Katya Sivers - Image Laundering. Warfare As Backdrop
Image Laundering: Warfare As Backdrop
Katya Sivers
On 14 March 2022, three weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian Channel One employee Marina Ovsyannikova walked in front of the cameras during the live evening news broadcast of Vremya programme, holding a poster with the slogan “No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They are lying to you here. Russians against war.” Her gesture mirrored that of a hostage, but instead of a dated newspaper, the live broadcast itself became her alibi, serving as an unambiguous timestamp. Positioned between the anchor and the backdrop, she ruptured the seamless image that the audience had been conditioned to consume.
Ovsyannikova’s five-second act, brief as it was, catalysed an immediate tightening of security protocols: live broadcasts were now subject to a mandatory one-minute delay. This adjustment marked the shift to a sanitised, risk-free presentation of the war, transforming it into a sterilised spectacle, much like an OnlyFans platform for viewers seeking safe gratification: "War, when it has been turned into information, ceases to be a realistic war and becomes a virtual war" (Baudrillard, p. 41).
The cynical and instrumental use of media has been fully appropriated by Russian state television channels, turning the war into a carefully curated spectacle. Fabricated backdrops, often digitally constructed, stand in for the reality of the battlefield, with news anchors reading scripts against these artificial settings. Even live segments from war zones are curated to exclude the human costs of war – refugees, suffering, death – while presenting an image of military might that is sleek, polished, and distant. The broadcast unfolds as a performance, where tanks, airplanes, and missiles are reduced to the status of graphic symbols, digital collages, and 3D renderings, as if they are part of an abstract, sanitised narrative. The hyper-saturated, impersonal nature of these representations transforms the war into an event devoid of empathy or human consequence, happening in a realm far removed from the viewer’s immediate reality.
This media spectacle is not a new development. It has historical antecedents in Russia’s cinematic and media history. One of the most well-known fabrications, Sergei Eisenstein’s October, for example, reimagined the Revolution of 1917 a decade after it had passed. Commissioned by the October Jubilee Committee, the film became one of the Soviet Union’s most ambitious cinematic endeavors, utilising unprecedented resources, including control over an entire city. Eisenstein’s montage techniques – combining “montage of attractions” to elicit emotional reactions with “intellectual montage” to provoke deeper associations – produced a fabricated narrative of revolution. But even this idealised version was subject to censorship: Stalin demanded the removal of all scenes featuring Trotsky just before the film’s premiere.
The methods that proved so successful in the early days of Soviet Russia were further exploited by the state with historical photographs. Those who fell out of favor with Stalin were erased, their figures scrubbed from the visual record one by one, while the faces of the “enemies of the people” were obscured with black marks (King 1997). This practice persisted for decades, as the image – now a malleable surface – became a tool for the state’s narrative control, turning even death into a strategic intervention in the visual archive. With the evolution of media technologies, the dynamic between observer and observed has undergone a profound shift. In response, critical artistic interventions have surfaced, where individuals actively obscure their faces as a tactical resistance against surveillance and the pervasive reach of power structures.
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