The International Space Station above the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

 

The International Space Station above the Temple Mount in Jerusalem 

The International Space Station above the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

The Oblique of the Tribe of Dan

The tribe of Dan, from which the hero Samson came, migrated north in the Land of Israel and settled in the area near Sidon. There it connected with the gentiles of the sea and became a tribe of sailors. From there, according to one tradition, it continued in a northwesterly direction, becoming part of the Greek tribes, also called "Danaides". It continued wandering in this direction along the Dnieper River, reaching as far as Denmark. All of these places contain the syllable "Dan" in their names.

"Oblique" is also an important geometric concept in modern architecture. It notes a design compromise between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the urban space. The world is today one global city, run virtually in the speed of light, by the electronic media.

Ukraine, along which the Dnieper River flows, is also on a political "Oblique", as an intermediate state between East and West.

The danger in this geographical-political-war Oblique for the State of Israel is its inevitable lengthening towards Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf states and Iran.

Oblique of Dan

Blueberry Hill song, 12 Monkeys movie and Vladimir Putin's performance

The essence of the promise of stability, prosperity and security is at the mercy of science and human intelligence. If something still got out of hand, it was because someone was probably negligent, did not perform his task properly, did not turn in time to the appropriate expert - a phenomenon known in modern language as "failure" that requires investigation and examination.

In his book "The Critical Space", the French philosopher Paul Virilio described in detail the striving of rational-scientific thinking to achieve control in the world of phenomena with a tendency to control even the uncontrollable. But capturing the great promise of technology and science will, in his view, lead to an "integral accident" that will not only change the human perception of technology but may even bring an end to the "modern project."

Of course, Virilio did not wish for such an "accident" but warned against it: as great as the promise is, so is the depth of the crisis. Indeed, modern man's expectations of science and the state find themselves repeatedly battered in the face of defiant reality. This time, in the Russia-Ukraine war, we are not just facing a "global accident".

From Gaston Bechelard to Paul Virilio

Gaston Bechelard and Paul Virilio are two of the greatest French philosophers of the twentieth century. They have many similar characteristics: Phenomenological and the anti-structuralist approach. Cognitive fracture as a key for understanding human behavior. Existence of eternal movement, speed and present. Flight and aviation as key amplifiers of consciousness. Importance of material reality and especially architecture. Negation of Post-modrnism. Poetic writing style. Affinity for physics of relativity. Different characteristics are: Purification versus accident. Psychoanalysis versus technology. Classics against Hyper-modernism.

Bechelard [1884 - 1962] was a senior member of the French Academy of Sciences, and greatly influenced postmodern French philosophers. He contributed greatly to the study of the poetics and philosophy of science. He developed the concept of the "cognitive rift", which is essential for the progress of science out of crises. He has extensively developed the concept of "dynamic imagination", according to which the main function of the creative imagination is to refute existing images.

Virilio [1932 - 2018] was a cultural theorist, urbanist and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings on technology, as it has evolved in relation to speed and power, architecture, the arts, the city and the military. The major concepts he developed are "Dromology" ["Racing"] and "Global Accident". According to them, modern culture, the cyberspace, is instantly virtual. It moves at the maximum speed of light, creating a reality of a uniform world, a huge global city, which is a terminal saturated with detached images and prone to accidents.

For both, fliht and aviation are key to creative thinking. They are  a male-female creature alike and the deity in person. The attributes embodied in these concepts becomes for them, automatically and involuntarily, the creative intuition. This is similar to the reliance of many other creators on these concepts as a starting point for thinking. For example, the issue of UAVs stands out today. It has become a tool through which one can review and summarize any human phenomenon. For Bechelard the UAV is another good conductor, an amplifier, for the imagining mind. For Virilio, it is another link in the de-localization and global accident of humanity.

The difference between Gaston Bechelard and Paul Virilio is the difference between the optimist and the pessimist. Bechelard's point of view is personal and intimate, compared to Virilio's global-cosmic point of view. Bechelard observes in space what the near and familiar reality is, on the personal and private scale. Virilio is replacing Bechelard's dream and reverie with technology and media. He looks at the world from the outer and unfamiliar space, on the superpersonal scale and on society as a whole. Bechelard is the desire, the passion and the hope. Virilio is the surrender and defeat, the inevitable global accident. In Bechelard the world is as round as a well. For Virilio, the world is as square as a screen. Bechelard is innocent and Virilio is cynical. In Bechelard the world opens up and in Virilio it is closing.

While Heidegger, Virilio's spiritual teacher, view the radio as superficial and a reduction, Bechelard saw it as a possibility for deepening and uniting hearts, a kind of universal utopia. The conversations in cafes are loud, but in the universal world of radio, everyone hears each other, and everyone can listen comfortably.

Clues to Bechelard's critique of the "distressed philosophy", as he called existentialist philosophy, can be found without difficulty in all his writings. The refusal of distress was inconsistent with the fashion order of his time, but Bechelard remained consistent in his positions. Boldness was needed to write, in the middle of the twentieth century, in France, in the days of the existentialist climax, that "distress is false: we were created to breathe well''.

Many writers note the psychic powers that Bechelard's philosophy imparts to those who come through its gates, the healing quality inherent in his philosophy, in the possibility he offers, in which man and the world are in constant poetic dialogue. There is indeed a lot of loneliness in Bechelard's philosophy. This is, without a doubt, a philosophy of the individual, the loner. But he is not alone, he is always in the company of the world. Moreover, he is in the company of the beauty of the world. The natural destiny of dreaming, Bechelard believed, is to see the beauties of the world. You can not dream of ugliness in a reverie. Beauty is not only aesthetic, it also a need of the cognitive, ethical and mentality of the person.

Virilio is replacing Bechelard's dream and reverie with technology and media. The sorting and comparison based on the classicical writers by Bechelard, alternates with him to the sorting and comparison based on the present reality. Bechelard's point of view is personal. Virilio's perspective is global. According to Virilio, the world has changed. It is not the same world known by classical works and history. It all became a bustling mega city. We can no longer rely on our natural perception. It was completely distorted by the Tele-Media. The original and new poetic image can not exist in the world of electronic consumerism images, which enslave the imagination and cognition. Loneliness is no longer a sacred value. It is mechanical, and stems from the social split into "human points" created by technology.

The words, too, became worthless. Only the oral experience, the continuity that the delay and acceleration in speech are capable of, remained. It is the stops speech can create, by the wisdom of the thinker, in the mind of the listener. Virilio, through his stretched paragraphs, brings back the reader to the beginning of the social consciousness, of the shoutings of primitive man. He does not have a dialogue with the reader, as does Bechelard. There is hom survival for its own sake. No hand caressing. There is a finger that press the destruction button.

