Hollywood has been mining Balkan stories for ages, without knowing where the Balkans are exactly, who lives there and how.
DUŠAN MAKAVEJEV (IORDANOVA 2006, xvi)
∵
The wars in the former Yugoslavia have inspired filmmakers and “resulted in an incredibly large body of film productions” (Mazaj 2008, 9), and the Bosnian War (1992–1995) in particular has become the subject of numerous domestic
This article focuses on the representation of sexual violence against women in the Bosnian War, both in Hollywood and in domestic film productions of Bosnia. With regard to self-representation and Otherness, the comparison highlights the different perceptions regarding the Balkans2 as a region through the example of Bosniac women (Bosnian Muslims3). The films discussed in this article, Grbavica, The Land of my Dreams (2006), the first feature film by Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić, and In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), Angelina Jolie’s debut as a film director, both tell the story of sexual violence
[…] casts women as sexually pure and mystically nurturing, and stresses the evil done to these “good” women as a way to petition for their rights. The other which I call “power feminism,” sees women as human beings—sexual, individual, no better or worse than their male counterparts—and lays claim to equality simply because women are entitled to it.
WOLF 1993, XVII
Under this aspect, I will take a close look at the way the filmmakers portray their female protagonists as they claim to show women in possession of agency, but instead they stress “the evil done to these ‘good’ women as a way to petition for their rights” (ibid.). Based on Wolf’s thesis, the “sexually pure” (ibid.) female signifies the traumatic event. As a result, Jolie and Žbanić unintentionally support a narrative that portrays Bosniac women as passive actors lacking in agency. Furthermore, the films reveal how gender intersects with ethnicity and nationality in postwar Bosnia since, in both of the aforementioned films, it
The distinction between the domestic and Hollywood portrayals reveals stereotypes about the Balkans. On the one hand, there is a Hollywood actress and director giving the victim a voice (cf. Jolie and Žbanić 2012) and with regard to Jolie’s activism supposably with the intention of contributing to the peace process in the region, and on the other hand there is Sarajevo-born director Jasmila Žbanić, who suffered under the siege and reflected on postwar Bosnia in a film she produced with a small production company, while remaining cognizant of Western perceptions and also responding to them. Žbanić’s film is set twelve years after the Bosnian War and focuses on a mother–daughter relationship, their everyday life in a war-torn society, and the daughter’s realization that she is the outcome of a violent rape. Jolie on the other hand depicts a romantic story between a Serbian man and a Bosniac woman who meet again in a detainee camp where he is the commander and she is the detainee. Both films focus on an educated urban, secular, liberal Muslim woman (Bosniac) who lives in Sarajevo. Still they tend to represent Bosnia as a semi-oriental “Other” by depicting it as backward in its response to war crimes. The label “Balkans” has been revived since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars, and the region has been characterized as a “powderkeg, the spirit of never-ending disagreement, the dark side of Europe” (Živančević-Sekeruš 2007, 105), and Bosnia, as a former member of Yugoslavia and a geographic part of the Balkan Peninsula, is often directly indicated by such a label. According to Maria Todorova, who developed the thesis of Balkanism on the basis of Said’s concept of Orientalism, the Balkans are the Other within Europe and are associated with negative primitive images (cf. Todorova 2009, 20). Therefore, the female Bosniac victims in Grbavica and In the Land of Blood and Honey both arguably represent the distant “Other.”
1 In the Land of Blood and Honey
Hollywood actor and activist Angelina Jolie stated that her motivation to make In the Land of Blood and Honey was to give the victim a voice; in an interview with the Bosnian film director Jasmila Žbanić at the Berlinale Film Festival, Jolie emphasized that she felt encouraged to make the film after a woman told her about a traumatic experience in a detainee camp during the war in Bosnia and that she thought that her story should not be forgotten (cf.
Regarding the representation of Bosniac women and victimhood, Jolie’s film evoked controversial reactions after a rumour had spread that the film was about a love affair between a Bosniac (Muslim) woman and her Serbian (Christian Orthodox) rapist.6 The public debate shows how sensitive and
The discussion about the film in Bosnia reveals the starkly gendered ethnonational perspective that is prevalent in representations of the war. The story of In the Land of Blood and Honey is set almost completely around a detention camp during the Bosnian War. Almost all males in the film are Serbs while all the females are detainees and Bosniacs. The victim–villain structure depicted in the movie oversimplifies issues of both gender and ethnicity. As a result, the film strengthens the image of the Bosniac female victim and the male Serbian aggressor. Yet Jolie gives the audience two main protagonists who although they represent the victim–villain narrative as Ajla is the Bosniac female victim and Danijel is the perpetrator, at the same time challenge these images. On the one hand there is Ajla, who already caused a public debate on having agency and sexuality as a Bosniac female victim; on the other hand there is Danijel, who instead of representing the Balkan hetero-image of a strong, patriotic, and aggressive male, stands for a man full of doubts, emotions, and empathy.
