“For the first time back then, I thought about everything seriously. The past and the future, both equally unknowable, and also this ongoing situation that the consulates call transitory but that we know in everyday language as the present.” – Anna Seghers, “Transit”

A good few months ago, when the war in Ukraine was an all-encompassing preoccupation, I conceived a theoretical intervention in its searing midst, starting from a very simple bias: I would limit myself and solely regard its images (of course, a selection that was to be relatively representative) while trying to understand what and how they transmit things to us. Now that the war is, fortunately (?), going further and further away from us (in every sense), it’s time to reprise the analysis from the very point that I left it, following the trace of a bicycle rider that was riding down the empty boulevards of Kyiv, perfectly unbothered by the ongoing tragedy, and who thus ended up symbolizing a sort of contradictory semantic pothole laid in the path of a propaganda machine – the war itself – which loves to prance about without having to deal with any stops on the way. As such, we should return to the scene and make good use of this deceptive calmness in the production of images on the front, but to do so by attacking the problem in an opposite sense: not by starting from the fun facts that pierce the conventional texture of the war imaginarium, rather from the central event of these months, that demolishes the rifts (political, social, audiovisual) that has insinuated themselves up to that moment – the Bucha Massacre.

All sorts of images streamed into the images from the village that was found in a state of destruction after the Russians’ retreat: images too human (acquaintances of the victims screaming in pain) and images insufferably machinist (visuals captured by drones), hurriedly standing in line on the profitable marketplace of suffering. The risk of analysis, in this case, would be to fall, treading down the same path as our current political leaders, into the mirage of a rank battle between Truth and Lies, the kind of clash that peaked during another essential moment in the history of the image – the Romanian Revolution –, once rumors of the fake mass grave in Timișoara started to circulate. It’s important to remind how that debate ended with a powerless confession on this apparently destructive function of the image, that which transforms the world into a simulacrum, accelerating it and de-realizing it up to the point that it reaches the state of a transfigured reality that is impossible to reach. A seductive, yet seemingly simplistic argument, and ever since then it has been so clear that this sinister accusation towards the image-as-an-agent-of-virtualizing is simply misplaced: just look at how many civilians died in Ukraine (or in Iraq, or Syria) despite the audiovisual stream that has flooded our screens over and over again, a sign that bullets are just as real and the war is just as terrible. Instead, it would be much more productive to see which device of visibility integrates these images, in order to co-exist with them more healthily, shielded from the paranoid verdicts that replace knowledge. In the words of theoretician Jean-Louis Comolli, “war serves as a means (amongst others) to blast up any precautions concerning the appearance of violence or horror”. As such, our obligation, as people who claim to be preoccupied with images, is to re-establish these precautions.

I’m interested in a particular image that came from Bucha, and the fact that it’s centered around another bicycle has less to do with a sort of formal dandyism – that is, to smooth out the connection with my words from a couple of months ago – and more with the sensation that sums up, in itself, a few important lessons regarding the market of contemporary war images. The photo was shot by Ronaldo Schemidt and shows the dead body of a man lying in plain sight on the street – his face obscured by the camera’s angle –, the frame of his bicycle lying between his legs. A terrible image, of the kind that can lay testament to the gratuitous, anonymous violence of the fratricidal war. The presence of the rusty bike, with its grocery bag improvised on the top of its back wheel, makes the image bloodcurdling, since it indicates the wantonness of the crime and of the banality of a life that has been suddenly terminated. It’s what makes the image transcend its simple meaning as a reportage illustration, allowing it to attest to an unspeakable supplement, a rebellion of silence. But it’s exactly this – a perversion hailing from the time that frames would necessarily turn to a matter of morals – that makes images become suddenly uneasy. A contradiction starts to be born from its very punctum. Because one can feel that, behind its desire to transmit more than it shows, like the photographer would be forcing himself upon a real that he bends to his own, aestheticizing will. Look at the photo once again – see how perfectly the frame of the bicycle falls in the middle of the image, a sign that the photographer, before clicking his shutter, was careful enough to place the dead man as symmetrically as he could within the frame, while even taking care of its depth of field. This pretension to beauty – to the status of “oeuvre” – is not at all welcome, because it betrays the very principles of human dignity, especially when, almost literally, it is created behind the back of its subject. In that instance, the photograph ceases to be an image – a window to the other, if you will – and becomes a shocking publicity logo, much more of an accomplice to the reality that it pretends to denounce than one would like to believe.

Recent media streams have been assailed by such visual samples that, under the pretext of informing the audience, do little more than to captivate – and to hold captive – the gaze. The success of these clichés – and I’m using the term in both of its meanings – has more to do with the process of immediate recognition on the part of the spectators that it’s counting upon. In simpler terms, they arrive at us after they have been stamped with labels such as “war”, “suffering”, “death” and other grave words written in sympathetic ink over their explicit contents. Thus revealing – to paraphrase philosopher Jacques Rancière – a precise connection between the verbal and the visual that comes to greet expectations and to recomfort them through the sleep-inducing power of a déjà-vu, which ejects the specificity of the present in favor of similarities with others upon others theaters of war, reducible to the same meager imaginarium. That is not to say that violence and suffering should not be shown – on the contrary, hiding them would mean playing into the enemy’s hands. But it’s as necessary as can be nowadays, a renewed questioning of the ways how these all-too-sleek visuals end up massively circulating throughout the media apparatus, to search, instead, for the images capable, in the words of Ranciere, „to disrupt the usual regime of this connection [between verbal and visual], as applied by the official system of information.”

