War and Peace

From the nitrate film prints used by the pioneers of cinema to record the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, to footage of contemporary war conflicts taken with the smartphones of random passers-by. A significant part of our visual memory of the last hundred years consists of images of war. In four chapters, the documentary epic War and Peace investigates the making, archiving, and social significance of films depicting warfare in different times and places. Aesthetics and technology change, but what remains the same is that film is not only a neutral witness in war, but also one of the most powerful weapons. „It is clear that cinema, from its origins, has had a stronger link with war than with peace, in part because of the spirit that permeated the first half of the last century and the intrinsic need to document historic events, and in part owing to the real difficulty of filming a process of peace.“