Furthermore, the reactions to In the Land of Blood and Honey point to the question of “who had the moral right to speak on behalf of women victims” (ibid., 23). The victims along with other members of Bosnian society quickly reacted either by taking offense or by seeing the movie favourably. The audience in favour of the screenplay perceived the film as a true story about the war instead of regarding it as a piece of fiction, whereas critics did not want to see such a narrative circulated, since it was Hollywood, an influential outsider from the West, trying to portray the Bosnian War. Although Jolie stressed that her film represented a fictional approach to the topic and should be regarded as an artistic expression, In the Land of Blood and Honey contains a political message. The fact that a famous Hollywood actress shot the film raised concerns about what kind of image she would transmit on Bosnia and the war. The public debate, in comparison to the one on Grbavica, which was evaluated positively among the Bosniac population and only criticized within the Serbian population in Republika Srpska,8 reveals how sensitive Bosnian society is, when it comes to the Western perception of the Bosnian War.
Hollywood’s portrayal of Bosnia in In the Land of Blood and Honey is simplified from the very beginning. The introductory lines of the film picture prewar Bosnia as a utopian vision of multicultural harmony: “Before the war, the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of one of the most ethnically diverse countries in Europe. Muslim, Serbs, and Croats lived together in harmony” (Jolie 2012, min. 00:00:00–00:00:30). The violent and complex dismantling of Yugoslavia is simplified here. The introductory sentence implies a diverse and unified prewar society in Bosnia. Although multiculturalism and multiconfessionalism was and still is characteristic of Bosnia, which has been religiously
Jolie also marks ethnicity by her choice of music. While the Serbs listen to Turbofolk music,9 the Bosniac people listen to Yugoslav rock music from the 1980s. Accordingly, Serbian soldiers are accompanied by Serbian Turbofolk music as they get drunk and harass women. Jolie depicts Turbofolk culture in a very explicit way when she characterizes the Serbs. In a scene in the detainee camp in which a soldier and some imprisoned women listen to a radio report on the Srebrenica massacre, in which 8,000 Bosniac men were killed by Serbian paramilitary forces, the Serbian soldier switches to a different radio station that plays Turbofolk music.
Even though Bosniac women play a significant role in Jolie’s movie, the narrative focuses on the individual fate of the main protagonist Ajla. The other Bosniac women remain in the background. The heroine Ajla stands out because, unlike most other women in the camp, she is portrayed as very attractive. The other women represent the traditional Bosniac victim, elderly rural women wearing headscarves, which used to be a common image in news
The victim–villain structure is embodied through Ajla and Danijel. Ajla’s relationship to the commander, who turns out to be her former date Danijel, presents her as a self-confident woman who has choices and whose actions are based on her own will. He saves her from rape and she lives under his protection in the camp separated from the other women. The dynamics of their relationship are characterized through an overlap of love, lust, and consensual sex. Toward the end of the film, during Danijel’s internal struggle with the expectations of his surroundings and his dominant father Nebojša (Rade Šerbedžija), as well as the ongoing war, his desire for Ajla turns into possessiveness, aggression, and even violence. However, in the end, Danijel opposes his patriarchal father and lets Ajla flee from the camp. She joins a self-armed Bosniac group and returns to Danijel to the camp to presumably get information on Serbian military positions. Danijel is not able to fully protect her, as his father uses his absence to confront Ajla and leaves her with a soldier who rapes her. After a massive explosion in a church, where Serbian military commanders had been holding a meeting, among them Danijel’s father, Danijel accuses Ajla of betraying him when returning to the camp. Overall, it can be said that Ajla and Danijel stand out from the represented ethnotypes of Serbs and Bosniacs, which are depicted in a rather traditional and straightforward fashion. Unlike other Balkan men in the film, Danijel consistently shows a sensitive side to his masculinity. The director evokes sympathy for the perpetrator Danijel and the victim Ajla and wants the viewer to believe that this relationship could have been possible without war. Nevertheless the depiction of a “Romeo and Juliet” love relationship between him as a Serbian man and her as a Bosniac woman simplifies the conflict and does not do justice to the complexity of the war: “To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other […] what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom” (Sontag 2003, 10). In the end, it is Danijel who beats and eventually shoots Ajla to death. The missing happy ending may seem surprising for a Hollywood film although it leaves the viewer with a feeling of sorrow and empathy for the victim, who was desired and beautiful, and killed only for belonging to the wrong ethnicity. Danijel confesses his murder and hands himself over to the hands of the UN peacekeepers admitting that
2 Grbavica
Muslim women rape victims, along with the women survivors of Srebrenica, had become a major symbol of the suffering of the Bosniac people and the cause of a multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina. […] Both mass rape and the sex-selective killings of ethnic cleansing were made to stand for the brutality of the enemy, the drama of Bosnia’s plight, and the suffering of the Bosniac nation. The film [Grbavica] thus immediately took its place in the familiar narrative of national innocence and victimhood.
