Il n'y aura plus de nuit, Eléonore Weber, France, 2020, 75’

This new session of A(r)mar la cámara takes the viewer to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but always from the sky. Eléonore Weber, the film's director, reflects on images of war, a camera/weapon and the desire to see beyond the limits, virtual borders that prevent the spectator from getting closer to the real situation.  

A war in black and white. A war through a monitor. The French and American pilots comment on the map they see from their planes in Il n'y aura plus de nuit. Red dots represent people: the thermal camera tells them what is alive. "In the theatre of external operations, erasing the recordings is an offence, a crime," they explain at the beginning of the film. In this war, the images are the shooter's terrain, they are the crime. It is a cold war, at a distance. 

How can we trust the images we see if they are technologies subjected to power? Under this Farockian premise, we study the hospitality of the virtual as opposed to the hostility of the real. The distance with which we observe the massacre of people places us in a comfort zone for which we are responsible for not being able to act. Listening to the conversations of the protagonists, we become witnesses to the decision to shoot or not. We are subjected to the simulation of war and we, as spectators, are strategic hostages in front of the cinema screen.

Presentation and Q&A with the director Eléonore Weber. 

Eléonore Weber is a theater and film director. She has directed a short and a medium-length fiction film, Temps mort and Les hommes sans gravité. She has also directed a documentary, Night Replay (Arte -La Lucarne), co-written with Patricia Allio.