First person war: Helmet cameras between testimony and performance

by Federico Selvini

Warfare and optical recording technologies

The relationship between military apparatus and optical recording technologies can be divided into two distinct categories. The first involves images that serve a pragmatic purpose. According to Paul Virilio, ‘alongside the “war machine”, there has always existed an ocular (and later optical and electro-optical) “watching machine” capable of providing soldiers, and particularly commanders, with a visual perspective on the military action under way’.^[1]From WWI aerial photography to drone vision in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, modern warfare is typified by images whose main function is to expand the perceptual field of warring sides. These images are not evaluated for their artistic value, but rather their function is to provide data and support in conducting operations, as well as to depict an advantageous representation of the battlefield. As a result, their aim is to monitor, detect, and annihilate enemy forces.

The second category encompasses images produced by troops fighting on the frontline at the lowest level of the chain of command. Soldiers shoot videos and photographs to recollect their personal war experiences, a trend dating back more than a century to the outbreak of the First World War, when camera manufacturers developed lighter and easier-to-use devices. Numerous soldiers brought photographic equipment to the front lines and ‘during January and February 1915 the press began to publish amateur pictures taken by military personnel’.^[2] Despite attempts by armed authorities to prevent this movement, ‘prohibition was impossible to enforce, and many thousands […] of snapshots were made by British, French, Belgian, German, Russian and other soldiers’.^[3] As a result, soldiers’ photography became a recurrent feature since the First World War. This trend literally erupted in the early 2000s for a variety of reasons.

Over the past 30 years consumer shooting devices have undergone significant technical development, resulting in inexpensive and easy-to-use cameras flooding the global market. Additionally, social networks and video-sharing platforms now allow for the instant distribution of any kind of audiovisual data. Nowadays, the hierarchical top-down structure of traditional mainstream media coexists with a chaotic, continuous, and decentralised flow of information, lacking a regulatory institution capable of filtering content and providing an unambiguous representation of warfare. As William Merrin highlights:

The result is that almost every individual and non-state actor in the conflict zone now has a complete set of peer-to-peer and global publishing tools at their disposal, making it impossible for any organization or government to control the flow of information and the story they want to promote. Given that the military operates as a top-down organization, used to giving orders and controlling its informational activities, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies and platforms has hit it hard. Since 2004 it has discovered that any serving soldier can bypass its hierarchy, producing, sharing and distributing any material they want, with important consequences for the military’s public image and international relationships.^[4]

Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin distinguish two patterns in the warfare mediatisation process. First, there is the broadcast war, a stage where the informational paradigm is top-down and imposed primarily by television networks. In this stage, media companies play an overriding role in determining perceptions of the conflict, targeting a generalist audience, and acting in tune with political and military power (the First Gulf War remains the most representative case of this approach). Second, ‘the proliferation of new media technologies renders more of life matter to be recorded, disseminated and debated on near-instantaneous and deterritorialized scales’.^[5] This phase constitutes the end of the monopoly of traditional media, governmental, and armed forces over information control. Warfare spreads through an intricate network involving channels and tools consumed daily by users all over the world. Precepts such as monitoring and censorship have become mostly ineffective. Media objects, scattered across an endless flow of data, are no longer manageable by authorities. For this reason, Hoskins and O’Loughlin argue that ‘it heralds a struggle between the established and relatively ordered regime of mainstream news […] and an “ordered disorder” of information that is potentially much more diffused’.^[6]

In this context, digital technology, network infrastructures, and consumer shooting devices have deeply shaped the visual features of contemporary armed conflict. Current wars are, among other things, a clash of images fought through the intangible social spaces of the web.^[7] All the subjects involved – regular soldiers, militiamen, guerrillas, NGOs, and civilians – actively participate in this circumstance, addressing distinct audiences on a global scale.

As a result, contemporary warfare is characterised by a proliferation of recording devices, with a prominent place occupied by minute videographic instruments usually secured on the operator’s head, known as helmet cameras. These wearable devices reproduce the user’s field of view and are distinguished by specific features such as a small and compact size, lightweight, and resistant to impacts and atmospheric agents.^[8] Additionally, they mount a wide-angle fixed focal length lens that keeps the framed field always in focus. Helmet cameras are entirely automated instruments that do not require manual user control. The aim of this essay is to investigate the war images produced by these devices, identifying both the recurring features in the footage and a variety of links established with the actual media landscape.

The structure of the paper will be the following. In the next section, we will examine the first-person gaze and the relationship between the body and the recording device in an attempt to define a valid approach to describe the images produced by helmet cameras. We will then show how these images share commonalities with other contemporary media practices, such as the post-photographic approach, the videogame world, the aesthetics of extreme sports, and the social network culture. Finally, we will analyse an atypical use of helmet cameras: in contrast to the ‘diffused war’ paradigm, the television docu-series Taking Fire (2016) represents a kind of ‘normalisation’ of these devices. In Taking Fire, the anarchic components of helmet cameras are actually reabsorbed within the military and mass media complex.