HELMS 2013, 3
Thank you […] for being so liberal to invite such a small film from a small country with a small budget. […] I just want to use this opportunity to remind us all that war in Bosnia was over some thirteen years ago and that war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić still live in Europe freely. They are not captured for organizing rape of 20,000 women in Bosnia, killing 100,000 people, and expelling from their houses one million. This is still Europe and nobody is interested to capture them. In my opinion it just grows bigger and bigger. I hope this will change at least your viewing on Bosnia and I hope this bear will not be disappointed when he sees Bosnia.11
Žbanić 2006, 1:02:49–1:08:35
With this statement, the filmmaker continues to victimize Bosnia and its women as well as to blame the “West” for being complicit in the failure to prosecute the crimes that occurred during the war. Žbanić acknowledges the superiority of the West, which is symbolized by the awarded bear, and by doing so, with this narrative she reduces the agency of the Bosniac people, as it seems they have to seek for protection and justice from the West.
Bosnia’s Otherness and the choice of the main female character show that both Jolie and Žbanić had an educated urban audience in mind for their films. Ajla in In the Land of Blood and Honey and Esma in Grbavica both come from an urban space, namely the city of Sarajevo, and are well educated. Žbanić explained her choice in an interview with the argument that, although she
Right from the beginning of Grbavica Žbanić represents the opposed images of femininity and masculinity in today’s Bosnian society. Collective female victimhood, underlined by passivity and sorrowful singing, is demonstrated in the opening scene. Throughout the film, the visual depiction of the past and present, of ethnic and gender contrasts, is marked with music. The story begins with a melancholic traditional Islamic song ilahija, “Birth,” when the audience is introduced to Esma, who is sitting with female Bosniacs in a women’s centre at the floor listening with closed eyes to a female voice singing the sentimental song. The camera wanders for several minutes between the female bodies, showing details of their faces with closed eyes, their hands, and their feet. The sudden interruption by an impulsive Turbofolk12 song in a nightclub, where Esma asks for work, contrasts with the poetic and sorrowful singing in group therapy. Underlined by the music, the audience is confronted with the male Balkan stereotype. The prevalence of domineering, intoxicated males, such as Esma’s new boss, also contributes to the creation of an “overall context where female subjects are depoliticized by being reduced to simplified archetypes devoid of complexity so as to reproduce dominant patriarchal regimes and norms” (Husanović 2009, 106).
The filmmaker skilfully depicts the Bosnian postwar and postsocialist society in which Esma is stigmatized. The plot develops around the mother’s desperate search for money and Sara’s discovery of her mother’s lies. In order to attend a school trip, she needs two hundred Bosnian mark or a certificate that her father died as a so-called shaheed, a Bosniac war hero. Esma, who hides from her daughter that she was conceived by rape, tries to get the money with part-time jobs and asks colleagues and family members if they can help her out.
