I have a longstanding criticism of the well-meaning documentaries produced for PBS by Ken Burns. These are shows like The Roosevelts, Jazz, and, most famously, The Civil War, the series on which Burns reputation is founded. In all of his documentaries, Burns runs out of footage relevant to his subject matter -- this is particularly the case with The Civil War series, a program about an event that was only sporadically photographed and, then, with primitive and heavy still cameras. Burns addresses deficiencies in his visual resources by simply recycling the same pictures over and over again all the while accompanied by plaintive folk-song like melodies and poetic narrative. This device seems to me dishonest. Every picture is taken for a purpose and shows something that the photographer wanted to document in its specificity. I want to know why the picture was taken and who its shows. I want to know the location where the photograph was made and how the content of the picture relates to the historical information that Burns is providing in his film. But Burns rarely describes the pictures that he features in his documentaries (unless the show is about country music or jazz in which he can actually edit into his picture real performances). Indeed, most often the pictures are equivalent of screen-savers, images that are pretty and, even, atmospheric but which are never explained as to person, place or what is being represented. You can listen to Burns' Civil War like a radio-play. The pictures are more or less completely superfluous, sometimes to an irritating effect -- after all, some of these pictures are extraordinary, have strange and memorable details and the viewer wants to know what the images mean. But Burns is to busy retailing to you his tendentious views of history, generally voiced in lugubrious tones by Peter Coyote, and the images always seem to be orphaned, a mere after-thought.
I have a similar response to the nightmare French documentary There will be no Night (2021, streaming on MUBI). This documentary is comprised entirely of gun-camera footage excerpted from government archives maintained with respect to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. As the narrator assures us, every single combat encounter is automatically filmed and, then, analyzed and archived. Failure to retain or archive the gun-camera footage is apparently a felony. Therefore, there is a huge library of pictures showing helicopter and missile strikes on supposed belligerents in these theaters of war. The director, Eleonore Weber, has accessed this footage, almost all shot with FLIR (night-vision) technology, and cut together the combat scenes with a poetic, rather Ken Burnsian voice-over. (One might think that this work required labor in the archives -- in fact, the more spectacular gun-camera images are invariably leaked and can be seen on You-Tube. (The credits at the end of the film generally identify You-Tube sites -- it doesn't appear that Weber had any cooperation from military authorities either in France or the United States). Weber consults with a French bombardier and helicopter pilot whom she calls Victor K. She provides some technical information courtesy of this informant. However, in general the footage is completely untethered from any circumstances -- with one notable exception, we aren't told where the pictures were made, what is going on in the imagery, or who is being blown to pieces by machine-guns apparently firing explosive shells that rain down on the apparent "enemy" and simply make them disappear. Without any context, the footage is titillating and depressing, but since we don't what is going on, don't know the nature of the mission, and don't know who is being murdered from the air (often from several kilometers away), it's impossible to evaluate anything that we are shown in the film. Assuming the nature of these wars and their military objectives (or lack of objectives), we can't tell if we're being shown war crimes, atrocities, or merely violent incidents on the battle-field. And if we can't evaluate the ethics or morality of the killing with which we are confronted, the movie becomes somewhat pointless -- really just exploitation of the sort that caused these picture to be posted on the internet in the first place.
The film begins with some FLIR (infra-red night-vision) shots of big, sinister-looking helicopters rising into the sky. There's an uncanny image of three parallel white beams of light probing along the surface of a butte or mesa -- it's unearthly and I have no idea what I am seeing. We're shown some training footage -- the gun-sight follows some groups of men in what appears to be a rural French village and, then, the crosshairs track a car. The narrator tells us that it's important to keep a target in sight at all times -- if you lose track of the target, even momentarily, there may be a case of mistaken identity resulting in a massacre of innocents. The narrator points out that the gun-sight pilots, who track their targets with motions of their head, seem to be able to see everything, yet always complain that their victims are barely visible at all. Zooms are "nauseating" and pilots avoid them. Although the footage shows detailed terrain and enemy movements, there are limitations -- the gunship pilots can't tell roads from rivers except for the fact that water reflects the stars in the sky. The battlefield footage is all ambiguous. We don't know what we're seeing. In one sequence, a car meets a truck next to a bare field. Men get out and someone carries a long narrow object (a rifle?) into the empty terrain and throws it aside. The man then darts back to the trucks where a couple of other wait for him. The pilot fires and the men vanish in a cloud of exploding dirt. Then, we see a couple wounded men who are flailing around. One of them rolls under the intact truck. The pilot, then, blows up the truck, something that Victor K says is "not very decent of him." In general, once the pilot commits to firing, something that requires approval from HQ, he will keep shooting until any signs of movement are obliterated -- this means that there are several distressing images of obviously wounded figures staggering around (one of them throws his arms up over his head as if to surrender) being blasted into oblivion. There's an attack on a weird flat-topped building from which dozens of tiny black figure swarm like ants. Enemies on a hillside are hiding under wet blankets so that there thermal signatures can't be read. But when some of soldiers emerge, the gunship blows off the top of the ridge. No context for any of this is supplied: we don't know where these actions take place or who is being killed; we don't even know in which country these events happen. The most alarming sequence doesn't involve any gunship attack at all. A group of about a half-dozen men are struggling to unearth something on a road. Suddenly, the screen goes dark with a huge flash followed by roiling clouds of smoke and dust. The men were digging up an IED and it has exploded. Everyone has simply vanished and there's a big round moon-crater in the middle of the road. This fascinates the pilots who continuously circle the scene of the blast, exclaiming things like "Holy Shit!" and asking one another if they saw the explosion. The narrator, displaying a typically French form of rhetoric, says the pilots are circling around a void, an absence where once there were men. The explosion is so spectacular, however, that you can understand why the pilots would be interested in the crater and the locals below who appear from the environs to pick at the debris. We see an infamous You-Tube clip in which a pilot blasts into pieces about five men, one of whom was a journalist carrying a tripod that was mistaken for a long gun. The men's activities seem jhostile from the air and one can seen how a mistake of this sort could be readily made. There's a big battle involving an attack on a hillside covered with tents -- it's no so much a battle as a massacre (the men on the ground have no way of fighting back). The weird thing about the slaughter is that a number of donkeys are standing among the explosions and the gunship pilots are scrupulous in not blowing them up. It's just the men who vanish in clouds of dust and fire. In the middle of the mayhem an uncanny figure stalks slowly through the explosions -- the narrator thinks it may be an old woman, stooped over and moving gingerly, but its silhouette looks like nothing earthly. The film ends with a weird sequence seemingly shot in Utah or at Glen Canyon. FLIR technology is now so advanced that we can see the desert in color -- the only way that we know that it's night is that the lights of distant town flare garishly against the horizon. A man is wandering around in the desert. Here the cameras are not in the air but shooting from the level ground toward the horizon. The man hides behind a frail-looking bush. Why does he do this? What are we seeing? Is this staged for the movie to show how ambiguous human movements are when viewed from afar? Or is this guy genuinely playing hide-and-seek in the desolate wasteland? The final shots are FLIR images of families in the suburbs of an American city -- the gun-sight tracks over them as they wave to the helicopters. I think this is supposed to demonstrate that it is very hard to interpret human behavior viewed from this abstract, schematic perspective -- but the footage demonstrates the opposite: the sinister meetings between heavy vehicles at remote crossroads, the wolf packs of men furtively loping around the adobe and concrete villages, the tents on the hillside and the bunker from which the men swarm -- all of these images certainly seem to show belligerents and hostile conduct. But the film never deigns to explain to us what is happening. When death comes from the air, the Vietnam expression is relevant -- shoot 'em all and let God sort them out. But most of the killings in this film, if you support the premise of these wars (which I don't)however, seem to be "righteous".
I assume that the title of this film refers to Revelations 2:22 -- that in the Holy City there "shall be no night."
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