Helmet cameras: Body performance and machine gaze

Helmet cameras possess two primary qualities: the first-person view and the prosthetic relationship with the human body. In order to analyse these facets, it is useful to consider a practical example. A short video posted on YouTube by Ted Daniels, a US Army soldier who was deployed in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom (2001-2014), can provide an illustration.^[9] The footage begins concurrently with the onset of the ambush, as the soldier walks a few steps along a mountain crest and subsequently grips his assault rifle to fire several rounds toward the attackers (Fig. 1). He then changes magazines and shouts to his fellow soldiers, ‘I’m moving down’, as he descends the ridge. The enemy fire intensifies, and bullets can be seen bouncing off the ground inches from Daniels’ boots. Suddenly, we hear a stifled groan, and the soldier gasps: Daniel is wounded, but he continues to shoot at the enemy while lying on the ground. He eventually rises and struggles to reach a safe spot. The private, crouched behind a boulder, is relentlessly targeted by the Taliban (Fig. 2). In the last few seconds of the recording, he repeatedly shouts to his comrades, ‘I’m hit’, while bullets hit in close proximity.

The camera mounted on Daniel’s helmet emulates his perspective, giving the impression that the entire video is a point-of-view (POV)/subjective shot. According to Edward R. Branigan, in film theory a POV shot is ‘a shot in which the camera assumes the position of a subject in order to show us what the subject sees’.^[10] In his analysis, Branigan dissects this cinematic technique into its constituent components. The POV shot comprises six elements that are spread across two frames. The first frame is called point/glance, where the shot shows a character’s position looking at an object or another character, typically located off-screen. The second frame is identified as point/objective, where the camera represents the object or character observed from the viewpoint of the first frame. Additionally, temporal continuity links both frames, and an effective observing subject is required. Branigan asserts that ‘a POV shot, therefore, requires the presence of a character but more than a “body” is necessary – the character must be “aware” and “looking” in a normal way’.^[11]

Daniel’s video, however, does not adhere to this schematic. Instead, the skirmish is portrayed through one single long take, and the soldier’s body is always invisible, apart from his limbs. An anonymous gaze, expressed by an unidentified subject, is presented. Furthermore, the video lacks context; an outside view capable of providing a comprehensive overview of the situation is absent. Our gaze corresponds to the soldier’s mobile and limited point of view.

Italian scholar Ruggero Eugeni posits the concept of the first person shot as a means of describing a distinct condition of the subjective gaze within the current mediascape. ^[12] For Eugeni, the POV shot is primarily a cinematic figure with specific grammatical characteristics. It is formed by combining two successive images, ‘one represents a character who gazes, the other represents what is seen through the character’s eyes’.^[13] Instead, the first person shot is a cross-media figure generated by the intersection of at least five technical innovations. These include the invention of the Steadicam in the 1970s, the development of handheld digicams during the 1990s, the manufacture of miniaturised digital cameras such as helmet cameras or smartphone cameras, the dissemination of video surveillance technologies, and the spread of videogames that adopt a first-person perspective. Eugeni argues that the POV shot and the first person shot differ primarily in their relationship between the subject and the technical device. In the former, there is a clear ‘distinction between the subject(s) who is (or are) watching inside the diegetic world, and the object of the camera which temporarily occupies their perceptual position’.^[14] This division is blurred in the first person shot to such an extent that both the human being and the camera are transformed into a hybrid agent in which the technical device and the subject are no longer two ontological independent entities, but are mutually dependent. As such, Daniel’s body becomes an operating instrument that not only supports the camera but also marks its hectic cadence on the images.

Scholar Richard Bégin speaks of ‘somatic images’ to illustrate the relationship between the body and footage, referring to images that seek to depict the physical presence of the camera-subject. Bégin employs the term ‘mobilography’ to describe an audiovisual practice where ‘the fundamental notions of the body and corporeal perception are transformed by the advent of a technology which gives concrete form to the hybridization of the body and the camera’.^[15] According to Bégin, mobilography is not solely associated with helmet cameras but is a media practice with a genealogy that includes various light recording tools such as 8mm film cameras, smartphones, etc. However, helmet cameras possess a unique quality in that they are secured directly onto the subject, freeing the user to move around without managing the device. The contiguity between the camera and the body highlights the corporeal and somatic reactions of the subject, making them a distinctive class of images. For Bégin, somatic images:

refer to the state of a body-camera revealing its excitation, agitation, or state of rest. Rather than depicting a subjective vision of the world obsessed with discoursing on this vision, these images preserve the trace of a pre-discursive recording, that of the physical experience of what is occurring. What one may thus be hoping to record is the sensitive film of the world, the innervation at the origin of every experience.^[16]