Virilio is one of the most prolific and poignant critics of the drama of the modern technological age. The enterprise of his life is an ongoing reflection on the origins, nature, and influences of the technologies that make up the modern  and postmodern world. He was particularly interested in military technology, representation technologies, computer and information technologies and biotechnology. The question of aviation as a dystopia is central to his thinking, as aviation is a key factor in the creation of the visual world and the global city, a world-terminal that is negatively interactive. Although Virilio does not ruling out technology, he radically criticizes the ways in which it changes the world, and even the human race. The criticism towards him is that he has a flawed perception, which is too negative and one-sided, and loses the empowering and democratic aspects of new computer and media technologies.

Sources:

Gaston Bechelard. The poetics of space

John Armitage. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews

The book "Open Skies" and the film "Eye in the Sky"

The introduction to the book "Open Sky" [1997], by Paul Virilio, begins routinely. He calls the sky "the primary beach." The sky separates the fullness of the earth from the emptiness of outer space. With the invention of the artistic perspective in the Renaissance period, focusing on a horizontal vanishing point, man moved away from the natural connection to the initial vertical contrast of sky-earth, embodied in gravity. Nowadays, when the sky is populated by countless afying objects, it is worthwhile to go back and focus on the vertical horizon.

From then on Virilio turns to an original theory: outer space does not exist as the scientists explained to us. The essence that controls the universe is time, which is matter in itself. Time is the dark matter of the universe. From the initial cosmic darkness derive our cognition of time as matter. This time-material creates the space familiar to us. We should call the regular time "continuity". Continuity exists in itself as matter, from the continuity that exists between atomic particles, to the continuity measured in the ranges of the creation of the universe. It is a substance whose intensity is measured by its speed, which is in relation to the speed of light.

Despite the lack of a scientific basis for the theory, the continuity of time as a material in itself is well tangible to anyone involved in filmmaking. The film editor connects footage of filmed raw material. Between each of two sections is a section of a black screen. Each passage create in the editor a sense of tangibility. His challenge is to cut off the darkness, the void, just as he cuts a piece of something . The black screen segments between the pieces of footage are a physical entity. This entity is un identified, yet it exist. Its feeling is as of the photographed material. It therefore treated, without choice, like a substance in itself. Nature despises emptiness for its own sake.

Virilio abandoned his keen interest in cinema in favor of interest in the dimensions of time, which allowed him to explore the mega cities of the world as a critical space, enslaved to accelerated technology.

Emptiness in which ordinary time becomes substance characterizes the opening scene of the film "Eye in the Sky" [2015]. The protagonist of the film is a colonel, responsible from London for an operation using unmanned aerial vehicles, which takes place in Africa.

The motto at the beginning of the film is: "In war, truth is the first victim." The motto is the essence of Virilio's thought, which deals mostly with observation technologies and decision making in the field of military aviation, and their impact on visual thinking today, where immediacy plays a central role, due to the congestion of images.

The opening scene of the film shows, in half-body camera views, a girl in Africa in the yard on a sunny morning, watching her mother bake bread, and at the same time playing with a hula hoop, next to her father fixing a bicycle. The ring is symbolic. It points out, according to Virilio's worldview, inspired by the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, the usual time and space, embodied in the growing by the diameter latitudes  of the Earth. Virilio describes this in his book "Polar Inertia" [1990].

Using a drone, the camera gradually moves away from the yard toward the street, where a military jeep with armed men is moving. The jeep is seen through the target sight of a UAV that follows it. The camera continues to move away, and the distance causes the viewer's point of view to focus on the vertical axis, which according to Virilio and Hawking indicates the abstract time and space, according to the earth longitudes,  which are arbitrary and uniform in diameter. The aiming lines of the drone become the letter E in the name of the movie, which  appears on the screen.

The picture shift to the Colonel, who is seen in a second long opening scene, in the close-up of her face in complete darkness, as she wakes up in her bed in her country house, ahead of a work day. It's still night time. The lighting is foggy and warm, using night lamps indoors and outdoors. In contrast to the clear sense of reality in Africa, the sense here is of an undefined, mystical reality. As if time is matter and the central dimension.

The camera follows her in half-body shots: while still drowsy she puts on a robe, takes the dog out into the yard, and opens the computer with a fingerprint. On the wall are pictures of the faces of the terrorists she focuses on. The picture sharpens. The photographs finally awakening her, along with an urgent mail.

An eye in the sky - the full movie on YouTube

Paul Virilio - Camera movement over eighty years

The properties of the element of fire guide Virilio in writing on the subject. Fire is an almost imageless element, except for three: light, heat, immediacy. The light according to Virilio is the light of the camera, the heat is the weapon, the immediacy is the decision making.

Virilio reviews how the development of the camera was due to the development of the machine gun, and in general how the development of cinematic photography was due to the consequences of various military developments. Observation and visual intelligence are the cornerstone of the military. That is why they have been at the forefront of technology since the dawn of history to the present day. As the weapons became more sophisticated and the slaughter on the battlefield increased, so did the need for more sophisticated means of observation. The observation plane became the most effective means, and in this way the battlefield, and later the whole world, also became cinematic. The war itself became a spectacular visual spectacle, due to the sophistication of the night lights and the intensity of the shells, in parallel with the sophistication of the defenses against them, trenches and fortifications, which created a sense of disconnection.

The function of the camera is first to connect the fragments of the whole that are revealed to it in separate images, into one complete image. Unlike more modern photography, which focuses on details and create resolutions. Nowadays, with the development of means of observation also for the invisible, such as infrared and radar, and other electronic means, the problem is the management of the information that comes from them, which is the most reliable, but also dense. This created the need for computing, and from there it was a short way to make automatic decisions. In this way the war became a nonstop film, and the nonstop time management replaced the management of space. There was also an obsession with stealth weapons, simulations, and electronic deception. As a result, the war became impersonal and intangible.

Because the sense of reality went wrong, so did human reason. The need to filter information under the conditions of human-machine combined activity was first discovered in World War II, with the sophistication of air defense equipment. Thus was founded the science of cybernetics, based on the concept of the system and the feedback, and in particular the negative feedback, which allows for the screening of human errors through practices.

A detached worldview was created as a result, making motion pictures more tangible than reality. Reality, which has been imprisoned and eliminated by the electromagnetic cyber world, is being revived through the worlds of guided imagery of cinema. Movies have become the telescopic rifle through which we look at war in particular, and the world at large.

In World War II, aerial observation, which has become very sophisticated, has become the most important means of feeding raw materials for films designed to portray reality with an objective eye. But the aerial observation also turned the surface into a detached object, as in a laboratory. Everything became too clear and immediate from the air, and repeated evidence was required, as in a laboratory experiment, to confirm any report. This is due to the increasing speed and mobility of the modern ground military movement. The need for a broad verbal interpretation of the outcome of air battles and bombings, has turned silent films into talking films, among viewers in the command rooms. The ability to carry out nocturnal attacks using bright lighting and the use of radar added to the sense of cinematic detachment from reality. The speed of the decision became more important than its correctness. Mobility, the hallmark of the military force, has become a series of means of communication, sent only by the commander-in-chief to any force on the ground. Statistics have become a major tool for him in decision making.