Against Žbanić’s argument that her heroine Esma has agency due to her education and urban surroundings, I claim that she is in fact lacking in agency. The first impression of Esma is that of a psychologically traumatized woman in a safe space (a women’s centre). In the second scene, in which Esma is
The daughter–mother relationship is haunted by the mother’s trauma of being raped. Esma tries to be a caring mother, but her inability to speak to her daughter is repeatedly apparent. While fooling around with Sara, the trauma of rape recurs and Esma aggressively pushes Sara away, denying her love. While Žbanić’s intention is to emphasize Esma’s agency, the film in fact ends up portraying her lack of agency; in fact, she effectively demonstrates Esma’s inability to express herself or to stand up for herself. From an intersectional perspective, Grbavica illustrates how Esma is discriminated against as a woman, as a rape victim, and as a single working mother without the financial or educational perspective of building a realistic future in the Bosnian society. In fact, the stigmatization is also shown through Sara, Esma’s twelve-year-old daughter. Sara is stigmatized at school, and in her desperation to find out what truth her mother is hiding, she perpetuates the cycle of violence when she breaks the silence by confronting her mother with a gun in order to find out the truth. The violent act of pointing a gun at her mother grants her the power to confront her. Whereas Esma stands for victim feminism, her daughter, taking on the position of power feminism, refuses to remain a victim out of desperation; Sara has some kind of self-advocacy and takes the gun as a last resort to find out the truth—that she was conceived through rape—at the climax of the film.
Once Sara pushes Esma to tell her the truth, Esma herself is empowered in a new way: she finally finds her voice. Here the narrative turns toward a hopeful future, as Esma opens up in group therapy in the women’s centre and speaks
Žbanić addresses and questions the typical Western images of the Bosnian Other. She does this by evoking stereotypical Balkan representations of femininity, masculinity, and the economically weak society. The filmmaker filmed in devastated areas on purpose since Bosnia was, in the 1990s, often in the media and was represented mainly with images of destruction and war. Furthermore, she pointed out that she deliberately filmed in winter to underline the war narrative. It strengthens the effect of othering Bosnia, still being closely associated with a war that destroyed it. The second powerful image was the patriarchal society and the stereotypical Balkan male, who acts in an aggressive and dominant manner, while the women are shown as emotional and vulnerable.
3 Conclusion
The comparison of Grbavica and In the Land of Blood and Honey shows that sexual assault against women in the Bosnian War and the resulting trauma can be negotiated in very different ways. Although both films deal with the same subject, they use a different visual language, time span, narrative, and style of storytelling. Apart from the time span and visual effects that reveal a different film aesthetic, the narrative structure allows a different view into the characters’ life. Whereas in Jolie’s film the pain of the distant Other is illustrated through the brutal act of mass rape in war, Žbanić’s film abstains from directly showing combat and violence. She brings the audience closer to the healing process of the traumatic experience of sexual assault by showing the everyday
To conclude, both films address the issue of sexual violence against women in the Bosnian War revealing that the representation of victims is challenging as one has to regard gender, ethnicity, religion, and class. Dijana Jelača asks “how can we visually frame suffering in ethical ways that avoid the pitfalls of oversaturation, simplistic objectification, or fetishization of pain or pity” (Jelača 2016). Grbavica succeeded in representing pain and trauma without fetishizing it, because the viewers see the aftermath of the war with deeper insight as they follow closely the development of the mother–daughter relationship haunted by trauma. On the other hand, Jolie’s film achieves a sensationalist effect by showing explicit violent scenes that do not contribute to the peace process in Bosnia and serve the hetero-image of the Balkans as a region. Nevertheless, In the Land of Blood and Honey, although representing female victimhood, challenged the traditional auto-image of raped women for Bosnians by giving Ajla agency and sexuality.
However, Jolie’s film ultimately presents a disempowering image of the Bosniac female, despite its well-intended choices. Although Jolie’s intention to make such a movie may sound noble, especially in light of her choice to work with a mixed cast from all former warring groups, the film was mostly rejected within Serbia. Her second aim, which was to reach an international audience who will call for intervention in future conflicts, seems rather naive. Susan Sontag suggests in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) that, unfortunately, the act of looking at someone’s pain will not lead to intervention and aid as a consequence.
Moreover, taking everything into account, the narrative structures in both films contain the victim–villain pattern that intersects gender, ethnicity, and class. It is still the Bosniac woman who was raped and suffers, unable to find a voice. In the Land of Blood and Honey gives the victim a voice, whereas in Grbavica Esma cannot stand up for herself and is violently forced by her daughter to speak up. Therefore, In the Land of Blood and Honey and Grbavica both unintentionally continue to victimize Bosniac women as they both fail to deviate from the stereotypical ethnic and gender images of Balkan social positions.