Thus, helmet camera footage reveals the numerous ways in which our bodies interact with and respond to external stimuli in the surrounding environment. Our physical existence is situated within a concrete space that necessitates our engagement, incites our dynamic impulses, and compels us to explore and encounter. It is our kinetic vitality, motivated by our environment, that determines what is captured on film and what remains outside the camera’s scope. The dynamism inherent in the camera’s perspective is inseparable from that of our bodies. As a result, the visual perception of the camera relies heavily on our motoric activity. Despite being categorised as recording devices, helmet cameras aim not only to enhance our visual perception but also to represent the sensorimotor exchange between ourselves and the world. Images render our physical being central to the process of perception and interaction with the external environment. Thus, this hybrid agent records the multisensory experiences of the user within the space in which he operates. In this context, the camera captures ‘a video trace through the world as created by our movement in specific environmental, sensory and affective configurations’.^[17]

Returning to Daniel’s video, in this instance machine vision appears to be inextricably associated with the concreteness of an individual who does not seek to conceal his involvement, but rather emphasises his active presence in the world. Images rely on the agency of a dynamic body immersed among an assortment of the most heterogeneous environmental stimuli, including the rugged mountain terrain, the bright sky making man an easy target, the incessant enemy gunfire, and the frantic movements determined by adrenaline. Therefore, the filming device does not observe the unfolding of the fight from a disembodied perspective. Instead, it literally plunges into the physicality of the world, in close contact with all the things that surround it, whether animate or inanimate. Daniel’s footage echoes the reactions – even the unconscious ones – that the soldier faces while experiencing the perilous surrounding space. These reactions are closely linked to his sensitive, instinctive, and emotional perception, in an unrepeatable circumstance.

In considering these devices, we have noticed that one of their essential characteristics is an unmediated relationship with the physical environment surrounding the subject. Helmet camera images operate mostly in a non-fictional regime, so documentary studies can assist us in analysing recurring aspects emerging from the footage. Bill Nichols has identified six forms spanning the history of nonfiction filmmaking: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative. Which of these categories do helmet camera recordings belong to? In our opinion, we can see the concomitant presence of at least three modes.

First, we will cover the observational mode. This approach emerged around the 1960s thanks to a series of technical innovations, namely the development of recording instruments that can be easily handled by a single individual – a breakthrough process comparable, to some extent, to what has occurred with wearable cameras. The aim of the observational mode is to narrate events as they occur in front of the shooting device, as objectively as possible. In this regard, Nichols points out that ‘many filmmakers now abandoned all of the forms of control over the staging, arrangement, or composition of a scene’.^[18] This approach implies that the author hides his presence, refusing any kind of manifest intervention on the profilmic level. The purpose is to disclose the events as faithfully as possible, as if both the camera and director were not there. Helmet cameras seem to take this feature to the extreme. Thanks to their automatism and tiny size, they can easily camouflage themselves on the body, disguise their participation on the scene, and record events with great exactness. Commenting on Daniel’s video, Gregg Jaffe claims that

helmet-cams have the potential to explode the illusion of order and control. Soldiers can click record and quickly forget the devices are there.^[19]

The second mode is the participatory one, in which the author reveals both his personal mediation and the relationship he establishes with the filmed reality. Therefore, ‘what happens in front of the camera becomes an index of the nature of the interaction between filmmaker and subject’.^[20] The participatory mode implies the involved presence of the image-producing instance in accounts that may take the form of diary, autobiography, and testimony. Although in a raw form, these same narrative forms can be found in the helmet camera shots. This paradigm aims to communicate ‘a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result’.^[21]

The last useful approach in describing the bond between documentary cinema and helmet cameras is the performative mode. In this situation, what emerges is ‘the complexity of our knowledge of the world by emphasising its subjective and affective dimensions’.^[22] This approach extols the value of personal involvement as a means of deciphering a situation in which the director is personally engaged. Regarding the viewer experience, ‘performative documentary seeks to move its audience into subjective alignment or affinity with its specific perspective on the world’.^[23]

The use of helmet cameras exploits certain modes typical of documentary cinema, highlighting an observational approach that rejects programmed staging in favour of spontaneity, openness to the unexpected, and unforeseen events. The participatory orientation is evident in the tangible presence of the operator and his actions within the recorded world. Furthermore, the performative mode emphasises the idea of a personal and unique experience. On one hand, the device records situations faithfully without any interference in the reality of the shot; on the other hand, this recording is related to the sensorial experiences of the subject, as the user is not an external element to the filming but an involved and dynamic agent whose actions are ingrained in the corporeal images captured alongside the camera. Therefore, an anonymous author/performer bears witness to his existence in the world as much as to the world itself.

As a consequence, the language of helmet cameras takes shape as a performativity-testimonial approach, predominantly autobiographical in nature. It is expressed by an individual who is an active subject in the portion of the world in which he is acting. The performativity-testimonial approach revolves around the supposed objectivity of the camera eye and the liveliness of the human body, both elements constantly competing for the primacy of representation.