The citizens of the home front have also became partners to the reality of the command rooms. They were attentive to alarms, under the cloud of uncertainty of the bomb approaching them on the one hand, and watched at night the spectacular spectacle of the air defense spotlights and light bombs.

A similar spectacle is currently being experienced by Israeli citizens watching from a protected area in the background during clashes in Gaza, such as in Operation ''Wall Guard'', in which trails of thousands of missiles illuminated the sky. The first Lebanon war is an early and different example of the means of sight taking over the war, using the unmanned aerial vehicles to asist the airplanes.

In World War II, the culmination of the spectacle of light and fire was the atomic bomb. Immediately after the war it was replaced by the exhaust from the jet aircraft engines, and a few years later the fire emitted by the missile engines launched into space. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which required an immediate response from the United States following fears of launching missiles from the island, expressed the empowerment of the processes that connected the observation, immediacy and weapons, that are a modern incarnation of primodial fire.

In the Vietnam War, unmanned jet aerial vehicles were used for the first time, as part of a sophisticated electronic system of aiming and collecting data from various sensors. The UAVs, and the missiles launched by pilots remotely using the Send and Forget method, contributed to the disengagement of the fighters from the war. What remains is the link between the flash of light and the war. For war as a vision in Vietnam contributed the use of drugs by soldiers. War as a cinema has become a default.

In the 1970s, the advanced flight simulator was developed, which enabled full simulation of operational flight, and became almost its replacement. The flight has become a cinematic misenscene. Strategic deterrence was also practiced through electronic war games. The computerized maps, created using the aerial scan of the surface, created a new world of computer mapping, imaging and navigation. The pilots were given an overhead display, sophisticated helmets, and the ability to fly and launch through speech and eye focus. The flight became automatic. The eye and the weapon merged.

The critical space according to Paul Virilio

Global urban geographical decentralization, which is a major phenomenon nowadays, has led to the creation of huge cities and an endless, legal and illegal suburban expansion that extends across entire countries. The State of Israel, in particular, has long since became, due to its small size, population density, and lack of governance in the area of ​​regional planning, a single suburban city. This situation is changing the definition of sovereignty. It marks the end of the uniqueness of the place, which characterizes the old political stage and the historic city, and its replacement by the principle of immediacy, the unity of time, which is a politics of intensity and interactivity, of a technical set-up. Systems architecture has finally replaced the historic architecture and urbanism system.

The ubiquitous, immediate presence is being followed by the replacement of the traditional agenda, which was based on the solar cycle,  with accelerated technological agenda, realized by the electronic and digital media. The accelerated agenda is pushing past habits of populating space. The stable regional and urban planning of the space has long been replaced by a general lack of restraint, under social enslavement to accelerated technology. Accelerated technology accompanies humans on their daily journey by high-speed means of transportation, aircraft, cars and trains. These means of transportation greatly eroded the importance of the traditional urban space. Humans have become transfer players in the geographic space, where they are constantly mobile.

A third reason for the disintegration of traditional space is modern weapons, the operation of which is characterized by automatic remote decision-making at lightning speed. A heavy critical mass has been created, heralding a catastrophe of the dismantled historic city, of the traditional urbanization, as well as of the state.

Because the cohesive spatial layout was lost in favor of an invisible morphological configuration, a committed personal, interactive isolation was created. An atomization of the individual was created. In this accelerated process, the individual is awaiting return to the homeland, but has no escape from life in the suburbs.

The endless urban expansion marches along with the inner urban collapse. Both together eradicated the distinction between urban population and colonial settlement. They obscure national citizenship, the very obligation to grant significant political citizenship to populations under authority. Separating colonialism from state citizenship is completely impractical, given these urban processes. The sense of enclosure in the kibernetic space is common to all sectors.

Both sides live on the scale of individual survival. Each of the two types of citizenship has, in practice, rights and obligations that equal their status. The "colonial" citizen is exempt from military service and other civilian duties. He is able to build his private home on state land without obtaining building permits, not paying taxes, marrying several women and more. The "state" subject is obligated to obey every law, mild or severe, and the authorities take every opportunity to impose authority on him. Both types of citizens enjoy free basic social and health insurance. The economic ties between them are numerous and diverse.

The traditional extroverted international colonialism, which was characterized by the occupation of territories far from the homeland, has now become an internalized colonialism, dominated by global technology and media corporations. The traditional city collapsed into itself and crumbled. The centers of major cities around the world have become slums.

The immediate interactivity of the technologies has led to the decline in the value of the local human workforce. It gives priority to multinational monopolistic centralism. This is an ideology that denies the rule of national freedom movements. It creates opposing niches for the pursuit of self-management. It corresponds to a minimum country claim presented by economists. This claim enables the creation of technologies that do not require full employment and a real and practical presence of employees.

The pursuit of sovereignty today is a symptom of a simultaneous search for momentum. It is an acceleration that characterizes all separation movements, that exists between all contemporary urban classes, regardless of their national identity. The aspiration for political isolation is of extraordinary dimensions, and includes all sectors of the population. The anti-establishment ecological movement has long exhibited its enormous dimensions, for example in the North American survival movements. Survival movements can also serve as a touchstone for their absurd chances as a counterculture.

Today the spatial disruption has become the disruption of time. Transience has become a key concept in employment. Technical unemployment, temporary employment, dispersal of the wage burden, fragmentation of the labor system, fragmentation of residence, fragmentation of the family, and so on, have become the distinctive hallmark of life today. In addition, a culture of online social networking has been created, based on similar principles.

The traditional family and community, which were the building blocks of national identity, have disappeared. They fell apart following the modern lifestyle. This disintegration also has negative consequences for the status of citizenship, as it allows for disobedience to state institutions, such as through a tax revolt and a lack of governance. There is no real civic center, almost no valuable political center. The real weapon is first and foremost the position, array and direction of the forces present in the current systemic deployment, which tends to completely neutralize the ties between the citizens, the neighborhood unit.

As a result, the development of terrorism today is limited. Terrorism has nothing to do with substansive actions today. In fact, the various national terrorist movements have never had anything to do with opposition to the collapse of traditional urban systems. They expressed a utopian connection to the homeland, while the land of their longings had long since became a suburb. 

Traditional terrorist bodies are today  inefficient and irrelevant, in the reality of mega cities, which are spreading and collapsing simultaneously and uncontrollably. First, they arose to present a false utopian vision of the homeland, but not to deal with the urban issue as reality requires, by way of presenting an independent alternative to urban renewal. Second, they operate in a crumbling society, because the family and the traditional community, which are the source of classically organized resistance, no longer exist for all the inhabitants of the mega cities. Third, they operate in an outdated strategy, of conventional weapons, while the key today is the technological weapon, based on speed.

