Towards a new model for approaching conflict images

This article provides a theoretically informed close reading of acclaimed filmmaker Hito Steyerl’s striking engagement with the War on Terror in her 2007 documentary artist’s film Lovely Andrea. I discuss how the politics of Steyerl’s confrontation with war are located in her careful selection and assembling of transnational images into intricate motifs forged around the body, the rope (or stand-ins for the rope) and the theme of bondage. These motifs work through the bombarded multimedia terrain in which conflict images circulate, at once replicating the pace, freneticism and truncated views of this terrain and reorganising it by creating unexpected and provocative connections between images, connections that do not only highlight similarities, but often call attention to dissimilitude and misalignment. The article offers a series of examples of the subtle insights and disruptions Lovely Andrea’s motifs yield, through a discussion of: how they work to ‘disembed’ embedded viewpoints through their reframing of the War on Terror; how they undermine the pornography-torture convergence that marked debates about War on Terror black sites; and how they highlight and unhinge critical developments in the structure and operation of twenty-first century power, with particular reference to vertical and horizontal lines. Placing Lovely Andrea in dialogue with influential accounts of the relationship between violence and visuality in aesthetic theory, and drawing on Steyerl’s own essayistic writing, I make the case that Steyerl’s motifs break from paradigms of ethics and empathy, as well as from certain representational approaches, in order to better respond to the forms of power, politics and mediation animating early 21st-century war

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