In conclusion, the human body, shooting device, and point of view overlap, occupying the same spot. Performativity and testimony combine in an instantaneous and autobiographical narrative form that presupposes a nameless and vital gaze in which observation and action are inextricably linked. Viewer and character share the same visual perspective, with a gaze that exists solely in the present tense. Helmet cameras enact an embodied, sensitive point of view, connoted with the body’s liveliness, proving that ‘our objective flesh is always also immanent – thrown “here” and “now” into a space-time occupied by other immanent things and beings in dynamically material combinations’.^[24]

Helmet cameras and the contemporary mediascape

At first, helmet camera short films were distributed through cyberspace. Joan Fontcuberta identifies this contemporary connection between network infrastructures, pictures, and digitalisation as post-photography. For Fontcuberta, post-photography implies the proliferation, accessibility, and overabundance of images that, due to the advent of new technologies, are instantly shareable. Nowadays, the power of photographs no longer lies in traditional aesthetic canons, but in their communicative capacity, in their being able to ‘speak’ to a specific viewer. Therefore, photography has become a language spoken – or rather, performed – on a global scale, irrespective of gender, race, age, or social condition. Anyone can record and distribute audiovisual content, available to anyone willing to look for it among the meanders of the internet (‘we are voyeurs of lives that are not our own and in which we end up feeling like co-protagonists’^[25]). As a result, our perception of the world sinks into this hectic and multifaceted visual universe.

Among the most recognisable practices in the post-photographic environment is the selfie. Here again, we see a clear detachment between the human and the machine eye. For Fontcuberta, the novelty of the selfie act is epistemological: this practice is less about representing the world in front of the camera lens and more about our physical presence in the world, our being a first-hand participant in an ongoing event. As a result, the autobiographical aspect prevails over the documentary one. Undoubtedly, we observe several important differences between helmet cameras and the selfie. Above all, the latter places the subject’s body at the centre of representation, while in the former case, the user is usually concealed behind the device. But even so, helmet camera stylistic features follow the same trajectory: the somatic images mentioned by Bégin render the substance of the subject a pivotal component of the depiction. Consequently, both wearable cameras and selfies involve the materialisation of the image-producing instance to such an extent that the physical presence of the subject in exclusive spatiotemporal coordinates becomes the centre of attention.

In warfare, the anarchic post-photographic approach clashes with the hierarchical organisation of the armed forces. Soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq have heavily exploited both social networks and consumer filming devices to establish a new war imagery. According to Patricia Pisters, a central feature of Iraq war films

is the level of subjective and affective intensity of many of the images. Contrary to the distant ‘empty’ images of the First Gulf War, images have become highly subjective and chaotically intense.^[26]

As a result, this visual material seems to present itself as an alternative to media and military authority over the distribution of audiovisual information.^[27] Roger Stahl describes the current relationship between the audience, the media, and the military as interactive warfare, emphasising a new correlation between the citizen/spectator and the state of war. Stahl asserts that ‘the pleasures of the interactive war are predicated on participatory play, not simply watching the machine in motion but wiring oneself into a fantasy of a first-person, authorial kinetics of war’.^[28] Thus, interactive warfare presupposes a new category of spectator: no longer passive but active, who becomes part of

the military publicity machine, not only through new media technologies but also through rhetorics that portray war as a ‘battlefield playground’. Here the citizen has been increasingly invited to step through the screen and become a virtual player in the action.^[29]

Herein we want to shed light on helmet camera war imagery and its resemblances with two other visual narratives: extreme sports and videogames.

Regarding the former, Stahl underlines that, since the 1990s, the battlefield has been translated into a playground within which the spectator does not wish to get the whole picture of the event, but rather to be ‘in virtual proximity to pain and danger’.^[30] This trend is due to the influence of extreme sports on the US public, where the mise-en-scène places the camera as close as possible to the body, visualised in a perilous situation. Therefore, according to Stahl ‘the discourse of extreme sports serves as a model for the relationships among consumer, camera, and battlefield that increasingly informs the virtual citizen-soldier’s relationship to state violence’.^[31] The widespread availability of helmet cameras arose in the first decade of the 2000s when Nick Woodman founded GoPro. The company soon established itself as one of the world’s leading manufacturers of consumer shooting devices. Initially, GoPro’s target market was so-called extreme sports, such as snowboarding or surfing. In fact, Woodman has developed a wearable camera that allows athletes to capture images from a first-person perspective, even in restricted environments. Every day, videos filmed using helmet cameras are uploaded to social media platforms, showcasing individuals engaging in reckless sporting performances. These videos often feature an encounter between a skilled athlete and a challenging terrain. In this depiction, the camera ‘strives to maintain the “wildness” of a site and a sight by actively selecting seemingly untamed places that can be submitted to the fearless exploratory spirit of their conquerors’.^[32] Remote and harsh locations turn into a battlefield/playground in which the subject comes up against savage environmental conditions. These videos, whether depicting war or sporting feats, showcase the vulnerability of the body at risk in perilous situations and the courage of individuals who are capable of surviving such extreme undertakings. Thus, the user’s relationship with space appears to be both playful and adventurous, yet dicey. This dichotomy is central to extreme sports, where risk-taking behaviour is viewed positively as a means of personal growth – in fact, ‘high-risk athletes deliberately took risks as a means of becoming positively transformed.’^[33]Kevin McSorley emphasises this aspect to the point that nowadays ‘soldiering is also increasingly sold as an “experience” – borrowing the extreme sport rhetoric of adventure, adrenalin, and testing oneself to the limit – rather than as a career’.^[34]