Military technological progress, which nowadays dictates political decision-making, is characterized by ballistic missiles. Everything is known today in very short durations, a few minutes and sometimes even less. The first response doctrine argues that in order to achieve the target, the nuclear missiles must be launched before those of the enemy have left the ground. These characteristics are similar to those of unmanned aerial vehicles, which are currently the most common weapons in the war against terror.

In order to be able to express themselves, the various political resistance bodies must adopt quick quantum thinking like lightning, based on time and not on space, and act according to commutes between center and fringe, in the territory in which they are located. Speed also requires action in attacks instead of defense. This is at the risk of losing self-identity, which is typical for quantum decision makers. They also run the risk of lack of public support, engaged in time management in a technological and informative race, and baseless political promises, in an urban environment that has lost its original identity.

The article was written based on Paul Virilio's book "The Critical Space".

Style and Content in Paul Virilio's Works

Quotes on Paul Virilio, the French Post- Modernist thinker, from the book: The Virilio Reader,  editor James Der Derian:

Preview: Reading Paul Virilio's writings is an oral reading. It is well understood only when read. This is because the word being heard has the ability, because of the time needed to be spoken, to pause on the visual image for the appropriate period of time to decipher it, while producing and creating the appropriate mental stimulus for deciphering, something which is impossible when the eye experiences constantly changing images in silent reading, or as in the everyday reality in general. In this respect, Virilio is like other Post Modern French thinkers, including Gaston Bacheler, who also create difficulties in understanding them without getting into their shoes. Thus, any reading of a summary or article of their writings is worthless. Read the source first to understand what it is all about, like reading a song.

Paul Virilio character impression was of  of a proud yet somewhat shy man, with none of  the character that marks many of the nouveaux philosophes. He was popular and received many invitations to speak, and accepted only few.  Born in 1932, as a child his first encounter with the speed of the war machine came at the outset of the Second World War, listening to the radio in his hometown of Nantes, hearing that the Germans had reached it, and then, almost simultaneously, hearing the sound of tanks outside his window. It was his first brush with Blitzkrieg. Aerial bombardments also left a deep impression, as they destroyed the city completely. He was drafted to fight in France's war with Algeria, before taking up a career practicing and teaching urban architecture. In between he learned the art of stained-glass making.  His official bios usually begin with his tenure as professor (1969), general director (1975), and president (1990) of the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture.

Beside his contributions to the philosophy of technology and society he wrote numerous shorter pieces on film, art, architecture, and current diplomatic-military affairs.

Virilio represents the power of will, intellect, and belief over the technological predestinations of late modernity. Virilio believes that accidents play a double game, as both disaster and diagnostic of the human condition. They can serve as a powerful agnostic wrench in the works of the new techno-deities. 

Virilio's gift for original and often un anticipated transition from seemingly commonplace discussions to profound, at times transcendent, critical syntheses, requires a particular attentiveness to the interplay of the topical and rhetorical. He is able, in part, to accomplish these transitions - which might best be described as accidental syntheses – by virtue of the specific sensibilities of the French language and culture not easily reproduced in other lenguages. 

What is for some panache, others will consider indulgent. At times these unwieldy sentences appear to be nothing more than an expedient means for imparting raw information. In other instances the task of reading him involved recognizing moments in which a shift in registers occurs from what at first appears only to be informational, to what finally amounts, in a quasi haphazard fashion - by virtue of a sheer glut, a vertiginous welter of references - to one of those unique accidental syntheses. 

The task may then best be described as sensing, approximating, or even guessing in a manner which strives for a certain rapport.

Internet browsing, hypertext and other computer-related stuff, goes well with Paul Virilio's theories about the impact of speed on the western world as we know it. Climbing up across Searching in the Internet tree, one will find the complete collapse of distance accompanied by a radical attenuation of identity. Lost sight, as well as the original site of the "Person'' are characteristic to browsing. He - or she are thinned out, disappearing into the infosphere, seven degrees removed from everything. Something that one moment had been so close, seemingly so significant, had become nothing at all.

Virilio is not the first to discern this dark side to an Enlightenment which had, for the most part, contracted a new happy, progressive marriage of self, reason, and technology. Earlier warnings about the possible perils of technologies of reproduction have been powerfully and persuasively voiced. 

First on just about every list would be Walter Benjamin. Writing in Germany in the 1930s, he observed how mechanically reproduced art, especially film, would become useful for Fascism, for the rendering of politics into aesthetics, with the advantage of mobilizing the masses for war without endangering traditional property relations. In the essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he anticipates Virilio's linking of technologies of acceleration and war in citing an early analyst and advocate of speed, the Futurist, Filippo Marinetti.

Second is Guy Debord, leader of the Situationniste movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, author of the short but highly influential, Society of the Spectacle. Surveying the spread of spectacle, the fetishization of the image, and the rise of a consumer society, he anticipated the failure of conventional, radical, spatial politics in May of 1968 in France. 

Third, there is Michel Foucault's extra-disciplinary genealogies of politiwas techniques of control arising from pan-opticism. Displaying no anxiety of influence, Virilio takes Foucault's pan-opticon model to an extraterrestrial level of discipline and control, offering a microanalysis of how new technologies of oversight and organizations of control, innovated by strategic alliances of the military, industrial, and scienti communities, have made the crossover into civilian and political sectors create a global administration of fear. 

All of these critical thinkers and others have provided key insights into the political and social implications of the advent of new technologies of reproduction. Yet they seem out of date, stuck in place, when compared to the restless yet, in all its timefullness, strangely rustless conceit of Virilio, that the proliferation of highspeed, realtime, cinematic, global, computer networked - in a word – virtual systems of how we see, has forever changed how we know. 

In an essay which originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Virilio maps the social consequences: What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information super highways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this nonsituation, is going to usher in a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

In short, virtuality destroys reality. On its own, perhaps not a great loss; but Virilio has his eye where others do not, on the collateral damage done to the ethos of reality, the highly vulnerable public space where individuals responsively interact. For Virilio, the interconnectivity of virtual systems is not ushering in a new day for democracy but a new order of telepresence; high-paced interconnectivity is becoming, technically and literally, a substitute for the slower-paced intersubjectivity of traditional political systems. He sees the self as a kind of virtually targeted ground-zero; once voided, concentric circles of political fallout spread, leaving in the vitrified rubble.

reading Virilio will, inevitably, leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but also the style of Virilio. In a typical Virilio sentence, which often elongates a full paragraph, the concepts can spew out. Many get recycled in later books. Some, benefiting from a new empirical settings, stand out like polished gems. But almost all of them them provide radically different takes on the social implications of technological forces, liberating their analysis from the customary.

a very important and central claim of his books is ''Critical Space'': The exo-colonialism of the industrial, imperial period has become introverted – internally, by the de-industrialization and pauperization of the urban center, and externally by the rise of an intensive transnational capital and transpolitical megalopoles. Mega cities are in   a post-industrial endo-colonization. 

