From niche military technology to a ubiquitous presence in the arts and entertainment, the drone has become iconic and has changed, in just a few years, our basic audiovisual vocabulary.

A few weeks ago, as I was watching the live transmission of the Cyclocross World Championship on TV, I was distracted from the race by a drone shot. I noticed a paradox: tasked with transparently recording the “hostilities” (as journalistic jargon would have it), the drone ended up doing the exact opposite – referencing itself, installing a screen. This isn’t some subtle observation by a “specialist”: with an image quality that is clearly inferior to that of other cameras spread across the circuit, and with an unequaled speed, the drone struck a distinctive note that was impossible to ignore. But, however interesting this patchwork of formats (HD vs. pixelated images) that arises from juxtaposition may be, I wasn’t thinking about it at the moment. What I had my sights on was more diffuse, more profound: the sensation that I was a live witness to an innovation in the audiovisual landscape of sports transmission, an innovation that, beyond all else, had all the chances of quickly turning into a norm.

Allow me to explain myself. I hadn’t even set out to cultivate a critical approach towards the form of televised recordings of competition – in other words, to show an interest in the images of sport –, when I was already struck by a sense of vanity. And not unreasonably so: in the end, what is remarkable about sports images is precisely the fact that they are constant – to the degree that we have already started to consider the televised transmission of a match, be it football, tennis, or any other sport, as a sort of second nature. Like a sort of artificial skin that is perfectly grafted onto the real epidermis, discreetly enhancing it. If televised sport would be something else – for example, a field for permanent audiovisual innovation –, the experience of being its spectator would quickly become insufferable. This is why, when a foreign body penetrates this immutable formal tissue, we have all the right to detect this as an event with complex ramifications, that spread out into the future.

Televised sports – just like war, the other extreme where people forge new techniques of observation and recording – are a laboratory in which the unfolding experiment is all the more intense if one can mask its effects more effectively. As such, a UFO-like image – ultra-mobile, hyper-immersive –, landing in the midst of a standard, “rational” format of static shots and restrained panoramas, whose meaning is to faithfully render an event that takes place in a fixed space (here, the race circuit) without distorting it. When a new type of image appears as suddenly as it did here, it automatically makes its presence felt, disturbing the simple, “invisible” style of recording that one has become accustomed to. The image of the drone no longer solely refers to the match – it’s a viewing experience in and of itself. And it’s an experience that so brutally disjoints the usual workings of the transmission that it determines an explosion within the realism of the things that are shown.

Sleekly whizzing through the trees, speeding by so quickly that the landscape was barely kept intelligible, here, the drone recalls the action-packed cinema one would see in, say, Top Gun, and, as such, an imaginary video game. What we see is not a recording, but rather, the subjective angle of a hunter jet pilot. “At first glance, such a black aircraft that breathes down the neck of cyclists seems terrifying,” a Flemish journalist jotted down after the race was over. “But these images are simply sensational”.

It’s no wonder that this drone elicited various reactions. The gap that was opened between conventional technique and new inventions throws us smack in the middle of the visibility regimes that nowadays are more volatile than ever. Pilot Jan Crommelinck and his “second-in-command”, Tim Veruggen, have used their drone to touch upon some of the most fertile contradictions of the audiovisual: for example, the way in which an added touch of immersion translates into, at least until the contrary can be proven by technological improvements, a rupture in convention and a marked sensation of unreality. Or how a step in the direction of efficiency – the difficulty of placing classical video cameras along a terrain that is difficult to access, such as a forest – is balanced by an insane tracking shot of some stars (the frontrunners of the race, in this case): in its aims to reach a larger audience, sport seems to borrow one or two lessons from Hollywood.

A monumental image that knows no off-screen

The multiplication of the drone’s tasks – along with its relative democratization – have transformed it into an instrument that is familiar to most everyone. Its usage in performance sports doesn’t represent anything else but its enshrinement, the professionalizatition of a simple utilization: Sunday afternoon relaxation.

Light and easily transportable in a backpack, the drone is starting to fulfill a function that is all the more similar to the Super8 cameras of old, from whom we expected a type of work that lies both in the service of memory and of showing off, from a social proint of view. With its almost comical buzzing – the versatile DJI Mini model indeed looks like a more or less endearing little bug – and with its high degree of maneuverability, the drone is the one device that gives the exact hour in terms of spare time entertainment. It doesn’t precede the things that it shoots by inventing new specific activities, but rather, it’s called upon to endow older activities with the rather megalomaniacal aura of “great moments” that deserve to be saved from the oblivion of forgetting. It’s an enhancement.

However, it should by no means be regarded as a simple toy that dads use while they’re out on a picnic. And what lies testament to this is the topicality that has turned the drone into a decisive pawn on the chessboard of warfare, over the last year. From kamikaze drones to those bearing munitions, one could notice throughout the entirety of the War in Ukraine that the gadget’s initial meaning has been updated, into that of an efficient killing machine. Even surveillance or spy drones – which are closer tho the above-discusses usage – returns an eminently political charge to the banal act of “taking pictures”, far from its innocent added value on Sundays.

On the other hand, it’s well-known that – especially since the works of the great theoretician and filmmaker Harun Farocki – that “war technologies are still the precursories of civillian technologies, like in the case of the radar, of short waves, of the computer, of stereo sounds and jet-propelled aircraft”. In his film Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1989), Farocki started out from an outright pedagogical aim – to enhance knowledge – that is contained within the act of photography, only for him to then discuss the fundamental ambivalence of imagery that has military usage. The basis of this discussion is constituted by the experience of Allied plane pilots in the Second World War who, wishing to use images to certify the bombing of strategic industrial targets on German territory, are unable to realize that, in the very middle of the photographs that they have taken, one can find the Nazis’ extermination cams, hiding in plain sight.

