Being at war: Cognitive Approaches to Observational War Documentaries

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In this article I primarily analyse observational war documentaries in order to deal with
how this particular form of documentary contribute to our understanding of how it is to be at war as a soldier or as a civilian in a war zone. I analyse two very different observational war documentaries: Janus Metz’s Danish ‘Armadillo’ (2010) following a group of soldiers to Afghanistan, and Andreas Dalsgaard and Obiada Zytoon’s Danish-Syrian ‘The War Show’ following a group of young Syrians during the Syrian spring to the civil war and beyond. Based on theories of cognition and emotion and evolutionary biology the article argues for the importance of this type of documentaries in developing and understanding of what war really is and it is experience, how it is to be at war. The article also puts the films in the broader context of both fictional and documentary war genres trying to map how the different genres address different
parts of our cognition and emotion.
Original languageDanish
Publication date30 Sep 2017
Publication statusPublished - 30 Sep 2017

ID: 182929904