it must be painful to watch
It’s a small GIF embedded in a New York Times article from early February. You have to stare at the GIF for a while to really see the destruction, to read it as an actual event rather than a general example. All action has been abstracted away, but you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. The camera, mounted on a satellite blinking over northern Gaza, is not supposed to capture people. This is the drone’s-eye view of data, deterministic and detached.
The main focus of the article is the view from the ground. One particular view, at least. Times reporters discovered TikTok videos made by IDF soldiers as they bombed and bulldozed cars, trees, and buildings in Gaza. One video shows three bulldozers in a huge pit of sand, with the caption: “This is after a lot of work — the whole place was covered in greenery and houses until we got there.” These videos show the actuality of the GIF’s white line, an erasure far more arduous than any before-and-after might suggest. As with the satellite footage, there are no victims in these videos, just the blackened carapaces of where the victims used to be.
Taken up-close, these videos are still at a remove from the events they depict. The videos come already processed: edited, cropped, and captioned. The soldiers dance and cheer and parody well-known songs. One soldier DJs on a portable turntable; the video cuts to an explosion when the beat drops. A group of soldiers drink and smoke hookah on a rooftop while they detonate the horizon, clinking their cups in celebration. Here are destroyers in the idiom of the TikTok “creator,” ethnic cleansing like a Barstool video. It is a shocking juxtaposition of barbarity and blitheness, but not surprising, not even unfamiliar.
The camera orbiting the world, the camera in a soldier’s pocket. These are two ways we watch the war: on social media apps and via satellite, opposite ends of a vast global system of seeing and recording. The up-close and the faraway, the all-seeing and the intimate—the temptation is to start invoking Sontag and Baudrillard and McLuhan, but perhaps a better starting point is a far less sophisticated one: what is it all for?
I have watched so much war on my phone the past several months that it has made me well-informed but, generally speaking, worse. By the time it reaches me, it is a bold-texted, live-streamed refinement of death into data and data into explanation. Or, as with grisly videos taken in Gazan hospitals, it is a sudden howl of desperation amid the banalities of an Instagram feed. War looks less like war than the dismantlement of an entire people through a thousand little windows: photo carousels, video selfies, drone shots, embedded videos, propaganda, shaky bodycams. Artillery and airstrikes are interpreted in near-real-time into neat little maps.1 After a while, the surfeit of images and information overpower any claim to usefulness. They exist to keep us scrolling, or to visualize something we’re already looking at. So that we can all follow along, like some craven congregation fumbling with their hymnals.
This torrent of images leads, on the one hand, to complacency, the false belief that we can understand the world just by watching videos or reading the news. On the other hand, it leads to bafflement, the grating juxtaposition of proximity and distance, violence and tedium, leaving us in a confused stupor. This is not, of course, specific to war. This is the online experience: we look and look and become smug or exhausted. The more you see, the less you care. Or you care too much, to the point of apoplexy. With violent images, we feel most acutely the ways in which the media apparatus keeps us from processing things well. If images beamed in from the battlefield don’t affect us differently, lead at the very least to pity, something must be wrong.
The nature of this disorientation was actually rather well articulated in inarticulate remarks made by the Vice President, in Poland, in March 2022. She was in Warsaw to tout US humanitarian assistance to the region and show solidarity with Poland and Ukraine against Russia. At one point, she mentions war crimes perpetrated by the Russian Army in Ukraine:
We all watched… The television coverage… Of just yesterday. That’s on top of everything else. That we know and don’t know yet. Based on what we’ve just been able to see. And because we’ve seen it or not doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. But just limit it to what we have seen.
Like many of her official statements, this one makes the rounds on social media every few months for being Veep-like and ridiculous.
Harris’s syntax aside, there is some sense to what she was saying. Philosophically, she was basically answering the If a tree falls in a forest question in the affirmative: “Because we’ve seen it or not doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.” This is to say: whether or not we observe an event, the event occurs. More literally, she was trying to point to the existence of Russian war crimes. She says that there is already proof (“The television coverage of just yesterday”), suggests that there could be more (what we “don’t know yet”), but urges us to focus on the ones we know about (“what we have seen”). This assumption—that there are probably more war crimes than what we see on television—is notably the inverse of official rhetoric around Israel’s demolition of Gaza, where even the IDF’s most blatant crimes are called into doubt, minimized, and abstracted by US government officials, bureaucrats, and reputable news organizations.2
Phrased in its jumble of double-negatives, Harris’s speech was a refusal of conviction that also articulated a deeper epistemic confusion. “Because we’ve seen it or not doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened” could also mean: things happen and it doesn’t matter if we look or not. Or: we don’t even have to look to know what’s going on. Or: who even knows what is happening or what to say about it.
This conflation of self-assurance and helplessness, this unmooring of perception from knowledge, is a fitting articulation of the situation of the American spectator. We watch something, which we add to everything else. The things we had seen and not seen, the things we knew and didn’t know, the things that happened and did not happen. We log each new datum into the vast corpus of all experience, all possibility, all subjectivity, all witnessing, all knowledge, all plausibility. Donald Rumsfeld’s Johari Window riff from the War on Terror—known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns—has long since widened into an apophatic and impotent flux.
It’s possible that the images Harris mentioned in Warsaw were the very same images featured in a documentary from last year, 20 Days In Mariupol. If there is anything that might shock us out of mealy-mouthed pronouncements and social-media exhaustion, this film might be it. When it won the Best Documentary Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards (obligatorily, like Navalny last year), director Mstyslav Chernov said, “I am honored but probably I will be the first director on this stage to say I wish I never made this film.”