With his genial flair, here, Farocki unearth the traces of the drone’s ancestors. It’s worthwhile to inist a bit upon this figurative aspect. Since, as useful as we might think these aerial images might be within a series of strictly coded military activities, they seem just as strange to the untrained eye that simply wishes to see.

Arriving from the heights of the sky, these video materials do little more than to confirm, after all, what is the general drone-isation of the audiovisual landscape. With their forced preference for master shots – that is, panoramas that integrate tons of information –, the drone bears within itself a totalizing essence, that is all the more frightening. It displayed and image that, in its standard mode, is monumental, and knows no off-screen: everything enters the frame from all sides, in what is a visual plenitude that feels outright oppressive. So this is about more than just simple – ground-level – fear towards a staggering aerial object. It’s also especially a necessary hesitation towards a danger that has turned from aesthetic (the impossibility of making a triage of its material) into ethical (the panopticon is never too far away).

It’s not neccesarily the fact that, given what theoretician Jean-Louis Commoli affirmation that “cinema” means “all the types of images that are recorded after being framed and that are then, still in a framed form, shown onto a screen”, to solemnly declare, as we’re confronted with the difficulties that drone imagery poses in regards to framing, to say that they do not constitute cinema. In the end, what relevance does the act of proclaiming a specificity of the medium hold – even a minimal one, such as in this case – in an era when reels and the cinematheque are getting intertwined? It would be much more productive to notice how, almost every single time when the drone was mobilized by the mass-media in order to reveal, it followed its duty by adhering to a sensitive regime of the image that is all the more well-trodden the more it is poor in contradictions. We could witness such drones utilized towards the purposes of tourism and publicity – footage of some natural wonder or another, etc. – or, on the opposite side (but not quite), towards sensationalistic informative means.

Conscious of the almost involuntary effect that is caused by drone imagery – one of astonishment at such unnatural proportions – the manipulators of said imagery have doubled down on “accumulation”, “agglomaration”, “collective” and other such themes that can be easily generated at such an altitude. For example, we could alternatively take a look at the clip posted by president Volodymyr Zelensky in celebration of the 31st anniversary of the Independence of Ukraine, with a drone that suggestively flies over a string of abandoned tanks on the capital’s main boulevard – “spoils of war” that speak for themselves through quantity, and videos odf the destruction wrought by the earthquakes in Turkey, where the “proportion” of the catastrophe is explicitly contained within the image, and the tragedy is reduced to the post-human sight of the ruins.

A detached/detaching view upon humanity

In other words, one could say that the drone eliminated the human, minority and singular element from the image. At the height of the horizon, details get lost; all is multitude, cheap affect, a forcing of the gaze. Even the concentration camp in Auschwitz, in this proto-drone imagery, had beed reduced to the maximum, turning into a random architectural figure, almost indiscernible. And maybe this is precisely why – arising from this impossibility of sorting, of highlighting, of framing – it has arrived, in cinema, together with this feeling of commiting an atrocity. The usage of drones in films should follow the awknoledgement of this quality that is beyond human, to the same degree to which it underlines it with worry and relentless curiosity. The films that have managed to endow the drone with meaning are those that, instead of barricading themselves due to a sense of panic towards this effect of dislocation or displacement that is generated by this new technology, have embraced it with a responsible mix of fascination and fear.

The aim of this text is not to make an inventory of such films. But maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing if I could highlight or call to mind some of the privileged moments of the short, but already rich history of cinema’s collaborations with the drone. When Portuguese filmmamker João Pedro Rodrigues employs the flying machine in his 2016 film O ornitólogo, he intuits a usage that rips us out of the rather sterile dichotomy between good humanism and bad visual publicity. He doesn’t do it by undermining the balance of power (something that was indeed the enterprise of this delightful publicity film that is Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO), but by proposing something entirely different: an autonomous intuition. Which evokes the sensation that, by equating the drone shot with the hypothetical perspective of a bird, Rodrigues reinvents everything by using the self-evidence of sovereign gesture. The tense beginning of O ornitólogo, with its mix of static shots of the main character as he’s observing from his kayak, and the POVs that belong to the agitated avians, but also with “cinematic” landscapes in the vein of Discovery Channel, is one of the most beautifully negotiated film sequences of the past years. The drone sees itself integrated in a dispositif that transforms new types of imaged into a possibility that is yet to have been fully explored, which is precisely why they are so hypnotic.

Another film – but much lesser known – conscriously radicalizes Rodigues’ revelation; meaning, a transformation into a mannerist gesture. I’m speaking of Acid Forest (2018) by Rugile Barzdziukaite, which I discovered at an edition of the Pelicam festival, and that struck me from the very beginning with its mix of being both literal and futile. Discussing the damages caused by the acidic faeces of cormorants on forests, the film – a sample of rather uptight formalism – repeatedly uses drone images, under the aspect of traversing these devastated forests in flight, which are accompanied by the off-screen noise of flapping wings. The analogy is simple and, used within a documentary, has the merit of proving itself as being so “in your face” that it becomes visible from outer space – and still (here lies the paradox) who could have truly believed in it? 

The difference between the two films ultimately has to do with everything that one must call “mise-en-scene”: in other words, a certain art in interlinking images, of discovering within them a rough terrain, a delayed mirroring, or a mutual enhancement.

Left to its own devices, the drone delivers an ugly and flat imagery, without any opening. In order for it to become interesting, it first needs to be taken into consideration within its own terrain – new technologies – and tested against the petty humanity that it constantly risks of literally losing sight of.

Collage by Oana Barbonie

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.