Morss says, \u0022Benjamin claimed this battlefield experience of shock has become the norm in modern life.\u0022 The multiple injuries to the human senses \u0022paralyze the imagination.\u0022 (70) To resist what she terms a cultural domestication, Buck-Morss invokes aesthetics to redeem the political from fascism: [Benjamin] is demanding of art a task far more difficult-that is, to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity\u0027s self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding new technologies, but by passing through them. (71) Two tapes from the early 1980s, refusing the numbing shocks of civil war, embed this restoration of the bodily senses within their formal design as political action against the shock and numbing of war: Meta Mayan (Edin Velez, 1981), on the civil war in Guatemala, and Smothering Dreams (Daniel Reeves, 1981), on collective hallucinations propelled from war ideologies and psychic/physical wounds from Vietnam. These works use new technologies like video processing to redeem the senses, but also, beyond Buck-Morss, to reclaim racialized fragmentation of representations of war. The tapes create spaces outside, beyond, and after combat: Meta Mayan reclaims the landscape of Guatemala and the public communities of Indians, whereas Smothering Dreams recovers the psychic space of war indoctrination and combat wounds resulting from violent war ideologies and iconographies from a mass-mediated culture that inculcates violence and then genders it as masculinist. Each tape initiates a withdrawal from war through performing reconstructive surgery on war images with high-end video imaging technologies. Here, the use of special effects technology to process the image (slow motion, reducing the images to letter-boxed shots like snapshots) removes the image from its indexical relationship to referents, where it stands in for Guatemalan insurgents or U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, and reconnects it like tissue to its nerve endings of sensory perceptions of sound, smell, texture, touch. In each of these pieces, the image is not simply manipulated or processed, as an archival document or as a visual fact; instead, the image is resuscitated as living tissue, an organism through which the senses beyond sight are summoned. In this way, these tapes do not merely revive the subjectivity of war; rather, they attempt to transport the spectator to, or envelop the spectator within, a world not defined by logocentrism, geopolitics, governments, nations, causality, a world that the spectator must move through by means of the senses. In Buck-Morss\u0027s words, these tapes \u0022undo the alienation\u0022 of war, untying it from its mooring in logocentrism, nationalism, and spectacle, letting it float in more multifarious, complex waters, where a range of senses can seep in, loosening up the narcotizing of the image. Meta Mayan reclaims the senses from the dulling effects of the news, figured here as words that float above the senses and landscapes of Guatemala\u0027s civil war. A haunting image of a woman staring directly into the camera, slowed down, opens the tape, a visual dare and insistence of everyday life. Steam fills the frame, then fire, then close-ups of faces in a market, signifying an initiation into sensations. A news report in voice-over describes how Spain has broken off diplomatic relations with Guatemala after leftist peasants barricaded the Spanish embassy. The report concludes with the information that Amnesty International claims two thousand Guatemalans were killed in the last year, accompanied by the image of the same woman from the earlier scene walking, suggesting the fierce continuation of life despite death and torture, despite a civil war, despite developed countries\u0027 news media figuring an entire nation as guerrillas. Meta Mayan structurally decomposes objective news reports through the senses, filling the discursive space of war with the sensory, beyond words, experiences of the sounds of daily life. Images of a religious procession, men dressed in purple robes, swaying in and out of the frame, nearly floating, signify immersion in a world of textures and sounds. The tape deploys close-ups to resuscitate the senses, to move between the ne","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":23408,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}