Another visual reference for helmet cameras is the universe of videogames, specifically the genre of first-person shooters (FPS), which emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is characterised by definite rules. Gerald Voorhees, Josh Call, and Katie Whitlock point out that ‘the player’s navigation of space, the primacy of obstacles overcome by the act of shooting, and the first-person perspective are the essential components constitutive of the FPS’.^[35]

Upon initial inspection, the visual grammar employed in helmet cameras differs significantly from that of videogames. In the latter, the user can actively engage with the virtual reality of the game, whereas the viewer of wearable cameras assumes a passive role and is unable to interact with the represented world^[36]. Despite this ontological divergence, there are several notable similarities between the two. Scholars have noted the mutual influence between the visual imagery of the War on Terror and that of FPS games. In this regard, Voorhees argues that, since the late 1990s, various FPS

define their conflicts in terms that are circulating in contemporary culture. Fitting perfectly the ideological frame established by the Bush Administration’ War on Terror war rhetoric, those doing the killing are American soldiers, and those killed are terrorists.^[37]

Mehmet Evren Eken also highlights the correspondence between helmet cameras and first person shooters, noting that ‘whereas FPS games are offering viewers the opportunity to play out virtual war through their given extracorporeal existences, helmetcam videos offer corporeal experiences of real wars’.^[38] According to Eken, wearable optical devices and first-person games have formed a unique visual regime that has shifted from an external spectator capable of maintaining an impersonal perspective to a first-person observer immersed in the emergency of the battlefield. The audience is engulfed in the excitement and frenzy of the battle, unable to maintain a detached gaze that can truly question the content of the images – ‘In the FPS […] the bigger picture tends to fall away through identification with an embedded perspective’.^[39] Regarding the mise-en-scène, Rune Klevjer emphasises the centrality of the gun in the field of view – a key feature also in Daniel’s video. In the framed space, both the camera and the subject’s gaze align with the rifle’s sights.^[40] As a result, we can observe an obvious correspondence between the act of looking/aiming and the act of shooting/killing.

On a cinematic level, Adam Charles Hart sees a connection between FPS, found footage horror of the early 2000s, and a killer’s subjective shot typical of 1970s slasher films. With the latter, FPS shares the steadiness of the camera and the fact that the killer POV shot ‘never reveals the owner of its look (or, at least, delays that revelation)’.^[41]With regard to found footage horror, however, Hart argues that ‘FPS and found footage’s handheld shots are both searching cameras, vulnerable but attempting to combat that vulnerability through exploration’.^[42]

Taking Fire: Helmet cameras and the military complex

Taking Fire is a television series produced by Discovery Channel, recounting the story of a platoon belonging to the 101st Airborne Division, which was deployed for an entire year to an outpost named Cop Michigan in Afghanistan. Several servicemen brought helmet cameras to capture the events they were involved in. When the producers came across some clips posted on YouTube they were impressed and, after managing to contact the various soldiers, they created the series.^[43] Taking Fire consists of found footage organised into a coherent narrative framework, with two alternating narrative themes: first-person footage shot by the troops in Afghanistan and soldiers, years later, reflecting on the most significant images and episodes at home in the United States. The US Department of Defense endorses the series, which is acknowledged in the credits.

Taking Fire consists of five episodes that follow the unfolding of the mission in chronological order. Each part begins with the same opening theme, characterised by three storylines: helmet camera footage depicting combat, patrols, and daily life at Cop Michigan; short interview clips with combatants stating ‘it is kind of that journey from boyhood to manhood’, ‘it’s a brotherhood man, you can’t let your brothers die’, and ‘I don’t really think there’s anything that could bound you more, these are my brothers, this is my family’. Finally, television stock footage, including a journalist’s report asserting ‘the Korengal Valley was frequently described as the valley of death’. These elements are punctuated by several intertitles, declaring ‘the following was shot by soldiers on the front line. This is their story’, ‘a rookie platoon’, ‘the most dangerous place on the planet’, ‘filmed entirely by the soldiers themselves’, ‘outnumbered and surrounded’, ‘a small band of brothers’, and lastly ‘a year under fire’.

