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But the newspapers are still far from being able to print that picture opposite one of fresh troops lining up to fill another plane. Why not? It’s about the same proportion for geniuses who run amok in American society.And we are mindful of the dead: we know the approximate arithmetic by which losses turn into voters sacrificed; but we can only puzzle over the equation between civilian deaths and the impossibility of identifying, let alone winning, a peace. All of which leaves us confused about whether or not to show the dead and the killings.It was only late in the Second World War that the media decided that they could show pictures of dead bodies. In the First World War (by far the richest harvest), corpses were kept out of sight – on grounds of morale, or taste? And now, American authorities are offended that Al-Jazeera television has shown executed British prisoners, and the American media are insistent that they will never stoop to such atrocities.We do not need to believe that Firm promises in the early days of war are not reliable. A more interesting question may be, why not show the dead? Are the authorities fearful that too much exposure to death as actuality will diminish the belief in war? There are legends that it was the television coverage of the Vietnam war – in which, eventually, we saw corpses as well as people being struck down “live” – that killed the ordinary American’s faith in that war.Who knows? There were other factors at work, including the palpable lack of a plan that would win the war Similar feelings could build watching Iraq. So I’m not sure that mere slaughter does the trick – not in a society where, at the age of going to college, the young American can be expected to have seen 20,000 simulated killings on film and television.What is a simulated killing? It’s a killing for the purposes of fiction, where actors and extras are schooled in a sudden catastrophe of the body – limbs flung out, the head twisted, the body lifted off the ground by blast, morsels of flesh coming apart like debris We have become very good at this. We have a fine art that involves sewing sachets of blood into an actor’s uniform so that, when shot, we see spurts of blood, and even pieces of the body dislodged.

We have got used to this by now – the battle scenes where a wounded soldier on the D-Day beach sees a severed hand and wonders if it is his.Audiences lap this stuff up. And these days, the massacre of multitudes is easier still in that the people may only be computer-generated figures in the first place Easy come, easy go. And how long is it before that sophisticated society wonders whether it has grown a little too detached from life? Every picture that gets closer to a moment of death these days (and we will get there), reminds me of Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph, Falling Soldier, with a shirt-sleeved soldier in the act of falling, his rifle just leaving his grasp. That picture was used to raise funds for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but it didn’t stop or change the course of that war.It looks, in hindsight, like brilliant journalism.Go to Richard Whelan’s biography of Capa (published in 1985), and you cannot even be sure of the picture’s authenticity. Capa was a great camera artist and a reckless man: he died stepping on a mine in Indo-China in 1954, still clutching his camera. In Spain in 1936, with the same cloud formation in the background, he took another picture of a soldier a second or so later in his fall.

Is it the same soldier? Was the classic event staged, rehearsed and played out for history? Whelan admits he can’t be sure. That only points to this conundrum: that in an age when we are so familiar with fictional death, it may not be easy to verify the real thing. Or feel it.d.thomson independent.co.uk. Russian Ark

The idea of history as pageant, as heritage extravaganza, tends to be treated with suspicion these days, but it is spectacularly rehabilitated in the new film by Russian director Alexander Sokurov. I’ve never quite taken to Sokurov; his films, like Mother and Son, have often seemed turgid parodies of Slavic moodiness, and his last one Taurus, about Lenin, and shot entirely in nauseous green, felt like a slow trudge across a lake of cabbage soup.
Russian Ark takes itself no less seriously; at times you can cut the solemnity with a knife But it is undeniably a bold and magnificent folly. On one level, it’s a guided tour of St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum; on others, a journey through Russian history, a disquisition on art, culture and the destiny of a nation.