If, as claimed at a Viennese conference on the »camera wars« of the 20th and 21st centuries, war is a »roaming entity« - without spatial borders, without temporal
limits -, then it is little wonder that for a long time European documentary films have sought to pin it down where one least likes to find it: in the minds of returning soldiers and survivors, at the centre of civil society. There are two ways in which wartime events, which usually occur at the edges of the First World, are accommodated in the contemporary media landscape as a kind of »eloquent space«: first, the many thousands of minutes of strategic battle-front footage conveyed at a televised distance, fuzzy, greenish or blurred to a pixel soup by satellite transmission; secondly, in the form of traumatic eyewitness accounts, whose verbal discourses seem no less doubtful, incomplete and displaced than those of the images.

Trauma, the grieving process, the »War in the Mind« - the German television title of Heddy Honigmann’s pioneering film »Crazy« of 1999 – have obviously entered the standard repertoire of a culture of commemoration that is trying as never before to record and preserve traces of authentic experience. On the other hand, precisely these narratives bear witness to the powerful incongruity between experience retold at a distance and its representation in the visualisation-machines of cinema and television. This became apparent recently when, in November 2005, the Duisburg Film Week presented two documentary films produced for German television and put them up for discussion. Both films - »Massacre« (2005) by Monika Borgmann, Lokmann Slim and Hermann Theissen and »White Ravens« (2005) by Johann Feindt and Tamara Trampe – examine »dirty« wars, atrocities and the impact of the experiences on the psyche of the perpetrators. Both find their protagonists in civilian life, removed both temporally and spatially from the traumatic event; both largely dispense with »objective« commentary, instead allowing the bodies of their protagonists to speak all the more emphatically. The results could not be more different.

»White Ravens« is about Russian veterans from the second Chechen war. The film’s narrative structure follows a series of portraits that become significantly entwined with historic artefacts like letters, photos and amateur videos in an ever more complex and urgent manner. »Chechnya« seems less a concrete place – the conflict itself is never explained, there is no political or topographical »bird’s-eye view« whatsoever – than a »black hole« of individual and collective experience. The defining experience of the protagonists – a melancholy, disillusioned nurse, catatonic, crippled young ex-soldiers bearing the marks of alcoholism, all of them part of the special unit Speznaz – is not directly negotiable. It is conveyed instead both in the dialogue and in the a-chronological montage of the film about the moments of forgetting, of silence and of displacement. Precisely the absence of any traumatic ur-scene – the veterans either claim to have lost their memory or refuse to give any information about their time in service - here becomes an indicator for the precarious, traumatic constitution of a society. In the families of the young men, a resigned silence reigns, and the Russian public in »White Ravens« also seems nowhere near coming to terms with the war on a collective basis. »Trauma makes failure of memory significant, and trauma makes of representation a significant failure.« That is how the film theorist Thomas Elsaesser expresses the refracted referentiality of the traumatic narrative, which affects both the claim of the film narrative to be a true representation and the promise of a historical »master narrative«. What these soldiers have seen, experienced, done, remains just as speculative and unreal as the found images that the film shows, without commentary, in the epilogue: an amateur video showing uniformed Russians unloading trucks full with dead and disfigured prisoners.

»Massacre«, on the other hand, seems like the antithesis of this problematisation of memory. Six Lebanese militiamen talk in front of the camera about the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, to which a still unknown number of civilians fell victim. »Massacre« is an eloquent reconstruction of »what really happened« - a montage of subjective accounts that pretends to being a representation of historical truth. Whatever »experimental« pretensions the style of the film suggest – no faces are shown; instead, the restless hand-held camera captures details of the men’s bodies in anonymous, empty rooms -, the historical narrative presented in the film remains conventional. Every confession, no matter how doubtful, finds the right continuation, every asseveration of how difficult it is »to talk about it« is followed by a minute description of even the tiniest details of these murderous nights. In the face of the perpetrators’ eloquence, which seems almost assisted by the fluid continuity of the editing, the concept of a formal »abstraction« largely fails – an abstraction that, according to an interview with the filmmakers, was meant to expose collective and structural mechanisms of violence. The erstwhile perpetrators are today’s actors, their perspiring bodies are accorded an uncontested historical significance. Here, the (male) witness remains the authoritative source of history, and the fantasm of the controllability and coherence of memory stays irritatingly intact.

The 29th Duisburg Film Week – »Freunde der Realität« (»Friends of Reality«) - ran from 31 October to 6 November 2005. www.duisburger-filmwoche.de

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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