Double culpability/double subjectivity: Thomson and Craighead’s A Short Film about War, Animate Projects

How can one claim to make a film about war, let alone a short one? To make a film ‘about’ anything always results in approximation. Engagement with this very failure, though, can initiate complicated entanglements with doubt that open a possibility for politics. Often, a specific subject is most forcefully discussed when attention is paid to matters of concern rather than matters of fact.[1] While film may allude to replicating events, images, locations and questions, it is always constructed through filters of subjectivity. Thomson and Craighead’s A Short Film about War uses the structural language of documentary film, working with material relating to conflict gathered during 2007 and 2008 from publicly accessible archives on the Internet, proposing a means of describing war from pre-existing images and descriptions. War is a contention of power relations, asserted through both actions, and transmission of those actions; as communication technologies evolve so does the representation of war