Film explores representations of war in museum exhibition
A film from the University of Sussex that explores how museums tell stories of war and combat has received its world première.
Photographer Melanie Friend, Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Sussex, was invited to situate her own work alongside that of the Unseen Enemy exhibition at the British National Army Museum.
Unseen Enemy: War stories in public spaces was first screened at a panel on ‘Contemporary Soldiering, Self-representation and Popular Culture’ at the annual conference of the International Communication Association, in Seattle, USA, at the end of May.
The video - directed, co-produced and narrated by Sussex media academic Dr Sarah Maltby - draws on the British National Army Museum’s ‘Unseen Enemy’ exhibition, which ran from autumn 2013 to spring 2014.
The exhibition, which recounted first-hand accounts from British Army soldiers who had served in Afghanistan, raised critical questions about the role of cultural public spaces such as museums in telling stories of war.
Dr Maltby’s 10-minute video addresses these questions through the reflections of the exhibition’s co-curator Amy Cameron, and three other participants, all of whom had experienced war either directly or by investigating its representation:
- Dr Katy Parry, Lecturer in Communications Studies at the University of Leeds;
- photographer Melanie Friend, Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Sussex;
- and former soldier Craig Ames, now a lens-based artist and Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Sunderland.
The trio navigated their way through the display space, situating their own work - as practitioners and scholars - alongside that of the exhibition and reflecting upon how this particular story of war was being told, and how it resonated with other war stories in the public domain.
“There’s this disjuncture between how war is presented and what war is really like,” says Melanie Friend in the film.
Dr Maltby describes the exhibition as “the story of soldiering, told explicitly to educate the public and gain their support and generate dialogue within the military institution itself”. But, it is “a depoliticized story”, she concludes, “where much remains unseen”.
Unseen Enemy has now been published by the University of Sussex’s open-access academic digital platform, REFRAME, as one its Conversations projects.
REFRAME offers a range of creative content, including blogs, online film and video festivals, conferences and symposia, audio and video podcasts, monographs and digital archives.
REFRAME’s subject specialisms - media, film and music (including media practice, cultural studies and journalism) - are also those of its publisher, the School of Media, Film and Music (MFM) at Sussex.