Threat Trajectories: Cinema, FPV Drones, and Pandemic Anxiety

Many discourses on drone vision during the 2000s and 2010s focus on detached aerial views, arising from the pervasive military use of drones for surveillance of hostile territory both domestic and extraterritorial. However, a different kind of drone visuality is emerging, one fast-paced and kinaesthetic, which places the drone at street- and eye level, sweeping through the spaces of everyday life in ways that make them strange and frenzied. Originating in footage of competitive first-person view (FPV) drone racing, this visuality has moved into commercial narrative filmmaking, where it creates heightened affective sensations of urban space. Using the case study of Ambulance (2022), a film shot during Covid-19 lockdowns in Los Angeles, this chapter explores this aesthetic and connects it to anxieties which are indebted to pandemic realities.