Cinema has long shaped not only how mass violence is perceived but also
how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to the
execution of terror campaigns and news anchormen serve as embedded
journalists, a critical understanding of how the moving image is
implicated in the imaginations and actions of perpetrators and survivors
of violence is all the more urgent. If the cinematic image and mass
violence are among the defining features of modernity, the former is
significantly implicated in the latter, and the nature of this
implication is the book's central focus.
This book brings together a range of newly commissioned essays and
interviews from the world's leading academics and documentary
filmmakers, including Ben Anderson, Errol Morris, Harun Farocki, Rithy
Phan, Avi Mograbi, Brian Winston, and Michael Chanan. Contributors
explore such topics as the tension between remembrance and performance,
the function of moving images in the execution of political violence,
and nonfiction filmmaking methods that facilitate communities of
survivors to respond to, recover, and redeem a history that sought to
physically and symbolically annihilate them