Through the Crosshairs

"Against the ongoing normalization of drone warfare, Through the Crosshairs provides a much-needed visual history of the optical codes that sanitize American militarism across our screens. This impressively researched film tracks the aesthetic trade between Hollywood, televised journalism, the video game industry, and the Pentagon— and perhaps most crucially, investigates creative means of contesting the ubiquity of militarized vision today."

"From precision bombing to drones and satellite witnessing, Through the Crosshairsexamines how the US military and its supporting cast of entertainment media have taught us to gaze at war from high above the ground. Roger Stahl’s newest documentary traces the visual production of the weaponized gaze in films, tv shows, video games, news clips, and documentaries from World War II to the War on Terror. In so doing, Through the Crosshairs repeatedly demands that we reckon with visuality’s ability to sanitize war by refusing to look at the impacts of bombings on civilians. Captivating and alarming, this eminently teachable documentary traces the processes by which "we are all conscripted into the fantasy" of seeing through the aerial war machine. Invaluably, the documentary goes further by featuring resistant visions in which artists and activists expose the ground-level devastations wrought by aerial warfare. Through the Crosshairs is a powerful documentary that insists that we both acknowledge the militarized history of visual witnessing and the political implications of this weaponized gaze."

"For those who appreciated Roger Stahl’s 2007 documentary, Militainment, Inc., and anyone concerned with the omnipresence of contemporary war culture, his new video, Through the Crosshairs, is a revealing study of the weaponized gaze. War seen through the tunnel vision of the weapon’s eye institutionalizes the illusion of precise, sterile warfare. It renders civilian suffering invisible and substitutes a narrow range of tactical questions for larger concerns about war’s wisdom and consequences. The war machine is valorized by this 21st century way of seeing through the decontextualized crosshairs of a sniper’s scope or drone strike in news footage, television dramas, and Hollywood films. Professor Stahl not only documents a troubling convergence of public culture and war propaganda but also addresses the question of how to reframe war, offering a number of examples of interventions aimed at widening the frame, humanizing the victims, and imagining what it must be like to live under constant threat of the deadly drone. Through the Crosshairs is frank and explicit throughout. It includes some horrific images of destroyed bodies usually obscured by the weaponized gaze. It exposes the irony of valorizing yesterday’s despised sniper-assassin as today’s true patriot and national hero. It embarrasses anyone who laughed at heartless jokes about Predator drones or lucky rearview spectacles told offhandedly by political leaders and military officials. It raises the viewer’s conscience about what goes unseen and unremarked. It is itself a critical intervention that warrants multiple viewings."

"With U.S. missile strikes, aerial bombing, and drone attacks a daily fact of life in places most Americans have never even heard of, Roger Stahl's terrifying new film reminds us that these are about much more than the bloodless technological spectacle that appears on our screens. They are in fact about violence, and this violence kills real people. Hollywood and the corporate media have largely scrubbed this reality from the nation's consciousness. Through the Crosshairs reminds us just what we don't see. It should be required viewing for all Americans.”

"Through the Crosshairs is an invaluable educational resource and a compelling viewing experience. Deftly merging history, theory, and close textual analysis, the film forcefully articulates the complex, often disturbing ways in which war merges with contemporary visual culture."

"Roger Stahl’s brilliant film Through the Crosshairs demonstrates how American audiences learn to love the military machine. Representations of military technologies by popular and news media, video games and Hollywood studios are intercut with actual targeting footage. The film exposes the result: "smart-bomb vision," "drone-vision," "helmet-cam vision," all constructed by fusing the crosshairs of military scopes with the cinema camera. The deluded public consciousness is conscripted into a guilt-free experience of the weaponized gaze, itself presented through what Stahl calls a "straw-hole" of visibility. It takes the right code cracker to turn us into human beings again: Stahl also explores strategies for deconstructing our weaponized screens. Through media efforts of activist groups that expand the boundaries of the cinematic frame, we are presented with direct — and sometimes even immediate — effects of the wider context of American military occupation and the misinformation, errors, even lies that sustain it."

"Through the Crosshairs provides a nuanced and comprehensive history of the processes by which weapons technologies have come to dominate our field of vision.  The drones and sniper rifles that serve as iconic symbols of U.S. military power crowd both their operators and their victims out of the frame, rendering war invisible and hypervisible at once. We typically imagine that states prosecute their wars through a mixture of propaganda and censorship.  However, Through the Crosshairs maps a far more complex media landscape in which journalists repackage violence as entertainment and sanitized images of war work as effectively as secrecy to maintain popular support for militarization. Carefully argued and pointedly illustrated, this documentary reveals the sensory architecture of a wartime visuality that has become dangerously unremarkable."