Virilio was arguing from the perspective of a post-Einsteinian relativity, that not only seemed to play fast and loose with analoging, but also seemed to violate some of the basic laws of physics. The inadequacy of language to describe results and the field of quantum mechanics in general, confirmed with Virilio's point of view. The reader might have to suffer some conceptual gymnastics to get it. Yet, for every one of Virilio's oblique concepts or extravagant theoretical claims, there are others which slice right through the sludge that is served up as political analysis.

By this quality alone, there is no question that he belongs in the company of Benjamin and Adorno, Debord and Baudrillard, Foucault and Deleuze, Barthes and Derrida, for taking our understanding of the discursive relationship of technology, society, and politics to a higher plane of political as well as critical consciousness. After the millennium turn he stands out from the critical crowd, as a conceptual innovator and intellectual provocateur, the one who goes to the edge and sees beyond the traditional maps of modernity. 

Why Egypt Is Building a New Capital City

 

The pilot as a superhero in Israeli cinema

The Israeli fighter pilot as a superhero

The slogan "the best for pilots" still has significance in the State of Israel. Most of the public attach great prestige and importance to the pilot. World War II immortalized the pilot as a mythological figure. The stories of the "Battle of Britain" heroically described him. Winston Churchill said: "Never before have so many owed so few''. Ezer Weizmann, who served as a pilot in the British Air Force during World War II and served for about 8 years as commander of the Israeli Air Force, has become the most significant symbol of the Israeli pilot. He created the local slogan. It attests to excellence and implies that whoever flies is good.

The main historical factor in the development of this myth in Israel are the many wars that have been decided by its air power. Operation Kadesh in 1956 was relatively successful for the Air Force, but did not significantly dispel the myth. During the Six Day War, the Air Force's achievements were set and the documentaries about it highlighted the Israeli pilot myth. After that, when the Air Force was automatically associated with successes and abortions, there was a huge increase in the number of volunteers for a pilot course. Self-confidence was high and the pilots were wrapped in a lot of love.

The image of the almighty hero pilot remained in the minds of civilians even during the Yom Kippur War. Despite the low morale it brought with it, the Air Force was portrayed in this war as the main defensive wall. The pilot stereotype was perpetuated in it as the perfect hero, who is also a "sacrifing savior'', willing to risk his life and sacrifice his life for the State of Israel.

After the Yom Kippur War the pilots boasted less of the wings. This happened mostly to the young. But even if there was a slight respite in public admiration for pilots, they were able to regain the aura, thanks to successful operations such as "Entebbe" and "Attack of the Reactor in Iraq." These operations had a style that gave the Israeli pilot a Hollywood touch.

Today, the army is no longer a top value in Israeli society and it is permissible to criticize it, including the Air Force. Still, the image of the fighter pilot in public is better than that of other military personnel. Today the society is individual and the pilot expresses exactly that value. If you add to this elements like quick reaction, decisiveness, courage, challenge, self-control and accuracy, you come to the conclusion that this is the character of the popular hero.

An interesting question is in what direction will the pilot figure develop in the future, where the war will be largely waged using unmanned aerial vehicles, which require different characteristics and population segments.

In this context it is worth mentioning that the film industry was, from the beginning, an important source of employment for Air Force personnel around the world, after being discharged from military service. They have been integrated into this industry in all fields and levels. It was these people who shaped the character of the "Knightty Fighter Pilot" in popular culture.

The myth of aviation in the visual media in the State of Israel

Central to the approach that explores aviation as a comprehensive phenomenon is the practice of the terms "aerial awareness" and "aerial consciousness". The difference between them is, in short, is like the difference between the terms "artist" and "artisan".

The term "aerial awareness" explains the enthusiasm of individuals for the flying machine, which accumulates for independent creation and voluntary activity of creating traditions and symbols on the subject.

In Western powers, such as the United States, England, and France, aerial awareness puts the independent individual interested in aviation at the center. It is dominant and accordingly the character of the pilot is shaped as a lone hero, with a sensitive mind. He operates a highly complex machine while constantly physically moving in three-dimensional reality. He experiences and makes decisions that are not the property of the common man, who lives in a two-dimensional environment. The fighter pilot is therefore an "artist".

The term "air consciousness" means the intelligent use of aviation to create a comprehensive national and social identity and accordingly the pilot is part of the social system and does not question it. In World War II, there were four countries that controlled the "air consciousness", in what can be called the "air dictatorship". These countries are: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and the Communist Soviet Union. Because in these countries the emphasis in training was on quantity versus quality, the title appropriate for the pilot in them is "artisan".

In the middle are the countries that do not clearly belong to one of the two blocs, including Israel, which has created a unique aviation culture. Apart from being part of the myth and saga of the "best air force in the world", the images of the Israeli fighter pilot as a superhero also feed on Israel's ties with the United States, including American popular culture, with its superhero culture. Contrary to the image of the "wild west man", defense needs also contributed to the design of an Israeli fighter pilot with political views and social criticism, in films and in reality, as in the case of Yiftach Spector, who became one of the critics of Israeli defense policy.

Real American aviation events in the last half century have influenced Israeli society through television, which covered them as prominent and fascinating media events. For example, the "first Gulf War" that took place in the years 1990-1991. During it, American precision bombing videos were given extended screen time each evening. Feature aviation films, including "top Gun" (1986), illustrate the close connection between the American Air Force and the Israeli Air Force, thanks to the social background and similar ideals, the use of identical aircraft and the training and common goals.

The most important aviation-television event to date is the first landing on the moon, in July 1969. As in the rest of the world, Israel too watched with anxiety and excitement the miraculous journey of three Apollo 11 pilots: Reporters were sent to NASA space center,  TV and radio coverage of the event was from every possible angle and commentators and scholars have debated the question of the historical, scientific and spiritual significance of the landing. The Apollo 11 astronauts have gained the status of cultural heroes in the local media and entiresupplements have been devoted to their experiences.

The popular culture in the United States greatly reinforces the myth of aviation, but at the same time the image of the pilot as an individual with personal needs. ''Star Wars'' movie series, in which the figure of the pilot stands out as a superhero, can be analyzed as a biblical text about the cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil and the desire to survive with the help of God - "the force". There are Jewish scholars who challenge the ideological separation between popular culture and religious life and link episodes in the saga to Jewish religion and history. The saga allows for a local critical discussion of various issues, such as feminism and gender, government and minorities, psyche and personality, quality of life and environment and more. "Star Wars" also has practical importance for Israel militarily, as synonymous with space warfare and as a source for learning military strategies.