On the 19th of May, I went to a bookstore in Marseille, this fabulous city where Anna Seghers wrote her grand novel, Transit, in the forties, wherein the imaginarium of the present war – rows upon rows of refugees often caught in the quagmire of an absurd bureaucracy – has many echoes. I was looking for some random work, but my gaze was caught by the central display of books dedicated to Ukraine, amongst them, a book by Yevgenia Belorusets, titled It’s 15:30 and we are still alive, subtitled War Diary. The publisher makes the reader put up their guard: “At the time that we’re sending this to the typography, Yevgenia Belorusets is in Berlin. She continues to write, and we will continue to publish her.” It was only later that I started to think about what I was holding: the book had enough time to make its way onto the shelf, the contract had enough time to be signed, the diary to be written, even the war to begin and with it, atrocity to be perpetuated. The timeline had gone crazy, galloping in the name of information, one peppered with sensationalism and immediacy.

A few days ago, I came across the author’s name once again, while I was navigating social media in search of counter-images (as Farocki would call them) for this media steamroller that I wanted to escape. An occasion in which I could notice that every entry in her diary, dutifully kept until the 5th of April, is accompanied by an image (Belorusets is also a photographer). Interestingly, the images are more precious than the lines that should accompany them more or less redundantly, from the position of a subordinate, maybe also because audiovisual in general has started to become increasingly less coded and lacking in imagination, which is why any sign of perturbation is now noticeable from afar. Thus, on the 16th day (11th of March), we see a woman spray-painting a panel of the map of Kyiv: a telling image of a war set at a given distance from the perfectly recognizable arms and uniforms, which takes ownership of a regime of visibility that regards routine, turning it upside down – hooliganism turned patriotic act. Further on (day 21), but in the same key: a street where we can notice, at a distance, the silhouette of an adult holding hands with a child, in an image whose sole reminder of the military situation is its strange urban emptiness. Still, life persists in continuing its given rituals (walks around the neighborhood), thus turning into a statement. The simple reflexes which Yevgenia Belorusets shows here – thanks to a smartphone that is attentive to its surroundings – produce precisely the type of distress that can block facial recognition (and the ensuing calmness of one’s conscience, along the lines of: “the surgery was successful, the patient is dead”), instead offering us an image per piece, day after day, born from the perspective of the regular citizen, the one who is more often than not swallowed whole by the noisy media flux.

The rudimentary slideshow cropped up by the photographer includes a few works by artist Nikita Kadan at one point. (Besides, in the context of Romanian Creative Week, Kadan was the author of a work called “The Mobile Circle”, placed in front of the Unirea Hotel in  Iași – a “dance” of “Czech Hedgehogs”, anti-tank stoppers that will, later on, be donated to the city.) I had randomly stopped reading around the place where I read his name when scrolling through Instagram in search of war images, I happened upon a short video (9 seconds long) in which the framed a bombarded block of flats, in portrait mode – black traces of fire all across its facade – partially makes by a handful of blooming trees in the foreground. Like in a materialist film by Straub-Huillet, the film was content with showing the mute action of the wind: the leaves move here and fro, while the audio-only records the gust that hits the microphone. The force of this small gesture, of capturing a moving reality – with the trunks that execute like a sort of supplementary framing of the war’s visible traces, which simultaneously hide it under the foliage – was much more deeply touching to me, in its modesty as an observational testimony, than any coverage fabricated by the global media apparatus, with its appetite for totalitarian images. On the contrary: this fragment is important because it raises a sort of threshold in an audiovisual fluxus where everything is over-explained and hyper-visible, giving it the worthy dimensions (contemplation and silence) to these imprints of history that are but ephemeral. It concerns me not just from the prism of this moral, a bit of a tearjerker, on the perseverance of nature – but also because it reminds me of the words of theoretician Dork Zabunyan, who said that “images are rather more of a force that doesn’t belong to anybody, and which virtually traverse the bodies and spirits of anyone to reconfigure our relationship to the real, especially when this real is, in itself, the locus of a major political crisis.”

