Harry Gay
Thermal imaging and infrared technology have been around since 1929, but have seen increased usage in the last 50 years as commercial and industrial applications have expanded. Used largely in the fields of security and medicine, thermographic cameras have been teasing their use in the cinematographers toolbox in the last decade, with filmmakers breaking from our traditionally stable relationship with the cinematic frame to present an entirely new gaze for symbolic effect. Films such as Predator (1987), There Will Be No More Night (2020) and The Zone of Interest (2023) utilise this emerging tool for cinematic effect to question the boundaries between the human and the inhuman.
Thermal imaging works by capturing the heat emanating from peoples bodies. It is often used in the dark or when something is unavailable to regular human perception. The technology has most often been used in the fields of medicine and military practice, detecting unseen viruses or identifying targets from far away distances. The warmer the subject or object, the brighter they are in the frame, and the colder they are, the cooler their tones are. What viewers are privy to, then, is an almost kaleidoscopic vision completely alien to regular human perception, one in which intricate details of the human form are reduced down to blobs of red and yellow mass, moving about in dark purple space. It is this alien perspective that made it so suited to be used as the point of view (POV) of the intergalactic bounty hunter in John McTiernan’s Predator; its helmet allows it to track the body heat emanating off of the soldiers.
What thermal imaging displays, at its core, is an interplay between light and dark, brighter tones versus softer ones. The vast chasm between these polychromatic hues opens space to allow filmmakers and audiences to make moral and intellectual judgements on what these contrasts may signify. Within the context of analysing documentary cinema, Bruno Lessard (2018) traces a helpful history of light and dark in philosophy, and how light has often been used to “establish the critical distance necessary to pass judgment [sic] and clear the fog of ignorance” (45).
According to Lessard (2018), “light is at the source of the Enlightenment ideals of progress, reason, science, objectivity, self-consciousness, and truth”(45). Invoking the Western philosophical tradition of “the light of truth,” Lessard suggests that “[t]he knowable world emerges in the light of day, as reality is said to be confirmed by the senses”(47).
In contrast, night-time’s “dark, silent nocturnal space, imbued with uncertainty and indeterminacy, generates a sense of uneasyness [sic] and insecurity that haunts any philosopher or documentarian”(Lessard 51). The seemingly infinite possibilities of the dark, offering a disappearance of all objects, people and things, imbues it with both the presence of nothingness and something-ness.
The seemingly endless horrors of the dark can be potentially attributed to a ““disenchantment of night” that occurred as a result of the industrialization of light in the nineteenth century.” (Lessard 46) What modernity brought was the elimination of the vast mysteries that darkness and the night offered, be it religious or cosmological, and newer technologies that allow us to capture images at night, be it night photography or thermographic imagery, is an attempt to re-enchant the night. By re-enchanting the night, thermal images open “the possibility of rediscovering a part of human experience that has been neglected in image making and envisioning the different types of critical knowledge about the world that night can produce” (47).
It is through the seemingly alien and unnatural perspective of the thermal gaze that we are then given access to knowledge not immediately made privy to us. For instance, Predator follows a group of soldiers stalking the rainforests of Central America. Their guns-blazing, ultra-masculine approach to conflict, is presented as a thinly veiled allegory for the United States’ presence in Vietnam only a decade prior. As the men slowly begin to be picked off one by one by an unseen enemy, they are vastly outmatched by a technological force far beyond their capabilities. It is the thermal lens of the titular Predator that sets it apart from the men, technologically, organically and morally (see Fig.1). The thermal gaze is as alien to us as the creature’s expanding jaw, large bulbous head and scaly skin; it is artificial and thus inhuman, and thus frames the actions committed from this perspective as monstrous, inhuman and inhumane. It allows us to sympathise with the men, and, furthermore, gain access to the perspective of victims in the Vietnam War who would have also come face to face with an enemy with a vast military power.
Fig. 1 — The thermal gaze in Predator (1987).
This coding of the thermal gaze as monstrous is complicated decades later in films such as Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015) and Éléonore Weber’s There Will Be No More Night (TWBNMN). Since the invasion of Iraq, U.S. living room screens have been proliferated with images of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations. Drone shots of soldiers firing upon unsuspecting victims have become almost a part of our daily viewing habits, unwittingly or not, with these images punctuated by their thermographic gaze.
Sicario takes our familiarity and the practicality of these images as a matter of fact in its night vision firefight sequence, with the presentation made not out of aesthetic and thematic consideration but largely just as a way for the audience to be able to see the action. In the sequence, soldiers are using infrared cameras to document a raid, with the thermal gaze utilised for its practical and intended military purposes. It is meant to evoke a sense of realism, more than anything else, with the thermal image becoming a simulacrum for wars and conflicts that take place elsewhere; a presence of something yet nothingness.