Feature films about the fighter pilot in the State of Israel

Compared to the extensive place that the Air Force has in Israeli society and the many books written about it, few feature films have been made in the country about the subject of the fighter pilot. In the few films made in the State of Israel, the icon gradually became from national to personal, and in the meantime he is also exposed to social criticism.

The film "Sinaia" (1961) is a unique feature film in Israeli cinema, the plot of which takes place during Kadesh operation. It star is an Israeli fighter pilot, Yiftach Spector, who was loaned to a film from the Air Force and later became one of its top pilots and commanders. The film was made while he was still a young pilot. It is generally based on a real event. Spector plays himself as an Israeli pilot, whose Mister jet crashed near a Bedouin encampment in Sinai. He manages to take control of an Egyptian Piper plane, fixes it in a tent and takes off with the wounded Bedouin baby Sinaia and her mother. The plane crashes and the pilot dies. Sinia survives and is picked up by another Israeli officer, who was left to wait for rescue. Spector's character adds a mythological dimension to the film, as he plays the character of the legendary Sabre.

Early feature films, such as "Sinaia" and "Eight after One" (1964), perpetuate the fighter pilot myth as a local superhero. The later films are more critical. There are Israeli aviation films that use this myth to present criticism of national policy, or self-criticism of the character of the personal pilot as a superhero. In feature films such as "Way of the Eagle" (1990) and "Armand's Kites" (2011), the protagonist pilot character is subject to self-criticism and external criticism.

An example from the recent period is the film "Adventure in the Sky" (2019), which combines computerized visual content scenes. An aviation-loving boy and girl find scraps of an antique Air Force "Messerschmidt" plane. They decide to renovate the plane and fly it in the Independence Day demonstration. Throughout the film one can find a close affinity with the First Air Force Fighter Squadron, but comedic antagonistic sub-characters, who display the arrogance sometimes identified with the pilot profession, manage to maintain the critical character.

Between the character of the pilot as a national hero and the criticism of him lies the private personality. The Israeli fighter pilot walks on a taut rope, which is intertwined with both his profession and his conscience. The result, for the most part, sharpens self-criticism, which is also a key tool in his ability to improve performance, as part of the "best air force in the world."

The film "Every Bastard is a King" (1968)

The discussion of the values ​​of the pilot character rises another step in Uri Zohar's feature film "Every Bastard is a King" (1968), for which the script was written by Eli Tavor and produced by Avraham Deshe. The film was a huge success. The film is dedicated to the IDF forces that operated during the Six Day War. It is a hybrid, as it include long documentary footage. Hybridity is also an artistic means of illustrating the main message of the film, as will be described below. It is a film that can be fully understood and analyzed as an aviation film, as the protagonist represents the character of the pilot as a superhero, even though he is a private pilot, acting for personal motives. The film tells the true story of Abie Nathan and his peace flight.

The film consists of three plots naratives: The first deals with the peace pilot Rafi Cohen (Oded Kotler) whose character is modeled after Abie Natan. The second deals with the character of his driver Yehoram (Yehoram Gaon) who becomes a brave warrior in the war. The third deals with an American journalist, Roy Hemings (William Berger), who came to cover the upcoming war with his wife Eileen (Pierre Angeli).

Abie Nathan, a restaurant owner and peace activist, took off privately on a light private plane to Egypt in February 1966, in an attempt to talk to Nasser. The film gives his flight a human and representative meaning that goes beyond its historical impact. He is crowned as an alternate superhero pilot. A key sentence at the end of the film is: "If you want to live - you must learn to fly".

The film begins with a small convoy of cars, in which Yehoram is driving the leading car, with Rafi sitting next to him. Along with them in the car is the widow Eileen. They drive to the airport in Lod. The convoy pass between the planes, parking and loading onto a large passenger plane a coffin wrapped in the United States flag, in which lie Roy Hemings' dead body. At that time, the airport and air transport were considered another expression of Israeli air superiority. The scene herald the reality of today, where flying in passenger planes has become massy and tedious.

Then begins the chronological narrative, which opens with a description recorded by Roy, of the situation in the country on the eve of the war: ''Israel is a systematic and messy collection of paradoxes, which somehow have some logic, which can not be explained. Everything you say about the Israelis is the opposite''. His words are heard against the background of a picture of a gleaming El Al plane taking off with its coffin.

The mystical-religious dimension is integrated, with Rafi leading seven demonstrators, who are marching to Jerusalem for peace. They tell Roy that if the politicians did not bring peace, maybe Rafi will succeed. Yehoram says that Rafi's courage stems from despair. He once saved Rafi's life at a rooftop party, where he walked on the railing to impress a girl and almost fell into an abyss. The story is told against the background of a flashback scene, of Yehoram the paratrooper and his friends jumping from a large military plane. Yehoram says that parachuting is the best thing in the world, but getting off the plane is scary.

Hemings reveals the aspirations of the collective war of the Arabs. You can see in the flashback the incident where Rafi walked on the roof railing, told again by Rafi himself, to Eileen with whom he develops an affair. Rafi has an instinct for self-destruction. He may be interested in being a "sacrifing savior''. Even the  mental dialectic, the culmination of which is the idea of ​​love, is incapable of solving his problems.

Hemings resents that Yehoram took a female soldier as a hitchhiker, but Yehoram says he is "free as a bird" and works to live. Hemings repeats the sentence as he records the experiences of the day. The romantic entanglement expands in Yehoram's event with Eileen.

Roy gets a phone call from Rafi, who wants to talk to him about a return flight to Egypt. Rafi tells Roy that he is flying not because of what he is, which is meaningless to him, but despite who he is.

Rafi tells Roy about the flight to Egypt. The flight scenes appears in full: preparations for takeoff, flight, spontaneous reactions in public. For a moment, Hemings and Rafi return to a disco hall. Hemings is trying to understand the incident as a "miracle''. Rafi answers him that if he wants to understand, "he must fly''. Afterwards scenes are: Landing in El Arish, Egyptian soldiers surround Rafi who says he wants to talk to Nasser about peace, a conversation with the local Egyptian governor about the rights of the people of Israel over the Land of Israel, the flight back to Tel Aviv, the welcome reception, mass and imaginary in part, to a hero carried on hands.

After the conversation between Roy and Rafi, we hear from the disco hall a radio announcer, who tells about a village where a dragon threatens its inhabitants. Out of nowhere a hero arrives with the aim of killing him and succeeds using a paper sword. In a tragic turn, the villagers kill the hero, as they no longer need him. The real "hero journey" is not done by someone who aspires to be a hero, but is shaped in retrospect by the masses.