In the opening theme, we can indeed notice numerous recurrences connoting the series. First, the narrative structure of Taking Fire may recall that of a videogame. In reviewing FPS, Joanna Eagle argues that:

The subject position constructed by the FPS is defined through both agency and vulnerability […] The genre’s focus on special operations forces amplifies this construction, highlighting small, elite units of highly trained men, inevitably outnumbered but endowed with an arsenal of high-tech weapons and equipment. These figures maintain the status of the underdog (and the virtue this position conventionally entails) while asserting superior strength and readiness.^[44]

Furthermore, infographics are sometimes overlaid onto the actual images to provide viewers with orientation (Fig. 3). During these instances, the screen displays features reminiscent of a typical videogame HUD (head-up display), which presents ‘in easily visible ways the mechanistic information players needed for successful navigation of the game’.^[45]

Another recurring aspect in the series is the camaraderie shared between soldiers. The platoon consists mostly of recruits on their first mission, who bond over a perilous adventure that leads them to become men. This initiatory journey, filled with obstacles, is accompanied by the emergence of virtues such as courage, brotherhood, and sacrifice. A glaring demonstration of the initiatory nature of the conflict concerns Kyle Boucher, one of the main characters. Kyle claims to have joined the army because he was bored with his jobs, and he states without mincing his words, ‘I was a troublemaker; I think it’s that type of guy that joins the army.’ During a clash with the Taliban, one of his comrades is wounded, and Boucher saves his life by administering first aid (Fig. 4). In those dramatic minutes, Boucher realises that his greatest aspiration is to help others. Back home, he joins the fire brigade: the ‘troublemaker’ he had been before the war was no more –  Boucher had completed his training course and become a respectable American citizen.

Taking Fire depicts the war solely from the soldier’s perspective, portraying the invasion of Afghanistan ‘in terms of private, disaggregated experiences, that occur beyond the wider framing of any salient national, political or historical metanarrative’.^[46] The decision to engage in a conflict and its consequences are not the responsibility of an individual, and political evaluations are not considered by soldiers. Their primary focus is to protect themselves and their companions, with the critical goal being to survive and return home safely. Therefore, Taking Fire aims to convey and share the phenomenal sensations experienced by soldiers at the frontlines. The series employs somatic images that suggest embodied, tactile, and bodily perceptions in which the ‘presence of the soldier is constantly felt […] via the restless point-of-view, the sounds of breathing and vocalizations, the reverberations of corporeal movement’,^[47] as McSorley says.

In Taking Fire the camera captures a series of sensory perceptions and kinetic impressions to convey the sensation of being dropped into the middle of the battlefield. For example, in the fourth episode, a squad of soldiers is patrolling a mountain trail. Initially, the helmet camera observes the surrounding landscape with precise and vigilant movements. Suddenly, the Taliban begin firing from an unknown location, and the action quickly becomes convulsive and chaotic as the camera wearer frantically seeks a safe position. Once under cover, the camera returns to a stationary position. The soldiers then observe the area to locate the enemy, and when they do, the rifle comes into the field of view (Fig. 5). The weapon’s recoil produces vibrations that are imprinted on the frames. When the threat subsides, the camera records the soldiers’ rapid march toward the armoured vehicles that will take them back to Cop Michigan (Fig. 6). Throughout the sequence, in which the viewer can glean a small amount of factual information, the camera communicates a continuous variation of rhythm, a turnover of gestures, and sensitive acts that illustrate the relationship between the filming device, the soldier’s body, and the hostile territory in which this man-machine agent is acting. Therefore, the helmet cameras convey ‘personal battles between various embodied states’,^[48] according to the circumstances in which the soldiers are engaged.

Through the use of helmet camera footage, the viewer becomes a participant in the soldiers’ everyday life, disoriented and exposed to danger during war operations. The enemy is present only through the firing, remaining otherwise undetectable. Thus, the audience experiences the same feelings of bewilderment and disorientation as the soldiers.

The viewer is transported to the frontline and has the impression of being a witness to a real war from the inside, at the lowest level of the chain of command. However, the reason why Stahl speaks of ‘the absolute depoliticization of state violence’^[49] regarding the images produced by helmet cameras is that there is a lack of a critical and external gaze to question the content of the pictures. The proximity of the camera to the soldier’s body, relentlessly exposed to danger, results in an intimate relationship between the soldier and the viewer. In addition, the audience only takes on the perspective of one of the two combatants. These factors mean that the viewers can exercise a very limited view ‘that reduces the conflict to a hyperlocal it-was-either-him-or-me drama’.^[50] As a result, the violence and devastation are justified. War is reduced to its most atavistic level, a desperate struggle for survival. The soldier (and, by extension, the audience) is not tasked with deciding whether the occupation of Afghanistan is a legitimate political strategy. Instead, he simply follows the orders of commanders who, as is the enemy, are excluded from the narrative.