Fig. 2 — Military practise rendered through infrared eyes, the alien has become normal in Sicario (2015).
TWBNMN, on the other hand, is a documentary composed entirely of helicopter and drone footage captured during the unending conflict, and draws attention to the ways in which the thermal image reduces the individual features, especially at a distance, to a glowing blob. There is no stable sense of ocularity as the difference between a rake and a gun are dissolved. Under the gaze of the drone operator, everyone is guilty, every shape poses a threat. Here, the thermal gaze emphasises the division between the human and the humane.
Operators can be heard yelling “Kill! Kill!” like they’re playing a video game or lingering on the charred remains of a group of men blown up by their heavy artillery. Shooting individuals after they have already been wounded, our only point of contact with the soldiers, Pierre V., acknowledges they may have committed war crimes, but adds “the pilot could always say that they never signed the Geneva Convention for the protection of the wounded, so it doesn’t apply.” As Cath Clarke from The Guardian points out, “you can almost feel the itch to shoot everything that moves.”Here, the thermal gaze becomes monstrous and inhuman once again, as the film points to the immorality of warfare and the Western world’s dehumanisation of civilians in the Middle East.
In the film’s narration, Natalie Richard points out how some of the helicopters are named after animals, “sometimes prey sometimes predator’s,” while others are named after “Indian tribes [the US have] massacred.” Here, the thermal gaze returns to that of the predator, tethering it to a history of colonial expansion through advanced technologies. Predator and TWBNMN are linked, then, in their use of the thermal gaze to evoke the military might of colonial powers reaping havoc and laying waste to innocent civilians in the Global South.
In Weber’s documentary, Afghan civilians shield themselves from the drone’s eye with cold blankets, reducing their body heat and becoming invisible to the thermal gaze. Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger), similarly adapts to the advanced technology of the Predator at the end of the film in order to fight against it. In each instance, there is a clear acknowledgement of the ways in which darkness and light can be problematised for certain ends. Santasil Mallik of The Conversation suggests that “with thermal and night-vision cameras, any moving presence glowing in darkness becomes susceptible to gunfire by combat helicopters hovering above conflict zones.” Similarly, David Scott Diffrient in his write up for act. The Human Rights Film Festival, asserts that “the delineation between day and night becomes irrelevant in an age when the world’s most powerful, technologically sophisticated militaries can use long-range infrared cameras to target suspected threats at any hour.” Here we return to the delineation of light and dark as moral categories, to which Weber, according to Diffrient, are absurdly binaristic ways of thinking, one which “allows one side to legitimize [sic] its use of unbridled force against the other side, and to falsely claim the high moral ground by virtue of its literally elevated position above people who look like ants.”
Fig 3. —Dehumanisation of other bodies in There Will Be No More Night (2020).
As Diffrient concludes, “[t]his hypnotic film concludes that night and its associated comforts (e.g., family time, rest, sleep) will return to those devastated parts of the world only once we achieve that most elusive of goals: when — putting an unlikely spin on its title — there will be no more war.” As romantic as this ending is, Mallik points out that which is jarringly absent from the film, that being “the voices of those people who are continually mapped by the imaging technologies of modern warfare and the social and psychological effects the technologies have on them.” Similarly, while we are given access to the intimate lives of the US soldiers in Predator, the voices of the Central Americans slaughtered early on in the film remain absent. Both film’s most human points of contact are Dutch, a US soldier, and Pierre V., a French pilot.
Reverse Shot’s James Wham’s interpretation of the ending in a post-Trump, post-truth world, we see how there is a subversion of “the earth’s natural cycle, how there exists now a ‘real night’ and ‘fake day.’ […] Weber has invented a post-light cinema, and she suggests that we are living in a post-light world.” Here, Wham is evoking philosophical and moral arguments surrounding light and darkness, and the instability of knowledge in our current milieu. Eubulus Kane, writing for Medium, brings this all back to the thermographic gaze:
During the war on terror, technology and ideology converged. Night vision became the stand in for the befuddled western gaze with which coalition forces beheld the local context. And, through the monochrome of their misguided moral framework, the Afghan people — members of cultures and histories the western military abjectly failed to understand — were reduced to ghosts-in-waiting.
Here, Kane directly tethers the thermal gaze to a Western one, in which voices are absent, truth is obscure, and morals are grey.