Yehoram receives a military draft order. The war begins, with lengthy documentary scenes, which perpetuate the historical events, even though they seem seemingly irrelevant to the plot. The tanks go into action, in a battle scene of occupying Rafah. A small bird standing on a branch shaking in the wind is combined between this sections. The plot soundtrack is replaced by voices from the military radio instruments. The scenes of the charging tanks are combined with the scenes of the fighting and wounded warriors and especially with the heroic story of the warrior Yossi, which is the dramatic climax of the film. Although the air force does not appear in the war scenes, this does not detract from its triumphant aura.

At the end of the film, at six after the war, Roy accidentally walks to a minefield. Despite Rafi's warnings, he steps on a mine and is killed. Before his death, Rafi's sentence resonates in his mind: '' Do you want to understand? Fly''. Then his early recording from the beginning of the film about the paradoxical situation in Israel is heard again. Is is heard against the background of the passenger plane taking off with the coffin. In the last scene, Yehoram and Rafi say goodbye to each other in the terminal.

"Every Bastard is a King" puts a mirror in front of Israeli society on the eve of the Six Day War. It present a fascinating correlation between the spirit of the period and the character of the individual pilot. The film explore aerial consciousness versus aerial awareness. The first state of consciousness is that of Rafi, who sees in aviation the appearance of everything. The second is that of Roy, who sees aviation as a non-binding awareness. Yehoram presents the critical intermediate figure.

At the same time, the film explores two types of dialectics: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal dialectic seeks, out of an existential habit for what is on the surface, the earthly. The vertical dialectic strives, from a line of ideological assumptions, upwards, to the sublime. There are scenes in the film that highlight the gap between the two types of dialectics. For example, Eileen, who has no true national identity, has relationships with the three men. The personal scenes can also be defined as "prelimimary" and show an indistinguishable duration. In contrast, the aviation and war scenes are "symbolic", as they present awareness and order.

The film create a deconstruction of the Israeli reality. It dismantles and challenges the structural structure on which the state is based. The film glorify the aviation myth, which allows each person independent spiritual clarity, regardless of the stereotype of the knighty fighter pilot.

Myth, formalism and semiotics

Myths are a universal and interesting cultural phenomenon. They have existed since the dawn of civilizations, and probably have the greatest perseverance, similar to the important of religions. Every culture has created mythical images, which suggests that myth is a fundamental component of human expression. Although Western culture is generally defined as scientific and secular, it also includes many active mythical contents. There are many archetypal symbols, which believers believe to have a divine origin. For example, a bird may be the "forerunner", a high place may be the "place of revelation", and a giant tree "the tree of life".

Mythological origins are central to semiotics, which is the professional field of sign language practice - the basis for brand design. In mythological legends anything is possible. This is also the feeling that a marketer of almost any product tries to instill. Marketing is a mix of products, services and ideas. The marketer seeks measurable results, as an answer to every consumer's search for meaning in modern life.

For the semiotician, any simple object may have a symbolic meaning. Such symbols are, for example, Sigmund Freud's cigar, Charlie Chaplin's walking stick, and Michael Jackson's glove. The symbols can be exchanged in the free market. Despite this, they are endowed with a multiplicity of meaning, and what for one person is in the nature of "reality", for the other is in the nature of "imagination". Barter is conducted according to clear rules of the game. The domain of symbols is never higher than the domain of products, and there is always a product attached to the symbol, otherwise the symbol is not valid. The airplane became by the propaganda artists an object of symbolic significance of the highest degree.

Humans live by the stories they hear and experience throughout their lives. These stories are steeped in common symbols and myths, and involve riddles and answers. They showcase the human ethos, and so do the commercials. The cinematic plot is an expression of this. The cinematic or advertising story is multidimensional, and is integrated into a system of matching symbols, resulting from behavior, myth, tradition, and the like, in the lives of viewers and consumers. The purpose is of creating an integrated narrative in all popular culture.

Because the myths express central cultural values, they appear in all media and cultural channels, both mass and elitist. Myths exist in the world of advertising, propaganda and also in the world of films. Cinema is a place where the use of myths is gaining ground, and incorporating myths into feature films is a major phenomenon. The Hollywood studio film is a product that many people share in the production process. Hence, similar to the myth, it turns to as broad a common denominator as possible.

In the twentieth century, as human society became more modern, technological, and complex, so did the need to use myths in popular culture to define the role of each person in the masses. Cinema is a connection between reality and imagination, and offers a space for transition between them. It is a total art, combining many fields of art, and many movie stars have also become role models. Movie heroes belong to the "superhero" category, which is one of the most important archetypes in human culture. They are at the top along with the archetype of the "family" in its extended definition, as a group of people with close ties.

The seismic change in the political structures of post-World War I Europe spawned the fascist movements and regimes, built on the principles of mythical modernity. Mythical modernity was based on an aspiration for advanced technology, using belief and archetypal conditioning for its application, rather than the enlightened mind. The desire for a mythical fascist order developed during the war. The events of the war, the fall of the dynasties and the political upheavals were the most visible result of a rupture in the old order, and gave rise to fascism.

An influential German thinker was Ernest Junger. Junger, the decorated combat soldier who became an influential philosopher of the Nazi movement, clearly recognized the shocks around him, and preached a new civilian reality, taking an example from the war. Junger described the war in hygienic terms: war is an end in itself, it is the ideal existential situation. The war created a new kind of human being, a new race of warriors who adopted an ethos of military masculinity, discipline, power and heroism, and a fusion of man and machine. Civilian life is a continuation of the war in other ways. Technological and political warfare continues in them and with it human forging intensifies.

The clear symbol of mythical totalitarian modernism in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was the airplane. The linguistic symbols and metaphors associated with aviation discourse, its perception and interpretation, are many, and the sources that can be relied on in this context are very numerous. They include important cultural events, artwork, books, magazines, propaganda products and more. It was not the aviation itself, but its connections, not the pilot himself, but the concepts involved, that were the focus of attention. They served as a means of revolutionary liberation from the burden of the past.

The social agenda, which has been the focus of attention in fascist regimes, is clarified through the narrative of aviation heroes, and through the vision of the new man that fascism has tried to make a reality through an anthropological revolution. The protagonists were models and prototypes that citizens were required to use in order to shape their lives. The norms and values ​​that the media published as embodied in those heroes permeated the social reality and the world was understood according to their register.

The airplane and the pilot were totems, in the fullest sense of the word of icons with archetypal characteristics. They reflected the desire for order, and they were the epitome of modernity. The spiritual reciprocity between fascism and aviation was unequivocal. It has created mythical modernity, as opposed to liberal modernity.

This worldview fits into the formalist film style, in which directors are interested in expressive and subjective re-creation of their experiences of reality, rather than the way others perceive it. In formalist films one can find a high degree of manipulation, a re-design of reality. Formalist cinema tends to emphasize form, technique, and style of expression.