In a fundamental essay written on the occasion of the first Gulf War (1991) and titled “Montage Obligatory”, critic Serge Daney noticed the absence, in the televised transmission (essentially those of CNN), of any images of a bombed-out Baghdad – along with the need to supplement their lack through a process of critical imagination. It’s imperative to note how, nowadays, despite the dizzying proliferation of images across all channels, there are some blind spots still – these vexing hors-champs – on the map of visibility of the war in Ukraine. Even so: what about the civilians whose lives continue under the rain of bombs, far away from the spotlight of the news? It may be that the involuntary specialist of this process of imagining/decomposing/rearranging/recomposing reality from the perspective of day-to-day people is amateur photographer Oleksandr Burlaka, known on Instagram as maidan_nezalezhnosti, an allusion to the central square in Kyiv where the pro-European revolution of 2014 took place. Ever since the outbreak of the war, Burkala has been using his account as an indispensable, minimalistic chronicle of the war, seen from the perspective of the subtle modifications that it operates upon the urban sphere. I see an echo of the above photo in this image of traffic signs that have been smeared in black paint, in order to hamper the orientation of enemy troops. I see a tragi-comical testament in the image of this uneven wall constructed out of sandbags, a blue Lada, a bench, and a few chairs, as if people were building on top of these immutable parameters of the real, in a summary nostalgic note regarding ex-Soviet spaces. I see this funny plastic figurine that has been set in the vicinity of a school, whose face bears the trace of bullets. In his urban journey, Burlaka pays attention to minor things, thanks to which he manages to relay the richness of the experiences which compose the quotidian life of a regular resident of Kyiv: a rigorous countershot to the sensationalist imagery that has captured the audience for months on end.

Once more, this is not about sweetening reality – but about inscribing it within the framework of a different device, once capable of understanding that an image is not a message to be deciphered, but a sensible content that resists the idea of any “truth”. Besides, it’s enough to see this image shot by Burlaka which includes pieces from two apartment blocks – literal pieces, since the one on the left has been hit by a rocket, while the one on the right is almost fused with the first yet still intact, shows people living inside. The same principle of the insignificant detail is at work here, as well as in the photo which shows the ravages of a bombardment, featuring the interior of an apartment that is shown under the sun, with a bucket miraculously untouched, propped against a broken wardrobe. To end in a circular fashion, what I find phenomenal is this image of an individual wearing civilian clothes who is riding a bicycle, with a machine gun slung over his shoulder. Recently still, another man, once more riding a bike, is going down a deserted boulevard, framed by socialist apartment blocks, in an image of Ukraine that is practically inseparable from those taken during the peacetime of yesterday.

In my previous entry, I spoke about the large-scale usage of drones by the Ukrainian camp: the famous Bayraktar, deadly weapons at a minimal cost. But, there is another important function to thse flying machines – that of being a photo/video camera, of course. This way, we could witness how within these battles images were multiplied fromthe air, like an arch over time that related to the visual samples collected by allied pilots over the territory of Germany during the final daus of the war, wherein Harun Farocki – the first of them all – knew, in the eighties, to read the unquestionable traces of the extermination camps (Images of the World and Inscription of War / Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges). Even so, common sense forces us to notice that the role of drones has multiplied in the meantime. Whereas sattelite imagery principally serves strategic purposes – who of us hasn’t, in the last months, seen the images of the already-famous convoy of russian trucks stopped at the side of the road by the lack of fuel? –, the drone benefits from a more creative turnover. It seems to be used especially in areas where human have a scarce and difficult access, like the ruins that are now the town of Mariupol. Understandable, up to here. But the sansation is that the drone is not only asked to document, but to also contribute at the construction of a war imaginarium which fulfills a quasi-tautological function: of attesting the very existence of war. Drone images responde to a totalizing desire: they show the furthest reaches of destruction, and it’s very clear that, seen in such a manner – “bird’s eye” –, the buildings in Mariupol gain the accursed aura of photogenics. There is a beauty, an obsessive attraction of post-air raid ruin – the very same that W. G. Sebald noted in The Natural History of Destruction –, whose implacable leveling is confirmed here by the just-as-flattening images of the drone. If Comoli was right in another instance, where he said that “cinema” means “all the types of images that are recorded fter being framed, and that, framed again, are shown on a screen, etiher by screening, either by broadcasting”, then I’m not quite sure that drone images, with their non-frames that embrace the entire skyline, without the possibility of choosing between what can be seen and what cannot be seen, can be cinema (maybe only one lacking in human soul, like in the case of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel). 

In the face of this type of imagery, which fully discards the lexicon of cinematography – framing, off-screen, editing –, we need to reinstitue the factor of the human gaze, under the form of this audiovisual fitness that, in the words of Dork Zabunyan, can constitute “an attempt, be it modest, of organizing this undefined wave of images, to modulate it differently, even to interrupt it at times”. In other words, to modify the consistency of contemporaneousness in accordance to our own wills. In a 2016 film dedicated to the town of Mariupol, filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravicius – killed this yer in the very same town by Russian troops – showed the image of a priest that took off his cowl, only for him to remain garbed in his army combat suit. This act of professional transvestment, taking place in a chapel at the periphery of society and mass-media, could serve as a guide to this preliminary investigaton, together with the selection of the above-discussed photos. It’s important to understand that, in the era of this formidable expansion of the audiovisual sphere, any one of us can be the producer of the counter-images that oppose hegemonic narrations and which restore dignity to the anonymous subject. Could this war distract attention from the costly machineries (be they bombastic tanks of “flying” cameras) in order to concentrate it around the modest and intimate gesture of making images? It would mean a small signal of hope in an era that will go down in history as barbaric.

Victor Morozov

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