The empathy toward the servicemen is intensified as the platoon loses some of its members at the hands of the Taliban. After an improvised explosive device (IED) attack that claims the lives of two soldiers (Fig. 7), Private Boucher responds in a matter-of-fact manner during an interview, stating that ‘the best way to grieve your friend is to go out there and kill these bastards’. This suggests that defending the ‘family’, or the platoon and its comrades, and seeking revenge for fallen soldiers have become the primary objectives of the mission. The convergence of gazes through helmet cameras is a key element in the identification process between the troops and the viewer:

The spectator’s perspective essentially mimic’s the soldier’s, and just as they at first find themselves disoriented and uncertain of their feelings (why are we here, what is this place), so does the viewer. As soon as the first soldier is killed, the identification between viewer and soldier, by virtue of POV, is strengthened. The viewer is brought into the war as a virtual participant, the soldier who gets shot in front of ‘us’ could just as easily have been ‘us’. Thus as the soldiers gain a sense of purpose that suddenly gives meaning to the operation – revenge and retribution – even if that meaning masks the vague and unconvincing premise that may have brought them there, the viewer has been positioned to share their vengeful sentiment, identification having been seamlessly effected; this process, of course, conveniently sidesteps those nagging questions (why are we here, by what right), insinuating the viewer as part of the ‘we’ who are going to make ‘them’ pay.^[51]

However, patriotism is not the primary reason for enlistment, as Boucher joined the army due to job boredom, while Private First Class J. J. McCool claims that ‘anytime I’ve ever done anything crazy I’ve wanted it on video, then I decided to join the military because I thought it would be a lot of fun, I wanted to be able to document that’. Consequently, war is perceived as one possible extreme experience among many others: McCool is shown practising ziplining, which is classified as an action sport (Fig. 8), and there is an iconographic resemblance between extreme sports and war in the series. In a study of BASE jumpers, researchers found recurring motivations such as ‘“being able to deal with or fix intense situations through decisions” […] an Adrenaline Rush […] being in Control, or Overcoming Fear, in which participants “control emotions” or “face fears”; and Camaraderie, in which BASE jumpers cite “sharing the experience with close friends” or feel “supported from other BASE jumpers”’.^[52]The same motives, conveyed to the field of war, are expressed by the protagonists of the series.

Thus, Taking Fire depicts the trajectory of joining the army to overcome challenges and danger, to become an adult and improve oneself. War becomes an individualised initiatory experience, filtered through a limited visual representation and intangible in its totality. There is no outside view of the narrated events; both the troops and the audience are completely immersed in the action. Nevertheless, the images are perceived as primary testimony to the nature of war because helmet cameras can share both the individual’s subjectivity and point of view. Hoskins and O’Loughlin argue that ‘personal accounts may offer questionable veracity and an absence of objectivity, but they do provide authenticity’.^[53] Furthermore, poor images are commonly associated with ‘authenticity, sincerity, and even truth’,^[54] according to Francesco Casetti.

Taking Fire represents a narrative short-circuit that places the series in a different stage of the relationship between war and media. In 2015, Hoskins and O’Loughlin introduced a third phase in the process of war mediatisation: the arrested war. This expression denotes ‘a new paradigm in which professional media and military institutions have arrested the once-chaotic social media dynamics and more effectively harnessed them for their own ends through new understandings, strategies, and experiments’.^[55] Disoriented at first by the swirling flow of digital production, media companies are today able to adapt abruptly to the Web 2.0 revolution, incorporating the audiovisual material generated by individual users on the internet. There is no longer competition between broadcast media and bottom-up approaches, as the former has increased its range to the point of absorbing what used to stand as alternative narratives. Hoskins and O’Loughlin develop the expression arrested war because:

Media arrests war. It stops war escaping – escaping unintelligibility, escaping mainstream coverage, and escaping the control of military commanders. To arrest is to seize, or to stop or check. To arrest is also to attract the attention of. Those protagonists we would expect to be operating in hard-to-reach places – such as IS – seek the attention of the most open and popular channels and spaces. They are drawn to the mainstream media ecology because it has re-asserted its function as primary channel of the world’s affairs. We live, now, in a time of Arrested War. War no longer evades the eye of the primary gatekeepers. The dynamics once deemed chaotic are now harnessed.^[56]

Taking Fire presents authentic images captured by the protagonists in the actual locations of the conflict. Some of this audiovisual material is uploaded to YouTube and subsequently noticed by television producers. However, this filmic testimony is deemed inadequate as it lacks narrative elements despite possessing multisensory and kinetic traits. As a result, a plot is created based on the stylistic features of fictional cinema, extreme sports, and videogames. This canonical form, which reframes the war experience for audiences, does not allow for any subversion. Although new technologies permit the co-presence of multiple vantage points, Taking Fire employs a partial gaze that aligns with the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, as articulated by James Der Derian.^[57] Closer examination reveals that Taking Fire offers little insight into the ontology of war. Indeed, as Nicholas Mirzoeff sharply points out, like most media objects produced in the course of the War on Terror:

What was in retrospect remarkable about this mass of material was the lack of any truly memorable images. For all the constant circulation of images, there was still nothing to see. The relative anonymity of the war images must then be understood as a direct consequence of the media saturation. […] There is no longer anything spectacular about this updated society of the spectacle.^[58]

Conclusion

Through this study, we have attempted to posit a framework to describe the images produced by helmet cameras. Drawing in particular on Branigan’s and Eugeni’s studies of the first-person perspective, together with Nichols’ work on documentary filmmaking, we have coined the term testimonial-performativity to define the visual language of these devices. In the testimonial-performativity approach, the supposed objectivity of a fully-automated artificial gaze coexists with the individual sensitivity of a body that is always open to stimuli from the surrounding space. Successively, we showed how helmet cameras fit into a kaleidoscopic mediascape in which different practices share several common traits and characteristics. In the final section, we saw how these devices have also been used in more canonical narratives in which images are reabsorbed within the media-military complex that has been thrown into crisis by the advent of Web 2.0. In Taking Fire, war becomes a path of personal growth, and the mise-en-scènemirrors that of action sports and FPS: the soldier is presented as a reckless and daring individual fighting in an arena full of pitfalls and dangers. The ultimate reward is survival and individual development.

Unsurprisingly, this is not the only possible application. Helmet cameras have also been employed in narratives that seem to challenge martial discourses. One example is the film Combat Obscura (2019), made by soldier-director Miles Lagoze during his deployment in Afghanistan. The Marine Corps threatened legal action to prevent the distribution of the documentary.^[59] Moreover, helmet cameras have not only been used by American troops: jihadist guerrillas, civilians, and far-right terrorists have also used them for various purposes. Again, wearable recording devices are being used in theatres of war other than those of the Global War on Terror. In the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, for example, many soldiers on both sides continue to share images on social networks. All these instances deserve further investigation and research.

Without claiming to cover such a vast and complex topic, this paper has attempted to highlight the characteristics of helmet cameras, focusing on one case study considered to be extremely significant. Indeed, Taking Firedemonstrates how each filming device establishes a specific spectacle of the world, and at the same time the images are enmeshed in an unstable web of relationships with other media strategies and practices, each of which aims to influence the viewer’s perception and understanding.

Author

Federico Selvini holds a PhD in Visual and Media Studies at IULM University in Milan, where he currently researches and teaches. He holds a Master’s degree in Cinema and New Technologies. He is the author of Sguardi incarnati. Fenomenologia delle videocamere indossabili, published by Mimesis in 2023. He has published several essays in academic journals and he is a contributor to Segnocinema. His research interests include film and media studies, particularly wearable technologies and machine vision.

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^[1] Virilio 1984, p. 4.

^[2] Struk 2011, p. 30.

^[3] Oldfield 2019, p. 42.

^[4] Merrin 2019, pp. 113-114.

^[5] Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2010, p. 18.

^[6] Ibid., p. 10.

^[7] Mitchell 2011, pp. 2-3.

^[8] Ortiz & Moya 2015.

^[9] The video can be accessed via the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLHU-_OhT8g (accessed on 16 November 2022).

^[10] Branigan 1984, p. 103.

^[11] Ibid., p. 108.

^[12] Eugeni 2012.

^[13] Casetti 1998, p. 49.

^[14] Eugeni 2012, p. 24.

^[15] Bégin 2016, p. 107.

^[16] Ibid., pp. 110-111.

^[17] Sumartojo & Pink 2017, p. 39.

^[18] Nichols 2017, p. 132.

^[19] Jaffe 2013 (emphasis added).

^[20] Nichols 2017, p. 138.

^[21] Ibid., p. 139.

^[22] Ibid., p. 149.

^[23] Ibid., p. 152.

^[24] Sobchack 2004, p. 86.

^[25] Fontcuberta 2016, pp. 18-19 (translated by the author).

^[26] Pisters 2010, p. 241.

^[27] Smith & McDonald 2011.

^[28] Stahl 2010, p. 42.

^[29] Ibid., p. 16.

^[30] Ibid., p. 54.

^[31] Ibid., p. 65.

^[32] Vannini & Stewart 2016, p. 153.

^[33] Allman & Mittelstaedt & Martin & Goldenberg 2009, p. 242.

^[34] McSorley 2012, p. 50 (emphasis added).

^[35] Voorhees & Call & Whitlock 2012, p. 6.

^[36] Andrews 2023.

^[37] Voorhees 2012, p. 107.

^[38] Eken 2016, p. 138.

^[39] Eagle 2019, p. 139.

^[40] Klevjer 2009.

^[41] Hart 2019, p. 79.

^[42] Ibid.

^[43] Flint 2016.

^[44] Eagle 2019, p. 144.

^[45] Voorhees & Call & Whitlock 2012, p. 10.

^[46] McSorley 2012, p. 52.

^[47] Ibid., p. 53.

^[48] Ibid., p. 54.

^[49] Stahl 2018, p. 143.

^[50] Ibid., p. 22.

^[51] Lebow 2012, p. 45.

^[52] Allman & Mittelstaedt & Martin & Goldenberg 2009, p. 241.

^[53] Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2010, p. 68.

^[54] Casetti 2015, p. 121.

^[55] Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2015, p. 1320.

^[56] Ibid., p. 1321.

^[57] Der Derian 2009.

^[58] Mirzoeff 2005, p. 79.

^[59] Horton 2019.