Dal war movie al soldier movie : Il cinema americano contemporaneo e il ruolo delle immagini di guerra

This essay focuses on the main transformations witnessed in contemporary American war cinema, which places itself between fiction and documentary, Hollywood cinema and independent productions, with an emphasis on the so-called “War on Terror”. More specifically, this study aims to offer an image-specific introduction to the historical and moral issues of contemporary American conflicts. As a consequence of the emergence of new media tools and of a new accessibility to images, war cinema is facing today the challenge of a total representability of war in every respect, both at the level of personal experience and subjectivity. On the one hand contemporary war cinema attempts to cope with the partial visibility derived from the images produced by the soldiers’ use of light technologies; on the other hand it displays a form of tactical and holistic visibility, which is never as distant as in today’s warfare, due to the introduction of remote-controlled missiles, satellites and drones. This kind of dual representation invites at least two questions: what images can be trusted today? And what role do they play in contemporary war narratives?