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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has quickly become one of the most well-documented military conflicts. In part because so many believed the massing of Russian troops on the border to be nothing more than a provocation, when the full-scale invasion came, civilians quickly turned into amateur war reporters, filming the damage wrought by missiles and troops as if to prove that it was really happening. The country's filmmakers were not far behind. This article briefly considers the documentary output coming out of the war as a whole before turning to six case studies of films that use the formal aspects of cinema as a medium--shot duration, framing, the juxtaposition of sound and image, as well as the structure that arises from editing--to make arguments about both the nature of this particular war and the experience of war as such. It begins by examining the work of two filmmakers' collectives: Babylon'13 and Freefilmers. It contrasts these fragmentary or "mosaic" narratives of the war told from the Ukrainian side with two films made using "trophy footage": Ukrainska Pravda's The Occupant (2022), a compilation of the videos shot by a Russian soldier on his phone, and Oksana Karpovych's Intercepted (2024), which layers phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families over images of destroyed Ukrainian cities. It concludes with a comparison of two siege films, produced at grave risk to the filmmakers' lives: Mstyslav Chernov's 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and Hana Bilobrova and the late Mantas Kveradavicius' Mariupolis 2 (2022). Attending to both the films and their means of production, the article argues, has a lot to teach us about the way in which cinema can not only bear witness or constitute an archive but also actively contribute to the war effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |