Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The 2016 British Army recruitment film, “Be the Best” combined images of violent combat with messages of nurture and belonging. Viewers saw jump cuts, exposure pops, whip pans and crash zoom suggestive of flashback moments associated with trauma. But a commentary spoke of inclusion, self-development, life-skills and learning to cook. This paper explores how violence exists in an aestheticised disavowal of violent representation. The army recruitment story is one in which conflict appears in the flash-back, while messages of belonging, foreground brutal reality. Is there a forced amnesia driving this complex layering of army life? In these adverts we see these fragments of combat as visual abstraction. Characters appear in void spaces. But their suffering is enacted in the context of the mundane and the familiar: Tea provides comfort in amid an interminable wait for action. A perilous route march is made bearable when the soldiers start to sing “The Time of My Life,” from 1980’s teen romance, Dirty Dancing. The paper explores memory and forgetting, denial and spectacle. What are the consequences of avoiding representations of trauma when we are discussing culture inherent with trauma? The proposal considers these questions in the context of Surrealism the work of Georges Bataille and Lacanian psychoanalysis.