These films, while not belonging strictly to the horror genre, are horrific. What is more terrifying and monstrous than the merciless killing of civilians in warfare? It is a horror film playing out in real time, and a fear embedded in all of us. While not body horror in the traditional sense, it is a horror of bodies being tracked, reduced to blobs on a screen, depersonalised, dehumanised. Referring back to Wham,
The anxieties of the post-atomic age have developed into a highly personalized [sic] paranoia, where a drone or satellite can track you from an imperceivable distance, marking your location to the pixel on a global positioning system, cataloging [sic] the contours of your face, the rhythms of your gait, the nuances of your posture. Your entire life is databased [sic], and then someone—maybe in a war room on the other side of the world—pushes the button to have you executed. The panopticon has been fitted with a cannon, one that fires seemingly at random: to be seen is to be killed, and this technology is all-seeing.
In 2023, we saw a marked shift in the ways in which thermal imagery is intrinsically tied to the monstrous with Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. The film follows Rudolf Höss, a guard at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, and his family as they live on the outskirts of the concentration camp. Zone highlights the inhumanity of the family as they go about their quotidian routines—watering flowers, swimming, playing games—all the while countless horrors are occurring just over the boundaries of their property, just out of view. It is a vision all too familiar and stressed previously, one in which the world sits idly while monstrous acts are committed overseas or in neighbouring countries.
At night, a rogue child sneaks her way into the camp to hide apples for detainees. The sequence is bathed in an infrared glow that emphasises the silhouette of the child and the fruit she leaves behind. Here, the thermal subject is no longer at a distance, no longer just a blob on a screen, but rather a living, breathing human. Her act of kindness sets her apart from the other characters in the film, and it is through the use of infrared technology that her humaneness is emphasised. Thermal imaging has shifted from a tool for dehumanisation, to one of humanising.
Fig. 4 — The light of goodness in The Zone of Interest (2023).
These sequences are the lynchpin in a film all about light and darkness. Scenes are shot in very monotone greys and whites, the wall that borders Auschwitz is a very pale cream colour, the town Hoss is transferred two is blanketed by a gentle snow, and in the final moments of the film he walks down into a dark abyss, descending further in his moral bankruptcy. In an interview with The Guardian, Glazer said of the sequences with the little girl: “That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. […] It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good.”
While it may seem simplistic to revert back to very binaristic themes of light versus darkness and good versus evil, perhaps in this post-truth, post-present-future Trump landscape—in which disinformation spreads rapidly and an emboldened far-right is being spearheaded by Neo-Nazis—the world needs reminding that there are ideas that are black and white. Nazism is bad, genocide is bad, apartheid is bad: Glazer said as much in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Academy Awards when he condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These films are as much about now as they are then, and are reminders of the need for good in a time of evil.
Positioned thus, these films grapple with the inhuman treatment of marginalised groups by global powers. The gaze through which we see conflict has been altered by technology in the past decades, and these films highlight the moral ambiguity to which our gaze is filtered through. As these technologies develop, new relations to the body are created, with the scope of how one is tracked, measured and configured enforcing an increasingly dehumanised self. At the core of each of these films, however, is an urging for our collective humanity when contrasted with the monstrous. A monstrous that seeks to make horrors of our bodies.
Works Cited
Clarke, Cath. “There Will Be No More Night review – chilling meditation on modern warfare.” The Guardian, 24 Jan. 2022.
Diffrient, David Scott. “There Will Be No More Night.” act. Human Rights Festival, 4 May 2021.
Giardina, Carolyn. “How Roger Deakins Mastered Shooting in the Dark for ‘Sicario’.” The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Nov. 2015.
Kane, Eubulus. “Ghost Watch: An Analysis of Eleonore Weber’s ‘There Will Be No More Night’.” Medium, 4 May 2023.
Lessard, Bruno. “Shot in the Dark: Nocturnal Philosophy and Night Photography”. Critical Distance in Documentary Cinema, edited by Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard, 2018, pp. 45-69.
Mallik, Santasil. “There Will Be No More Night: Documentary raises ethical questions about using war footage.” The Conversation, 17 Mar. 2023.
O’Hagan, Sean. “Jonathan Glazer on his Holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now’.” The Guardian, 10 Dec 2023.
Predator. Directed by John McTiernan, 20th Century Fox, 1987.
Sicario. Directed by Dennis Villeneuve, Roadshow, 2015.
The Zone of Interest. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, Madman Entertainment, 2023.
There Will Be No More Night. Directed by Éléonore Weber, MUBI, 2020.
Wham, James. “There Will Be No More Night.” Reverse Shot, 31 Jul. 2021.
