Film Studies: The camera: weapon of choice on both sides

Always trust style, for it is the content that remains when every specious idea has turned to dust.

On 20 March (the first prime-time evening of our war), the Fox channel on American television had a camera and a reporter (Greg Kelly) "embedded" with a 3rd Infantry Division convoy headed north. The exhilaration and beauty of the uninterrupted shot they showed (its irrepressible elements of style) said everything. Please don't be offended by that use of the word "beauty". All rapid forward-moving tracking shots are exhilarating – this is one of the inescapable thrills of driving, as well as an emotional pleasure that can be seen and felt in films by people like Max Ophuls, Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Mann, Jean Renoir and many others. As you watched, you wanted to lay hands on a steering wheel and put your foot to the floor. You looked up to see the flag streamlined in the wind. Such a shot contains the seeds of discovery, and the idea of "terminus": it is going somewhere, and the director's use of searching movement implies (and even requires) a revelatory destination. We "track" in on something because we are hoping to identify its secret.

The Fox tracking shot (and I'm sure there were similar thrusts on other networks) was beautiful in a variety of ways: as the dawn light came up, so gradually, it was easier to identify landmarks and the umber hues of desert; yet the shot was also obscured by the dust trail of the vehicle ahead – the one the reporter was very anxious to follow (for mine fields were said to exist on either side of the track).

From time to time one could see ruined guard posts, or even shattered vehicles (some of them perhaps from 1991), but essentially the prospect was just desert, with the nearly abstract colours and forms of that terrain being "assisted" by occasional electronic break-up – brick-like patterns of interference, moving like ghosts through the mass of sand, stone, pearl and ochre. I went to bed with the shot still running – and for all I know, it's still turning over.

On Thursday night, the reporter, Greg Kelly, was gushing at the historic innovation of this footage – the novelty of a camera crew not that far from the point of an attack. This was so unlike the 1991 experience, when a similar administration kept cameras and reporting out of the action. It was as if Bush and Rumsfeld had learned the lesson of reality TV – you can be there.

Yet you didn't need to be there to wonder what if a missile came down out of the dusty sky and exploded in your lap? And what if that explosion unleashed poison gas? It left one suspecting that the powers that be – whatever they might have claimed before the war – were not too afraid of such weapons in practice.

By last Sunday, camera confidence had waned. On ground allegedly taken already, a mechanics service group got lost and became captives of Iraqi forces. Within hours, the Al-Jazeera television network was playing footage of some of those prisoners being questioned. Then there were scenes of several corpses in a room. The camera was hand-held and close-up, and it involved a director, turning or manipulating the dead faces so that they might be recognisable on television. It was the necrology of our own horror films coming back from a far country.

The Pentagon news brief lamented the ghastly taste in showing these scenes as much as it did the loss of American lives. ABC (the network I was watching) vowed not to show the footage. But the media lessons of this new war were clear already: that the camera is a front-line weapon. How long before we see bodies stricken and twitching? How long before our camera – our point of view – becomes captive, and the wild face of Arabia stares into American homes? So trust the style. Read the degrees of naive liberty and torture working through the camera, and recognise the imperialism of photographic techniques that America pioneered for the world.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk