At the Movies

Apropos my comment yesterday concerning a German Haguesploitation film, reader Deucaon asks:

Back to Bosnia
Beautiful People
Behind Enemy Lines
The Enclave
Grbavica
The Hunting Party
Life Is a Miracle
No Man's Land
Pretty Village, Pretty Flame
Savior
Shot Through the Heart
Warriors
Welcome to Sarajevo

Have you seen these films? Are any of them accurate (in any regard) in your opinion?

I have to admit, this is the first time I've heard about some of them. So let's take them in order.

"Beautiful People" - Never seen it, but this review suggests it's not ham-fisted manichean propaganda. As for authenticity, I've heard of plenty of refugees from different ethnic groups getting into fights in their adoptive homelands, and the heroin addict kind of sounds like the author of "My war gone by, I miss it so". Other things, like the rape story or the reporter's "Bosnia syndrome" may be exaggerated for dramatic effect, but they are there for symbolism.

"Behind Enemy Lines" - Utter rubbish. The only American pilot ever shot down over Bosnia was Lt. Scott O'Grady, and he flew a single-seater Air Force F-16. He spent several days in the forests of western Bosnia until the Marines located him and airlifted him out, without any interference by the Bosnian Serbs. In the movie, however, it's a Navy plane, the pilot dies, and the navigator survives to avoid deadly pursuit by rabid Serbs so he can deliver proof of an atrocity patterned after the Srebrenica story. I'm not going to waste words on such rubbish except to note the sheer idiocy of it.

"The Enclave" - Dutch miniseries spinning the story of Srebrenica from the standpoint of Official Truth. If the Dutch want to embrace the myth that casts them as evil enablers of genocide, who am I to stop them? Though judging by the troops that volunteered to testify for Karadzic's defense, maybe they've finally had enough.

"Grbavica" - Even if Jasmila Zbanic made a very artistic film, there is no denying that its main function is propaganda. Zbanic herself spoke about "raising awareness" and spearheaded an effort to get government subsidies for women who claimed to be rape victims.

As a sidebar: The whole "systematic rape" story, exploited endlessly by peddlers of atrocity porn, has never been substantiated. Of course there were rapes; no one denies there were rapes, or that this is repugnant. But organized on a large scale? Balkans wars were fought in an atmosphere of near-complete breakdown of society, closely resembling the Hobbesian "state of nature." Obviously, people capable of murdering their neighbors with glee, slitting throats, slicing off body parts and burning villages would not shirk from non-consensual sex. It would be interesting, however, to compare the supposed "mass rapes" of Bosnia with the numbers of women sexually assaulted by U.S. troops in Iraq - or, say, Okinawa (where there has been no war for almost 54 years).

Another issue are the "rape children." Bosnia was a very secularized place. Generations that had grown up in Communist schools were socialized in Communist morals - where abortion wasn't dirty or sinful, but practical. Only the very old were religiously observant, until the war and its aftermath (no atheists in foxholes, etc.). So I find it exceptionally hard to believe that many women would actually choose to keep rape-conceived children. Especially if they went to the West as refugees (see "Beautiful People," above). Perhaps that may have happened in some cases, for whatever reason, but as a widespread phenomenon it is simply unlikely. If someone has actual data to the contrary, I am prepared to revise my opinion, though.

Continuing on...

"The Hunting Party" - A horrid flop no one watched, and with good reason. Every time Hollywood tries to do a Bosnia story, it takes the already incredulous reality and makes it less believable by exaggerating it and changing it to seem more real.

"Life is a miracle" - Any Kusturica film is an exercise in "magical realism," where reality is just a convenient starting point for art and storytelling. However, there were more than a few inter-ethnic love stories (and even more inter-ethnic breakups) to base this on.

"No man's land" - This would have been a fantastic stage piece. Every time the film dwells on the two soldiers - the Serb and the Muslim trapped in the booby-trapped trench - you can feel the drama and the energy. Every time it tries to look like a Hollywood production - with the hapless Western journalist, the checkpoints, the clueless UN and the video clips of "news" - it goes off into hack territory. It's almost as if Tanovic made a tasty anti-war drama cake, then ruined it with the clumsy frosting of Muslim propaganda.

"Pretty village..." - If anything, this film is too realistic. Dust, mud, blood, rain, twitchy lighting of rural Eastern Bosnia, they are all here. Some characters may feel stereotypical, but they capture the archetypes (the mad machine-gunner, the slutty nurses, the "peace" protesters, the Army officer) that were all too real. It may simplify certain things, and contrive others for the purposes of storytelling, but for all its flaws it is still the most "accurate" of the lot.

