Nine Cinematic Devices for Staging (In)Visible War and the (Vanishing) Colonial Present
English Colloquium, hosted by the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
This paper explores the heightened visibility of certain people, images, and experiences and reduced visibility of others in the 'War on Terror', illustrating this with American Sniper (2014) and Good Kill (2014) together with other filmic examples and news reports.
It then turns to Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary Concerning Violence (2014), which explores the reverse perspective of those on the receiving end of the West’s actions.
Although this film deals with decolonization struggles in Africa in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, using archive footage from Swedish state television, it encourages viewers to see beyond the period and connect it to current issues, evoking the ‘colonial present’ in which violence inflicted on marginalized people continues in new forms.