I wish he hadn’t had to either. The footage is shocking, physically shocking, a shock to the system. I watched it with gritted teeth and blurry eyes. Watching it is like letting someone smack you repeatedly in the face. The whole paradigm of violence in 20 Days is entirely different from the scrollable feed or the overthorough news article. 20 Days is more like a bloody livestream disguised as a feature film. Up-close, unsubtle, and unrelenting.3
When Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Chernov was working for the Associated Press as a video journalist. Together with his colleagues—photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko—he chose to stay in the port city of Mariupol to document the invasion. As AP reporters, they were supplying images that would be licensed to major news networks throughout the world. Staying in Mariupol was a daring commitment to the job: they were the only international journalists there when the Russians came. 20 Days, comprised almost entirely of their footage from the ground, is a behind-enemy-lines look at Russian viciousness and the murder of innocents. It is also a behind-the-scenes film about how war footage is captured and distributed.
The plot of the film is twofold: the brutal siege of the city and the efforts of the reporters to document it and escape. Their ability to upload files to their editors becomes more difficult as the Russian bombings escalate and target infrastructure. Toward the end of the film, their ability to leave at all comes into doubt, let alone with their memory cards and cameras.4
Both plots coalesce into a work of political activism, and its engine is fittingly axiomatic: “This is a historical war,” Chernov says in his dour voiceover, “To not document it is impossible.” It is as if, rather than the man picking up his camera, the camera picked up the man. Chernov: “My brain desperately wants me to forget all this but the camera will not let it happen.”
Indeed, the camera shows all manner of things that you feel viscerally you should not be seeing. The body of a dead child, no more than four or five years old, spasming as doctors attempt to resuscitate him. There are tarp-wrapped bodies in hospital basements, gurneys smeared with blood, mothers screaming for their children. When not pointed at destruction, the camera is often pointed at the ground, as Chernov ducks for cover or runs through the rubble.5
For the most part, the film sticks to its purpose: an uncompromising drive to get the word out. To achieve this, the camera flinches at nothing. Occasionally faces and genitalia are blurred, but most of the ruin and death is shown without hesitation. In one dramatic hospital scene, a surgeon yells at Chernov to keep filming, even tearing a tarp from a gurney, revealing the corpse of a young man. Film this so the world can see what Putin is doing, says the surgeon. It is a desperation beyond words, perhaps blasphemous, baring for the camera the dead.
Even as the film remains steadfastly committed to its mission, there are several such moments that question or reaffirm the camera’s role in the midst of violence. A man fleeing the city calls Chernov a “prostitute” as Chernov records him and tries to ask him questions. Some people want to be filmed for personal reasons rather than grand ideas about the power of the image. “Can you film me? Maybe my mom will see this,” asks one young woman. “Vasya wants to live!” says an old man, holding out his pet turtle for Chernov to film. Others speak to the camera in a state of shock. At the start of the invasion, Chernov tells a wailing old woman to go home. When he sees her again, in a Crossfit-gym-turned-bunker, she scolds him: she did return home—only for her house to be bombed. Chernov apologizes and moves on.
Whenever Chernov and his crew finally manage to upload their images, we are shown a clip of news broadcasts that used the footage, mostly American and British networks. This drives the narrative of documentation and escape, each upload a little miracle, but it also means that we see the awful footage twice: once in the heat of the moment, and again with the framing of a newscast.
For all of Chernov’s dictums about the need to document, I found this element to be a telling counterpoint to the main thrust of the film, suggestive of a wider ambivalence. In the format of a feature documentary, which can only emerge months after the events it depicts, the footage is gripping and shocking. When it appears as breaking news—alongside a grim-toned news anchor, huge chyrons, boosted contrast on the photos for effect—it enters a ceaseless stream of horror and outrage. “This is painful to watch, but it must be painful to watch,” says Chernov at one point in 20 Days, as if to himself. There is something troubling about seeing how, by the time the images become the news, they have become less painful to see.
This is not to say that the images lost their power, nor that Chernov’s efforts were in vain. His efforts were heroic, courageous, and useful, even if they did not turn the tide of the war. And who could expect them to? Like many Oscar-winning films, 20 Days reiterates the power of filmmaking but exemplifies its limits. It insists on its importance in a desperate, automatic way, like a comforting refrain of scripture.
In his Oscar acceptance speech, Chernov implored his audience to “make sure the historical record is set straight and that the truth will prevail and that the people of Mariupol and those who have given their lives will never be forgotten. Because cinema forms memories, and memories form history.” He urged his illustrious audience to act rather than just to watch, though it is telling that he spoke of cinema’s role as shaping history rather than influencing the future. Far more than most, he should know the limits of his trade and the limits of looking, that a camera is not a weapon but a misery-machine. “We keep filming,” he says in 20 Days, “and things stay the same.”
ben tapeworm
1 The 2003 BBC infographic of Saddam Hussein’s hiding place, much mocked and memed online in recent years, is in fact an ur-text for contemporary data journalism: explanation and visualization taken to a needless, preposterous point.
2 An Intercept report on pro-Israel coverage of the Israel-Gaza war by major US news organizations noted how the New York Times tends to refer to Israeli children as “children,” while Palestinian children are more often “minors” and “people under 18.”
3The one aspect of the film that was far too unsubtle was the ominous electronic score, an ill-advised attempt to juice up the horror that felt not merely unnecessary but borderline immoral.
4 Though the films are different, Chernov’s slow and serious voiceover, combined with the drama of smuggled media files, bears the unmistakeable influence of another Oscar winner, Citizenfour (2014).
5 Another unsettling aspect of the film is that we never see Russian soldiers. We see bombs, mortars, Russian tanks. We see archival footage of Putin and one of his ministers. But this eerie absence makes the enemy seem less like an opposing group of men than an atmospheric technological capacity for brutality and death.