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With the release of a video clip from Channel 4 television’s ‘No Fire Zone’ documentary, showing footage of what the British channel said was the arrest by Sri Lankan soldiers of Isaipriya, an LTTE television newsreader, India’s ‘Newshour’ TV programme last weekend featured a debate titled ‘Can this footage be ignored?’ A point made by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, a speaker on the panel, was that the footage was not authenticated by ‘Newshour.’ Channel 4 said it had authentication, “but how do you know?” asked Dr Swamy. He went on to argue that all he saw was the picture of a woman, some soldiers giving her a sheet to cover herself with and then helping her get up and walk away. From that the surmise comes that she was raped, she was killed etc.

Swamy’s point draws attention to a typical feature of the Channel 4 documentaries on Sri Lanka that seek to incriminate the Sri Lankan armed forces over alleged war crimes. Nothing is authenticated, nothing is proved, everything is based on surmise and through an assemblage of visuals in such a manner that the viewer is led to believe that war crimes were committed. Viewers’ perceptions are manipulated so that they accept the meanings given by Channel 4′s narrative, to the visual sequences. For example pictures of some identifiable people are shown, followed by pictures of unidentifiable dead bodies which, it is asserted, are those of the people earlier shown alive. When atrocities are depicted Channel 4 suggests to the audience who the perpetrators, victims, times, dates and locations are. The narrative build-up and emotional momentum of the drama is such that most viewers would unquestioningly accept the interpretations of the image sequences suggested by Channel 4. 

Lev Kuleshov was a Russian film director who developed what is known in film studies as Soviet Montage theory. He showed how in film, meaning can be derived not from the shots themselves but the order or sequence in which they are assembled. (‘Montage’ in French means to build, organise or assemble.) Kuleshov demonstrated in an experiment how juxtaposition of different shots could change how an audience felt about certain scenes, and derive a new meaning from them – known as the ‘Kuleshov Effect.’

In his now-famous experiment, Kuleshov showed an audience a single close-up shot of an actor’s face, intercut with other images — a bowl of soup, an infant in a coffin, a woman reclining on a sofa. The audience, reacting, was full of praise for the actor’s range of expression in response to the different situations. In fact it was the same shot of the man’s expressionless face that had been intercut with these images. The expressions the audience thought it saw – of hunger, pity and desire — were created in their own minds, with a new meaning derived from the intercut shots. 

Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein further developed Montage theory, showing how two or more images edited together create a ‘tertium quid’ or ‘third thing.’ The concept is best illustrated in the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence of his film ‘Battleship Potemkin.’

The influence of Montage and related experiments on contemporary video is well known. It is plain to see in Callum McRae’s documentaries on Sri Lanka. While Eisenstein’s classic work belonged to the era of silent film, Channel 4 is helped along considerably in its project by several other factors, the most obvious being the use of sound, narrative and dialogue. We are not aware of what kind of cutting and splicing has been done in this department.

Another factor is the availability of the endless possibilities of digital image manipulation. One of these is the possibility to ‘tweak’ facial expressions. At one point in ‘No Fire Zone’ a group of young female LTTE suspects is shown being taken away in a trailer. In one frame a young soldier carrying a gun is shown escorting them, looking tired and somewhat harassed. For about a second the soldier’s face disappears from the top of the frame. It then reappears, but the tired expression has been replaced with a leer. The change is not obvious because the face is at the edge of the frame and off-centre. But it would no doubt register subliminally in the viewer’s mind.

There is much that is unknown about the creation of the documentary ‘No Fire Zone,’ not least because its authors refuse to release the original footage to either the UN or the Government of Sri Lanka for independent digital video analysis. What is known however is that Channel 4 as well as most of those ‘testifying’ for them in this video, for one reason or another, have reason to be hostile towards the GoSL, and could therefore have motives other than the purely altruistic. Channel 4′s Nick Paton Walsh and his crew were deported from Sri Lanka in 2009. Ex-UN staffer Gordon Weiss left Sri Lanka disgruntled with both the UN and the GoSL. The video footage was reportedly supplied to Channel 4 by ‘Journalists for Democracy,’ a self-exiled group that, again, has an axe to grind with the government by whom they say they are under threat. The young Tamil woman with a British accent who appears repeatedly in the video has been identified by the GoSL as an LTTE operative, with cadre number and dog tag. 

It’s also known that the LTTE regularly photographed and video-taped its own atrocities, and that it had a super-efficient propaganda arm to circulate material to an eager Western media. Where this material ends up and in what form is anyone’s guess. Add to this the powerful revenge motivation of pro-LTTE Diaspora groups bent on discrediting the Sri Lankan state, and it becomes clear that Channel 4 doesn’t need to try very hard in convincing significant sections of its target audience. The tidal wave of propaganda building up against Sri Lanka represents the mobilization of a complex configuration of forces, and ‘No Fire Zone’ merely rides that tide to international ‘fame.’