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The capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, was under siege for 1,425 days (April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996). International news media regularly reported onsite. The multiethnic and multiconfessional character of Sarajevo stands as a symbol for diversity and resistance. The importance of symbolic Sarajevo in movies is stressed by Dina Iordanova: “[…] I keep returning to the bitter irony that Sarajevo and its inhabitants came under the spotlight of international film-making because of martyrdom and the predicament through which they had to live. Had the Sarajevo siege and massacres not occurred, the city would still be perceived as semi-oriental and almost none of its inhabitants would be known beyond the borders of their land-locked republic” (2001, 237).
The term “Balkan Peninsula” was used by the German geographer August Zeuner, whereas Theobald Fischer, also a German geographer, proposed the term Südosteuropa for the peninsula (Živančević-Sekeruš 2007, 104). As the region partly belonged to the Ottoman Empire, the majority of Western travellers regarded the region as the antitype of the enlightened West at that time (Hammond 2004, xii). The label “Balkan” rose to international attention with the breakup of Yugoslavia and the following wars in the 1990s, as it was described as the “Balkan” crisis. Bosnia is strongly associated with the “Balkans” label.
There is a distinction between the terms “Bosniac” and “Bosnian.” Bosnian (Bosanac or fem. Bosanka) refers to the geographic area of Bosnia (without Herzegovina) and describes a person from Bosnia regardless of his or her religious or ethnic background (see Helms 2013, 35). In 1993 Bosniac intellectuals and politicians decided on the term “Bosniac” (Bošnjak or fem. Bošnjakinja) to recognize Bosnian Muslims as a nation (see Richter and Gavrić 2010). The term Bosniac has replaced the term Muslim, which has been used since the 1963 Yugoslav Constitution, and which referred in its preamble to “Serbs, Croats, and Muslims,” implying that Slavic-speaking Muslims in Bosnia are a nation (see Malcolm 1994, 198) rather than a religious group. In Yugoslavia since 1968 a distinction has been made between the capitalized “Musliman,” which referred to a member of a nation, and the lowercased “musliman,” which referred to a religious believer (ibid., 199).
Such as the Sarajevo Film Festival, the Berlinale, and the Golden Globe Awards.
Angelina Jolie is the cofounder of the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative. She continues her struggle against sexual war crimes; recently, for example, she issued a plea in the Washington Post, along with the former foreign minister of Germany Heiko Maas, demanding more action against sexual war crimes. The plea was issued shortly in advance of the UN Security Council meeting. For further information, see Jolie and Maas (2019).
The rumour was about a love between a Serbian rapist and his Muslim victim although the “eight sentence synopsis by Ms. Jolie, obtained by The Independent, does not mention rape but says the young characters Lejla and Danijel are separated by the war, and meet again later, under changed circumstances. Danijel is a prison camp commander and Lejla an inmate. ‘Danijel tries to find the best solution that would be acceptable for all. The question is if such a solution exists at all’” (Zimonjić Perić 2010).
For more information on the wartime rape of men, see Garaca Djurdjevic (2017).
Republika Srpska was a self-proclaimed state by Bosnian Serbs on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. It became under the Dayton Peace Agreement (December 14, 1995) one of two entities within Bosnia and Herzegovina: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. For more information see OSCE (1995).
Turbofolk music is associated with Serbian paramilitary structures and nationalism, machoism, mafia, corruption, primitivism, chauvinism, war, seduction, and sexism. It originated at the beginning of the nineties in the Milošević era in Serbia and was used as a propaganda instrument to motivate Serbian soldiers in fight. Today it is part of the mainstream music in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. It can be described as folk music with elements of popular music and beats. The genre is associated with primitivism and nationalism as the gender roles represented therein are conservative: potent heterosexual men and sexily dressed female singers. In stark contrast to turbofolk is the new wave music scene (electro, punk, and new wave) of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For further information see Vogel (2017, 11–13, 50, 57–58).
Wartime rape has become a topic in Bosnian society only recently. The interactive play “Yellow Boots” by the Bosnian director Anes Osmić, which premiered on December 8, 2018 at the Sarajevo War Theater, and an exhibition called Breaking Free (April 8–14, 2019), which showed images of children born as a result of rape, both aimed to address the stigma of wartime rape. For further information see Lakić (2019a, 2019b).
My transcription of the audio acceptance speech at the Berlinale.
Original Serbian song title: “Nije ovo moja noć” (This is not my night) by Singer Saša Matić.
Original Bosnian title. My translation: “Sarajevo, my love.”