Screening Bosnia by Stephen Harper

Author:Stephen Harper [Harper, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781623565923
Google: TezUDQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 38884202
Publisher: Continuum
Published: 2017-03-09T03:31:27+00:00

Conclusion

Although he began the war as a ‘humanitarian interventionist’, Michael Ignatieff (1998: 95) afterwards expressed doubts about his initial position on the war, wondering whether the West’s bombing to ‘end’ the Bosnian war had in fact been underpinned by narcissism and whether ‘we intervened not to save others, but to save ourselves, or rather an image of ourselves as defenders of universal decencies’. As the foregoing discussion shows, Bosnian war action films express something of this moralistic investment in the war. Through melodramatic and Manichean assertions of US or Western military and humanitarian superiority, these films ‘provide a way of solving (geo)political uncertainty […] providing moral geographies and making clear the lines between “us” and “them”’ (Power and Crampton 2007: 6). While not all of the films go as far as Killing Season in reimagining the Bosnian war as a US ground invasion to ‘liberate the camps’, they are all informed by the values of rugged individualism, the urgent and pragmatic imperative of ‘getting the job done’ and an unswerving sense of righteousness.

James Chapman (2008) traces three ‘lineages’ within the history of war film: war as spectacle, war as tragedy and war as adventure. The films discussed in the foregoing chapter invoke both the first and the last of these categories. All of these films mobilize the patriotic, masculinist and colonialist tropes typical of Western action adventure narratives (tellingly, the only Bosnian war action film to defy these tropes – and to belong to Chapman’s ‘tragic’ category –is a Croatian-Bosnian production, The Living and the Dead, as discussed in Chapter 6). They are all also racist films that, almost without exception, heroize white action heroes and demonize their not-quite-white adversaries. Indeed, as Martin Green (1980: 226) reminds us, ‘adventure has been a white idea as well as a male idea; it has been the means by which the people of one particular culture have taken possession of most of the globe’. More specifically, appearing during or shortly after the Hague criminal trials, these films entrench the notion of collective Serb guilt and reproduce the stereotype of the psychopathic Serb war criminal. In the Western imaginary, the Balkans, of course, have long figured as ‘a terrain of ethnic horror and intolerance, of primitive irrational bellicose passions’ (Žižek 2011: 47), as indicated by the very title of journalist Harry deWindt’s 1907 Balkan travelogue Through Savage Europe. And given the prevalence of images of Balkan bellicosity in contemporary journalistic commentary about Bosnia – British journalist Michael Nicholson (1994: 16) likened the people of the Balkans to the ‘Amazon’s Yanamamo, one of the world’s most savage and primitive tribes’ –it is unsurprising that these films also invoke the fantasmatic figure of the Balkan Wild Man, a revenge-driven, sadistic and perverted primitive whose rampages can only be stopped by a civilizing counterforce. These films suggest that Western intervention, however violent, is a source of enlightenment and that, as Bill Clinton (1999: 17) put it in his defence of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, ‘the Balkans are not fated to be the heart of darkness’.

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