In one of the first narrative films, The Great Train Robbery (US, 1903), a cowboy in close-up shoots directly into the camera. Alfred Hitchcock's black-and-white film Spellbound (1945) ends with a hand holding a gun, turning towards the camera and firing straight at the audience. Fifty years later, the makers of the The Matrix simulated the flight of a bullet through the air, picturing eddies behind it and distortions around it.
These are just milestone examples of what has been a close relationship between cinema and firearms. Movie makers want to jolt and shock their audience, fairground style. How better to do so than with a gun? It is small, explosive, dramatic, attention grabbing. By pointing one, Quentin Tarantino created a way of slowing down time and analysing its implications. Roman Polanski elevated Chinatown to the level of tragedy just by firing one.
In the Iraqi war, we have seen television footage taken from a camera strapped to the barrel of a tank, looking along it. The rotation of the tank head makes a perfect panning shot. The wide- angle lens of the camera exaggerates the length and drama of the barrel. When it fires, the shell launches from us, dynamising the space before it, Matrix-like. Then, far away, a soft impact and a sensuous cloud of powder. Aesthetically, camera and gun understand each other.
All that speed, those distances, that G-force, the swooping over valleys, the aerial views of civilisation's cradle: it is rendered for us with cinematic delicacy. The green hue of videophone imagery glows like tinted, silent movie footage. It is sublime, in Edmund Burke's sense; a terrifying thing, glimpsed and veiled.
Right from the beginning, the opportunistic world of movie making borrowed the robust language of combat. Filming is "shooting," the result is a "shot." Directors in interviews often refer to the production process as a military campaign. Their beloved equipment has, over the years, become smaller, faster and more effective. They work in a guerrilla style (their term). Actors talk about time stopping between action and cut, as if their lives were on the line. Isn't this self-aggrandising, the fey world of filmmaking imagining itself more macho than it is?
In Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), the camera became central to the killing process. In this case, a lowly focus-puller in a film studio wants to capture on film the terror of the women he's killing, so he inserts a knife into a leg of the camera's tripod; not a gun, of course, but the camera is the thing that kills none the less. The film was denounced as immoral, but Peeping Tom captured the brutality of filming, the metaphorical killing which a camera performs. In Dr Strangelove (1963), Stanley Kubrick looked at the same thing in a very different way. Where Powell's leading character was mad, Kubrick's murderous politicians and military men were stupid. Their cretinous lust for power was mirrored in a brutally simple visual idea: put a camera on a missile. There would be an outcry if this were to happen in Iraq, but ethically there is no different between a tank barrel and a missile. The latter is just more cinematic. In Kubrick's case, the dead logic of his commanders argued for a cinematic solecism: the camera on the missile did not express the sublime of war but the idiocy of its architects.
Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1987) has elements of both these. In it, policemen and robots have merged so we see killings through the eyes of a camera in the head of a gun-toting law enforcement officer. Where Powell used his camera to represent a deranged man and Kubrick to represent stupid men, here Verhoeven puts us in the moral position of someone who is only half a man.
None of these takes us the whole way, however. The knife, missile and gun are each wielded by damaged or partial human beings. What if human agency is removed entirely? If guns and cameras have uncomfortable parallels, is it possible to imagine a film told entirely from the point of view of one? Filmmakers like Abel Gance in France and Martin Scorsese in America have dynamised camera work by liberating it from any particular human point of view and attaching it to inanimate things. The film Madame de... (1953) was in part told from the perspective of a pair of earrings; so why not a gun? Alan Clarke got close. In 1989. he made a 39-minute film called Elephant in which the camera tracks around Belfast. Its point of view is entirely that of an unidentified killer's extended arm and gun. There is no psychology, characterisation or story. This is the only film I know which is centred solely on a gun. Is it morally empty? No. Most people saw tragedy, and a critique of killing in the very coldness of its point of view. Elephant is evidence of cinema's anthropomorphism, its innate need to see things from a human point of view; the implication that there is a human observer behind the lens.
Along the road to Baghdad, even where the imagery seems to have become complicit with the killing, the lessons of cinema are that, despite the parallels between shooting and shooting, one will not take the simple point of view of the other. A camera, like a gun, has no inner life. We give it one.
