On Monday morning, the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel opened all the news and magazines. Beyond the ephemeris of October 7, the media weight was justified because it represents the beginning of a war conflict that has only grown. A year later, we are on the edge of a full-scale war in the Middle East, and so all the images of the last twelve months about this disaster take on a new meaning to explain the present. Visually, the televisions represented the violence of the initial massacre as the seed of what has come after.
But in this performance to commemorate the fateful date there was a transversal audiovisual resource that both television networks and viewers have normalized: a kind of music video clips about the war to emphasize the horror. They served as preliminaries to discuss the conflict. To create the right atmosphere. A contradiction that, beyond being sensational, has something obscene or pornographic.
In Antena3’s early morning news, the presenter Manu Sánchez closed the program with a montage of terrible sequences from the war, especially from that attack on October 7 at the Supernova festival in Re’im. The images were accompanied by the musical theme Masters of war, by Bob Dylan. Despite the fact that the song has a strong anti-war message and questions the morality of a system that perpetuates these atrocities, the result has a certain will to fascinate through gruesome scenes and increase the necessary emotionality. Without changing chain, a public mirrorthey also introduced the most devastating images with orchestral music, featuring violins, which was increasing in intensity. The screams of the victims, the sound of gunshots, alarms and explosions overlapped with the tragic melody. The last notes of violins that closed the audio-visual montage, which sounded almost like a moan over the obliterating sequences, were linked to the sound of anti-aircraft sirens, but the final closure to the composition was put by the sound of a large explosion .
A La1 timea video to explain the tragedy of the thousands of displaced Palestinians accompanied by very sad music the voices of different witnesses who spoke of their misfortune. Beyond these video clips, to enliven the gatherings, the terrifying images served as background decoration without any caution in the selection. A The critical look from Telecinco, one’s own music thriller of fast-paced action added an uncomfortable epic to terrible images of people suffering, bloodied children crying and multiple explosions chaining one after the other. Everywhere the missiles flying over the sky and the smoke mushrooms after the deflagration were chained together with certain aesthetic pretensions, emulating the staging of fireworks.
War doesn’t need a lot of additives to look gory. These musical montages based on atrocious images are like putting horror at the service of aesthetics.
Mònica Planas Callol is a journalist and television critic
Source: www.ara.cat
