War on Humans, an explosive 5 minute film by Chilean artist Cristián Tàpies, uses a broad array of found and original footage and audio to explore from multiple angles the notion of a violent attack against humanity. The film opens with a series of shots of animals attacking people: an elephant stomping on a car, horses kicking and biting their riders, a bull attacking a truck, a literal version of what a “war on humans” might look like, if only the world’s down-trodden animals would organize an uprising in their own defense. The footage is interspersed with shots from a porn S/M film of a dominatrix torturing her client, making the association that fear and violence can be seductive and addictive. Adding to the pile-on of meanings, we see footage from the massive street uprisings in Chile in October 2019, which protested economic hardship and inequality, while hearing the Chilean president Sebastián Piñera declare that Chile is “at war against a powerful enemy.” By demonizing the protestors as violent fanatics, Piñera attempts to paint them as enemies of the people, but it makes more sense to view his own government, supporting a system of harsh inequality while suppressing political expression, as the real enemy of humanity. Finally, Tàpies brings covid into the mix, showing footage of a vaccine being injected into an arm, while UN chief António Guterres declares that humanity is “at war with a virus.” We also hear Bill Gates, in a TED talk from 2015, declaring that mass casualties in the immediate future are much more likely to come from an epidemic than from a war. Individual viewers may find this comment more or less alarming and ironic, depending on how closely they’ve been following the connections between Gates’ funding, the Wuhan lab that created covid, the “vaccines” and the ensuing mass casualties, and the mandates issued by the Gates-funded WHO. A “war on humans,” yes, but it’s not being waged by a virus.
The footage in the film is highly processed, reduced and abstracted into large areas of flat color, and shown with the jerky quality of a lower frame rate, creating a cartoon-like effect. This reduction in visual and temporal information has the effect of emphasizing the reduction of the discourse, the narrowing of perspective needed in order to sell the idea that a mass popular uprising is a “war on the people,” or to make us accept the spectacle of having the military in charge of mass coerced injections. It is apt that the methods used to sell these “wars” are sometimes referred to as “fear porn,” and Tàpies effectively underlines the ways in which the population is continually conditioned, by stoking their fear of these various “enemies.”
These images are bound together by the musical soundtrack, an elegant solo cello work by Bach, breathtaking in its song of calm, complex perfection. The music plays ironically against the chaos and strife of the images, with an implication that all of this chaos is being carefully orchestrated for a larger purpose.
As cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote in Pogo: “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” The fact that the characters in Pogo are animals can serve to remind us, on a planet where animals (including human animals), insects, viruses, microbes, and all nature are part of an inextricably linked web of life, that military metaphors are spectacularly un-useful when applied to public health, or applied to drugs, terror, or protest movements, for that matter. If you hear someone speechifying about being in a “war,” the chances are pretty good that the war is being waged against you.
Elegiacally, the film ends with an aerial shot of a massive train wreck, spreading fire and poison gas. The wars continue, with no end in sight.
The film’s condensed, poetic form makes its points entirely through montage and image processing, leaving out any speechifying of his own. Since the topics of Chilean politics as well as covid are still hot and divisive, this non-polemical approach keeps the film accessible and resonant for viewers with different perspectives on these issues. (My own perspective should be apparent to the reader by now.) It’s a flexible and effective strategy. War on Humans exposes an over-used metaphor, often employed by authorities, and by expanding the metaphor in multiple directions, the film allows us to see into the wars being waged underneath this “war.”
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