"Savior" - Again, filled with contrivances, from the American protagonist to the events he encounters on his journey. And yet it depicts the Bosnian war with brutal honesty: Serbs rape Muslim women, Muslims rape Serb women, both sides kill children with impunity. Villainy is all around. That is enough for some to dismiss it as "Serb propaganda" (Serb director and actors, but American writer and producer - Oliver Stone, no less), but that's what happens when one strays from the manichean formula of "Serbs evil/Muslims good." I also want to point out that even though this film features a "rape baby" as the pivotal plot device, the circumstances of her birth and her fate actually make sense both within the context of the story and within the context of the war at large.

"Shot Through the Heart" - Based on a supposedly true story of two friends (a Serb and a Muslim) who end up as opposing snipers in Sarajevo, this HBO production is remarkable insofar as it admits there actually were Muslim snipers. Then again, it presents the Muslim as a marksman who merely fights the evil Serb, who is "terrorizing" the city by killing women and children. If you really want to watch a Hollywoodized sniper movie, go see "Enemy at the Gates."

"Warriors" - I was unfamiliar with this BBC series. Apparently, it focuses on the British peacekeepers caught in the middle of a nasty war between Muslims and Croats in central Bosnia. I have no idea how accurate it may have been.

"Welcome to Sarajevo" - This was actually the first movie about Bosnia to be filmed on location, and just after the war ended. Unfortunately, while locations may have been somewhat authentic, the story was not. There really was a journalist who tried to help some orphans, and managed to evacuate one in particular - but the orphanage was nowhere near the front line, and the orphan in question was a Serb (in the movie, she's a Muslim; can't have your victims mixed up, right?). The filmmakers ruined a perfectly good story of genuine humanitarianism by bending it to fit the incongruous "Serbs evil, Muslims good" dogma. Typical.

Hague Goes Hollywood

Couple of years back, the Berlin film festival went crazy over Jasmila Zbanic's "Grbavica", a propaganda flick about the Bosnian war that harped on the theme of (alleged, fictitious) mass rapes of Muslim women. This year, a German director is tapping into the Bosnian atrocity porn, with a film described as "critical" of the Hague Inquistion (ICTY), but in fact another exercise in mendacity and propaganda.

Reuters reports: "German Bosnia film takes critical view of tribunal." Sounds intriguing, right? Except the story is described as one of a "determined prosecutor....struggling against time pressure and Serb nationalists." Huh? But wait, there's more:

In "Storm," the prosecutor's investigation of rape and murder charges is hindered by a powerful network of nationalist Serbs and then foiled by her own poorly prepared case. But just before it collapses, a witness to the rapes comes forward.

The trial is short-circuited by a behind-the-scenes deal involving the judge, the Serb's defense counsel and the prosecutor's pragmatic boss.

Let me see if I get this. The heroic Prosecutor knows that these evil Serbs (is there another kind?) are guilty of horrible murders and systematic mass rapes, but there's just no darn evidence for it. I mean, why else would the case be "poorly prepared"? Does that imply she's incompetent? Oh no, no, the heroic Tribunal is probably just short of money, or something, and you know, having to actually prove these charges is just so damned inconvenient... And then, of course, there's a "powerful network of nationalist Serbs" - which is probably based on the equally chimeric "joint criminal enterprise to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia". That would be the alleged grand conspiracy every single Serb politician, soldier, policeman and whoever else they finger is automatically guilty of until proven innocent, never mind that it actually doesn't exist.

But never fear! For our heroine will be saved by the Last Minute Miraculous Plot Device (i.e. the witness)! And then, just to be properly postmodern and angsty (it is, after all, a German movie - so optimism is verboten), the righteous victory is thwarted at its moment of triumph by Lawyer Show Trope #37, the "pragmatic boss" making a deal with a wicked defense counsel.

The director, Hans-Christian Schmid, said "his film was fiction but was based on elements of cases he studied." Oh it's fiction, all right. Because none of these elements bear any resemblance to anything that's happened at the Inquisition.

