As paradigms of modernist technology, guns and typewriters share a cultural terrain. This landscape is shaped not least by the arms manufacturer Remington & Co. switching to typewriter production after the end of the American Civil War, but also by phenomenological issues in the machines’ use and construction; with typewriters we fire off words as firing off bullets from a gun.

The title of the above documentary on movie maker Samuel Fuller draws through these technologies and places them aside image making technologies. Sam Fuller was a writer and filmmaker, with a specialty in war films. That these tools of his trade should form a title for this documentary by Tim Robbins  (pt 1; pt 2; pt 3; pt 4; pt 5; pt 6) is almost commonsensical. However the title resonates in ways that lie under or rather away from the documentary; for all these technologies fire themselves in their relationality into the cultural landscape in the late nineteenth century.

Whilst the movie camera would seem to be exceptional, it is in fact fundamental, a phenomenological sibling to the gun and the typewriter; think of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography and his photographic gun (Fusil Photographique). We still shoot a photo, the rapid opening of the lens referred to as a firing, as fast and as hard as the ejection of a bullet, or the strike of type on platen.