BOSNA!
A film review by Gareth Rees
Copyright 1994 Gareth Rees
Director: Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Ferrari Camera: Pierre Boffety Editors: Frederic Lossignol, Yann Kassile Music: Denis Barbier Duration: 117 minutes Bosnia/France 1994
It's hard to approach the good and bad in this film without being caught up a discussion of the message of BOSNA!, for this is a film that explicitly sets out to convert its audience to its side, to make people aware of the war and to try to influence them to pressure their governments to intervene. It's a film that's very aware of itself, of the process of its making and of the influence it might have: for example, Mitterand's visit to Bosnia is portrayed as an outcome of information given to the French President by the director, Bernard-Henri Levy.
The film is full of very disturbing images: a mother and child fleeing from snipers in Sarajevo; bodies littering a street after a shell has landed on a bread queue, many of them with legs or faces blown off; starving prisoners staring at the camera through the barbed wire of a concentration camp. It's impossible not to be moved by the suffering of these people, and difficult not to feel anger at the inaction of the diplomats who do little but talk while people are fighting for their lives and homes. The film makes much of comparisons between Western indifference to Bosnia today and Western indifference to Czechoslovakia and the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. There is, suggests Levy, the same denial, the same explanations that it's all much too complex to get involved in. In 1945 people saw pictures of the concentration camps in Poland and said "never again", but now that the camps are back it seems that we would rather deny them, or suggest that there's fault on both sides, then determine to stop the atrocities.
If there is anything I don't like about BOSNA!, it is the incessant wordiness of the voice-over. Perhaps Levy was so anxious to persuade that he didn't dare to let the audience come to their own conclusions. At times sounding like a Biblical prophet, at times hectoring us, at times reflecting on how the war affects our image of ourselves as Europeans, the narration never lets the eloquent pictures speak for themselves, pictures that have more than enough power to move and to persuade on their own.
*
Cambridge Arts Cinema hosted the British premiere of BOSNA!, a powerful and disturbing film about the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and about the reluctance of governments in Western Europe to acknowledge what was going on and their refusal to offer real assistance to Bosnia. Director Bernard-Henri Levy gave a short talk before the film. He said that the BOSNA!, filmed in Sarajevo between September 1993 and January 1994, and in other parts of Bosnia in March and April of this year, was neither a dispassionate documentary nor an artistic film; but was the answer to the question "What can I do to help these people, to make their heroic struggle known?" He wanted the film to be as militant and passionate as possible without being inaccurate in its presentation of the facts.
A question and answer session followed the film, chaired by Leonard Doyle of "The Independent." The questioners mostly expressed positive opinions of the films and asked Levy about the relationship between his film and a wider historical context. The film made much of the comparisons between the West s failure to intervene in Bosnia and its failure to take a stand over Czechoslovakia and Spain in the 1930s, but what about the many conflicts within and between other ex-communist states, such as Armenia and Azerbaijan? Levy said that his own memory and family history was concerned with World War Two, and so that was where he turned more naturally. He also wanted to try to convince people in England that they should come to the aid of Bosnia as they had come to the aid of France. He suggested that the West wasn't doing enough to help the post-communist states towards democracy, and that we risked the creation of monsters from the volatile mixture of fascism, nationalism and communism in these countries.
One questioner suggested that the reluctance of the West to become involved was out of a fear of Islamic fundamentalism in what the media portray as a predominately Muslim state. Levy agreed, and said that this was an inaccurate view of Bosnia. Sarajevo had been a "second Jerusalem," a city in which sizable communities of Jews, Christians and Muslims lived and worshiped in peace. Levy described a meeting with Bosian President Izetbegovic at the world premiere of BOSNA! in early June. Izetbegovic said that he had always refused a fundamentalist Islamic state, but if the West were to stand back and lets the country be partitioned along ethnic lines, then Bosnia may have to become one.
One questioner disagreed. He said that the conflict in Bosnia was much more complex than the film suggested, and that it was a mistake not to examine the origins of the present conflict in World War Two, in which the Serbians resisted fascism while Muslims were recruited into the German army. Levy responded passionately. He said that being right in 1945 didn't make the Serbians right now; even if their grandparents had fought Hitler, that didn t excuse concentration camps and ethnic cleansing.
Bernard-Henri Levy made a very positive impression on me; he seemed full of respect for the Bosnians he had met and spoken with and filmed, and full of energy and passion to tell their story to the world.
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