The Mundanity of War is Made Virtually Real
Hollywood war imagery tends to focus on battles. Great, dramatic and historic (or at least would be historic) battles where many die and no one relaxes. A truer dimension to the ongoing violence in the Iraqi city of Falluja is more mundane and drawn out. Refugee camps are assumed by many to be miserable spaces. But sometimes, there are refugees who have hope, and are even grateful to have survived long enough to be in a refugee camp. At least, this all seemed to be the case in the summer of 2016. At least, from the access that New York Times reporter Ben C. Solomon had when he embedded with the local militia working to fight against Isis forces in the city.
The New York Times has quickly tapped into the resource of virtual reality journalism with their NYT VR app. Since their first push to corner the market and sending out 300,000 Google Cardboard viewers for subscribers to watch their VR footage in April 2016, the institution has been releasing material on a fairly consistent basis. To date there are 30 features on the app.
One such feature is The Fight for Falluja, which appeared in a New York Times Magazine website feature Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Fell Apart in August 2016. The VR component is a companion piece to 18 months worth of reporting across the region that resulted in a written piece highlighting six perspectives.
It seems like there was another reporter with Solomon, who was reporting along side him, that was not featured in magazine. Times Reporter Bryan Denton wrote about the front lines of Falluja in the summer 2016 as well, and published an article about it. The photos are almost pulled directly from the VR scenes, but they are stagnant after seeing the scenes alive.
In addition to the text, and the VR component of Fractured Lands, there are 10 portfolios by a photographer’s almost 15 years of covering the area.
“At the very beginning of [2014], ISIS insurgents wrested control of the crucial crossroads city of Falluja in Iraq’s Anbar Province, then spread out to seize a number of nearby cities and towns.” That sets the scene for the VR reportage by Solomon.
The video begins on the roof of a building in Falluja with the Iraqi militia. Specifically, attention is turned to the sniper shooting at ISIS soldiers below, dramatically narrated by Solomon. A background of the city is described as the viewer gets a front seat view of the ruins via the VR camera in the truck where the reporter sits.
The first notable scene comes from the expectation that civilians have of war, compared with the actual experience. Solomon’s first trip to the front lines occurs on the second day of fighting to take back the city. As the Iraqi soldiers shoot of rockets in ostensibly street clothes they are retaliated against by a hail of bullets. Even when the militia fires back the mood is eerily calm.
“War is a lot of downtime” says Solomon while relaxing with the militia in their shabby headquarters later. The militia lies on the ground of a small apartment as Solomon observes, until the sound of a rocket is heard. After learning that the rocket that he ducked and covered for was actually outgoing, many in the group laugh. Civilians never get this type of look into the mundanity of war. One can only imagine the undertones of fear even while joking in downtime or waiting for the next offensive maneuver.
When Solomon journeys into buildings that were once ISIS headquarters, the VR gives an important view of the cages by which prisoners were forced to stay. When seen from the outside, viewers might already morbidly wonder what it’s like to be inside the cage, and Solomon obliges.
Later, the striking dimensionality of a refugee camp is visually explorable in 360-degrees. The viewer is engulfed in sandstorms as they blow through the encampments where refugees often have little more than flowing curtains to protect them from the sand. When sitting with families in the encampment, refugees are humanized in a way that is very different from the portrayal in traditional visual mediums. With a standard camera, a director or camera person dictates where the viewer is forced to look. With VR it’s more like theater where you have the freedom to look around the scene, look at other characters, and see whole new worlds and perspectives in the faces of others in the families. You’re not forced to stare at the matriarch or patriarch alone because shots of the family are cut for time.
The Fight for Falluja is notably one of the first VR projects that take you directly to the front lines of war. Thus far, war seems to be the best way to tell a VR story. The piece puts the viewer in a well covered area of the world, which many do not have the imagination for understanding the full scope of the damage done there. With the freedom to “explore” the humanity of the people and understanding of dimensionality of the spaces, the viewer receives a stronger perspective.
Indeed, much of the reaction to this piece has been positive. On the Youtube link to the story, there are 293 reaction comments mostly in praise of the piece, including Sarah Hill, the CEO of Story Up, a VR native media company saying it’s a “Great immersive look at what we normally don’t get to see.”
Youtube user jannu jokunen believes it to be the “first 360 video […] that works to tell a story using the medium well.”
There are, as with any journalistic medium, ethical questions here that stem from personal viewpoints on what it means to report on any battlefield. In places where human life is constantly endangered, is it exploitative to report with a technology that essentially captures an entire environment? At one point, the militia poses happily with a decapitated body of an ISIS soldier. Are there ethical questions with regard to this specific scene?
From my limited vocabulary on VR stories, this one works by far the best. In two other VR videos from the Times, 10 Shots Across the Border, and The Food Drop, a part of the feature “The Displaced,” landscape shots were used but they didn’t work for the story. Similarly, in 10 Shots, a story about a child shot to death across from the US over the Mexican border there is a scene within the confines of the child’s Grandmother’s house to which many viewers reacted badly. After entrepreneurial program students at CUNY J-School watched the story, they said the landscape was boring and they felt creepy being in someone’s living room.
My assessment is that the connection between these two reactions to two different scenes can be boiled down to a commonality between them. Neither scene did anything to progress the story. This problem doesn’t affect “The Fight…”
The landscape shots show the scale to which the city was ravaged by war, and the downtime with both the militia and with refugees build characters within the framework of the story.
It’s important to note that both VR stories were done earlier than Solomon’s piece. The Displaced was published nine months earlier, and 10 Shots was published in March 2016. The extent to which the technology changed in that time was minimal. The improvement came in the usage. The best we could expect of such a game changing tech is that the uses will be perfected.