So, again, how is any of this actually critical of the ICTY? Oh sure, right, the incompetent (kind of?) prosecutor we're supposed to root for, and the evil "pragmatic" boss who cuts deals with war criminals. Right. Except, you know, the deal-making boss is a complete and utter fabrication, as are the Serb lawyers and the "nationalist network." The only thing that even remotely rings true is the "poorly prepared" indictment - but even then that's supposed to be a charming character flaw of the woman we're supposed to like.

This isn't art, this is propaganda. The "criticism" amounts to accusing the Tribunal of not persecuting (not a typo) the Serbs hard enough - an accusation anyone even casually familiar with the Inquisition's opus over the past decade and a half would find utterly absurd.

Almost every single Serb who was seized ended up convicted, bullied into false confessions, or dead. Meanwhile, "commanders" of the terrorist KLA are acquitted, as are Muslim warlords who've openly boasted of their butchery to the cheering Western press.

Of course, had he tried to make a movie about the ICTY's epic failure to convict Albanian or Muslim warlords, Schmid wouldn't have received any funding. Had he somehow completed the movie anyway, it would have gone straight to DVD, rather than garner attention and praise at film festivals. But that's somewhat of a moot point, because it didn't even cross Schmid's mind to try, now did it? Everybody knows only the evil Serbs are criminals. And besides, note how the case at hand is about mass rape? Mass rape always gets media attention. Bleeding-heart interventionists in the West really love themselves some mass rape to get them in the proper mood of righteous indignation. Never mind that it's fiction, it's good fiction. In their minds, it should be true, and therefore it is. Kind of like Schmid's flick.

But for all the shlock, tropes, cliches, racist stereotypes resurrected from Nazi propaganda and pure old horse manure, this little piece of Tribunal propaganda just had to go that extra inch, and add insult to injury by adopting the very name of a Croatian military operation that ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Serbs in 1995.

I understand the Germans have a vested interest in declaring the Serbs genocidal; they probably think having someone else labeled that way would somehow water down the stain on their character that remains from WW2. And it would also provide a handy justification for German crimes against the Serbs back then, just in case the Serbs ever bring them up. But even so, this Scheisse is just too much.

"Modern" Morality

Slobodan Antonić writes in Politika (Serbian original here):

... My "favorite" is the argument that says, "This isn't evil; the sooner we realize it's actually appropriate, the better off we will be!" Because, you see, "that's not ours anyway," and "who has ever actually been there," and "only priests and romantics care" and "queues in front of foreign embassies are a much bigger problem" and "they are actually doing us a favor," etc.

But when a NGO elitist says these words, he is really talking about himself. His mouth says "that's not ours anyway," but his eyes are betraying his thoughts: "that's not mine, so I don't care." His mouth says "who has ever actually been there?" but his eyes are going "I have never been there, so why would I care?" His mouth says "only priests and romantics care," his eyes are saying "I hate priests anyway, one church more or less, all the same to me." While his mouth says "queues in front of foreign embassies are a much bigger problem," his eyes are saying "why should I have to wait in those queues because of that damn Kosovo?" He considers it one and the same to "be modern" and "think only of oneself and money," and is now trying to persuade the rest of us that we should also be "modern," so we would feel as good as he does.

The hypocrisy of NGO "modernists," says Antonić, is best tested by the following hypothetical scenario: would they be as willing to give up one of the parking spots reserved for their SUVs, as they are willing to cede Kosovo? Ah, well, that's different, you see...

This is quotable enough, but Antonić offers another great passage in the same article:

Someone once compared the seizure of Kosovo with rape. The rapists are big and strong, the poor girl could get a beating if she resists too much, and maybe it is really better for her to give in. But for crying out loud, how can anyone say on top of that, "Oh be smart! Maybe they are rapists, but they are rich, powerful, you can't risk ruining your future relations with the, so don't dare complain. Think of your future, think of becoming a part of their rich and beautiful society tomorrow. Cry a little, then come back and smile as if nothing happened."

Can it really be like that? As if nothing had happened? Are you serious about the smiling? What if the boys get a desire to have a little bit of fun again? And what could one possibly say about those who jeer at the unfortunate woman, "Come on, sister, don't be conservative, the boys are doing you a favor, you need to be modern, enjoy the sex, and especially when the Big Boss goes on top of you. Then you have to be particularly enthusiastic, groan and sigh and scream - Yes! Yes! More!"

Yes, Big Boss likes to be the ladies' man. But dear Serbia, you don't have to put on an act for him. Cry freely. And most importantly, remember them all, both those who took their turns with you and those who jeered and cheered. Because one day...