"In Through the Crosshairs, Roger Stahl offers an immensely rich and impressively comprehensive account of the weaponization of vision in American media and culture over the past three decades, tracing the ascendance of a weapon’s-eye view as it shapes the popular image of war, and asking after the implications of a popular understanding guided by the myth of precision targets. Giving compelling substance to Virilio’s seminal treatise on war and visual culture, Stahl presents a breathtaking array of images alongside crucial discussion of the military and industrial alignments that enable their production and circulation. Moving briskly from early aerial visions to the ubiquity of remote sensing and surveilling technologies today, Through the Crosshairs offers a wealth of resources and timely provocations that will prove invaluable to scholars and students alike. In concluding with examples of resistant vision that  complicate or refuse the weaponized gaze, Stahl challenges us to imagine other views and the possibility of more ethically grounded ways of seeing. This probing investigation of our identification with the images and technologies of targeting raises urgent questions for the classroom and beyond."

"Professor Roger Stahl’s concept of the “weaponized gaze” is a remarkable contribution to critical war studies as the gaze explains a crucial way by which Americans are tutored about war through our visual texts. Through the Crosshairs’ detailed and accessible explanation of how the gaze is developed — through projectile, orbital, drone, and helmet-cam visions — is invaluable to explaining this concept in the classroom and developing the visual literacy essential to our increasingly visual-text world.”

"Through the Crosshairs offers a compelling visual history of what it means to see the world as a weapon of war. Stahl documents how the military uses this pervasive visual logic to justify its policies and excuse its excesses. As importantly, the documentary offers strategies for resisting this weaponized mode of vision. Through the Crosshairs is a valuable resource for anyone wanting to understand why this visual trope endures in popular culture, and how we might see and think beyond the limited borders of the gun’s sight or the drone’s unblinking eye."

"Roger Stahl’s documentary Through the Crosshairs chronicles and critiques a murderous PR collusion over many decades between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the U.S. war machine and news industry. Its subject is the dramatization and celebration of the "weaponized gaze." This puts the viewer behind the weapon, substitutes the viewer’s line of sight for that of the soldier, pilot or drone operator and invites orgiastic response to the explosive fire and dust of death. Whether in the guise of “orbital,” “cockpit,” “helmet-cam,” or “drone” vision ultimately it is all just tunnel vision that cedes total control of the narrative to the war machine. This narrative excludes the role of corporate and plutocratic interest. It reduces the murdered and maimed to pathetic squiggles on monitor screens. It silences those who must suffer its consequences. It censors consideration of reasons, legality and ethics. It disinvites empathy for victims. Insultingly invoking “anti-war” motive, the narrative obscenely wallows in the anguish of a murderer’s guilt. It exploits remote killing for the mobilization of public support in favor of the routinely fabricated pretexts for war and violence. It fetishizes the machinery of war to better sell it to the merchants of war. Stahl also devotes a substantial portion of the documentary to examine successful and inspiring methodologies of resistance to these oppressive narratives of the weaponized screen and “aerial occupation” that expose their underlying fragility."

"Through the Crosshairs translates Roger Stahl's path breaking scholarship on the "weaponized gaze" into an informative, audio-visually engaging and highly teachable documentary that helps us think critically about how the military's merger with new media technologies is reshaping how citizens perceive war in the 21st century. In an age in which predator drones broadcast videos of bombs falling and soldiers livestream their battles, it is imperative that educators foster in students a critical visual media literacy for probing the dominant ways of seeing war. Through the Crosshairs is an indispensable guide to the social forces that manufacture a "weaponized gaze" of war, as well as to creative tactics for resisting it."

"Through the Crosshairs provides a historical overview of modes of looking — from mainstream news coverage and its use of satellite imagery to video games to drones. It demonstrated clearly for the viewer how governmental and military organizations shape public understandings of warfare. The segment on “clean” warfare, and the implications it has for knowledge of civilian casualties, is particularly important."

"From the silver screen to TV news networks via the spaces of war, the documentary Through the Crosshairs exposes the viewer to the targets of our armed forces. Recorded images from helmet cams, night vision goggles, and aerial, satellite and drone imagery depict a picture of the enemy, but recount nothing of the risk to soldiers or civilians. And yet, as the documentary unfolds, the viewer is asked to imagine a context beyond the crosshairs, where fellow human beings — and ultimately tragedy — reside. Through the Crosshairs challenges the viewer to cast a critical gaze beyond the crosshairs, to see beyond the propaganda to recognize, for example, the lives and losses of civilians living under aerial occupation by drones. In the end, the viewer is left with a choice: to accept the images at face value, or to participate in a discussion of the contexts that lie beyond the crosshairs."

"For many years, military images, television news, and Hollywood films have focused our collective attention on the visual technologies of modern warfare, often aligning our perspective with the weapons themselves and shaping how we see military operations in the world today. Through the Crosshairs is a captivating, insightful film that exposes the history of the weaponized gaze and the media systems that fortify it — as well as tactical resistances against it. This is a crucial documentary about the battlefields of our screens and the endless wars to control our eyeballs."