There is a parallel between marketing characters with the goal of becoming celebrities and states marketing, with the goal of making them more attractive in the international community. Specifically, the image of political leaders is the result of intense professional investment, measured by the field of consumer product marketing as brands. Hitler was an icon in the international community, as was Nazi Germany, which became a brand. The state as a brand exists for the purposes of domestic and foreign policy.

Roland Barth, one of the forefathers of semiotics, examined images through the analysis of the messages they contain, in order to know to what extent visual images create an ideological worldview. Key concepts in the analysis are the "signifier" and the "marked". The "signifier" is what we see, hear, feel. "Marked" is the meaning we derive from the signifier. For example, photography is perceived by us as a reality, but it has an ideological and cultural construction. A photograph of a polished soldier of local descent, against the backdrop of the flag of his country's colonial power, reflects his loyalty and identity which may not actually exist.

UFA studios - the German Hollywood

The German film industry, originally a small part of entertainment shows, grew at a dizzying pace, producing 353 films in 1913, more than 10 times that of 1910. During World War I, imperial Germany created the need to concentrate cinematic resources to produce regime-compliant films. The acting commander-in-chief, Ludendorff, issued a letter on the subject in 1917, creating the UFA company, which united virtually the entire German film industry.

Post-World War I economic crisis gave UFA excellent conditions to continue to head the local industry. But the company was put under economic supervision, which dictated the production of commercial films and a partnership with Hollywood studios. Another step was the privatization of the company. In 1927 it was taken over by the right-wing industrialist Hogenberg. The invention of the soundtrack at the time put many companies in crisis and allowed for a further strengthening of UFA.

The huge company continued to exist during the Weimar Republic and during the Nazi regime, until the end of World War II. The Nazis nationalized UFA immediately after coming to power, banning Jews from working there. It was part of a move to nationalize all the media firms in Germany, such as the press, radio and cultural institutions.

Joseph Goebbels closely monitored what was going on UFA and it was actually his private yard. He personally supervised the works, from the selection of the script to the final approval of the finished film. During the Nazi period, about a thousand films were made in UFA and its subsidiaries. There were quality films among them, in parallel with commercial films. The works were in a variety of genres, and reflected the artistic, economic, and political tension that prevailed in Germany.

Cinema, which originally created a cultural revolution, gradually became a major means of directing observation of reality. As a result, the fear that it would become a tool in the hands of subversive elements increased. These conflicting elements prevailed in the productions. It was a constant competition between artistic creativity, connected with radical social factors, versus the commitment to financial stability, bestowed by the upper classes and their conservative taste. What gave UFA its shape was its contradictory nature, as society was a force field composed of capital, politics, cinema and the public.

During World War I, UEFA military inspectors wanted to make a patriotic glow to the melodramatic tensions that cinema thrived on, and to allow viewers to enjoy visuality. The branding of the nation was the great ambition of the Nazis. Cinematic coverage has steadily corrected reality by allowing audiences to immerse themselves in larger collective destinies.  Cinematic setting was powerful. Through its credit strong emotional power was imparted to nationalism. War and cinema renewed the meanings of the modern nation-state and cultivated fantasies about it.

Because the UFA was an economic business, as well as a propaganda arm and a place of artistic and technical experimentation, in which Social Democrats and Jews played key roles, UFA films could not be reduced to a single influence. Neither Ludendorf, nor Hogenberg, nor even Goebbels, achieved complete command. Their empire was difficult to cover and control by its very nature.

At its peak, UFA competed against the major Hollywood studios and the German film industry was the second largest in the world. Its film studios covered vast areas of the Bubblesberg neighborhood of Berlin. The thousands of films made by the company, in all genres, were watched by hundreds of millions of viewers, for whom it was a symbol of the good life. 

During the Weimar Republic, in addition to entertainment films for the masses, experimental expressionist films were made in it. After the Nazis came to power, in 1933, they made it their main propaganda tool. Therefore the Allies eliminated it after World War II. Many of the professionals in Germany were Jews, and were banned from working for the company as soon as the Nazis came to power. They escaped, and some joined the rival Hollywood film industry. Enthusiastic Nazis took the place of the Jews.

The company became known for its designed productions. The rich scenery, and especially the lavish costumes, were a prominent hallmark of the films produced in it. As an added value to films, UFA studios have also dictated the entire popular culture, similar to the Hollywood film industry at its peak. UFA movie stars have shaped, through careful planning, the tastes, fashion and lifestyle in Germany. UFA has promoted itself, and the industry sectors close to it, through the intensive distribution of posters, advertisements, newsletters, magazines, movie diaries and of course a selection of the content in the movies.

UFA reflect the fate of the Nazi regime. The state-owned company initially created a production plant that ensured orderly productions, fixed salaries, and orderly film distribution. All the partners in the filmmaking, from Joseph Goebbels to the last crew members in the production, were dedicated film lovers. The productions were characterized by order and organization that were typical of the Nazi regime, compared to the relative disorder that was typical of the Weimar period productions. German order and discipline are immediately reflected to viewers in accurate scenes. Another value of the disciplined production was the ability to go out in cohesive outdoor filming teams in difficult conditions. Under crisis conditions, as during extensive military recruitment, manpower could be streamlined relatively easily. The production of any film was expensive, so it was important for the ability of the various studio managers to choose, through their centralized power, to create films according to artistic and national considerations, and not according to cheap commercial considerations.

The method has created a shortage of good scripts. The nationalized film industry has worked as a production line, and this is contrary to the original creative process, which does not succumb to the dictates of time. So when a pattern of success was identified, like aviation movies, it was repeated over and over again.

Important films made in UFA include:

During the Weimar Republic:

"Metropolis" (1927) - a film in the science fiction genre, with social significance, which was a prestigious production that almost brought UFA into bankruptcy. The plot of the film revolves around two groups of citizens in a futuristic society, the elite of the executives and the masses of workers, who live in two separate worlds, upper and lower. A robotic woman whips up a conflict between them, which ends in reconciliation.

films from the Nazi period:

"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1943) - a fantastic, big budget and colorful comedy created by Goebbels, influenced by the Hollywood's "Wizard of Oz", about the Baron's imaginary stories known from children's books. The Baron has in the film the image of a superhero, who lives forever and possesses miraculous technologies. The festive premiere in Berlin took place during the announcement of the surrender in Stalingrad. The film thus reflects the illusion of victory through miracles and miracle weapons.

"Kohlberg" (1945) - a colorful, high-budget historical film, in the genre of Prussian war films, dozens of which were made at UFA studios. The film was made with the participation of tens of thousands of soldiers as extras. The plot of the film revolves around the resistance of the inhabitants of Kohlberg to the siege imposed on them by Napoleon's army. The protagonist of the film is a young officer, similar to Goebbels in appearance and speech, who shows decisiveness and leads the citizens to dig a defense system in preparation for the enemy attack, which crush the city by bombardment. The film is intended to prepare the German people for a long war on the home front.