Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools Bc. Vladimír Zán The Image of the Bosnian War in American Cinema Master ’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. 2012 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Vladimír Zán Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. for his valuable advice, guidance and lending me some of the secondary materials. In addition, I would like to thank Nienke van Doorn and Jeff Handley for proofreading my text. Vedrana Mahmutović, who provided me with her personal experiences, observations and views regarding the issues the thesis was concerned with. Last but not least I would like thank Dušan Kolcún and Charline Ruet for their support and encouragement Table of Content 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 2 2. The Bosnian War ...................................................................................................................... 9 3. Inventing Bosnia and Herzegovina. ........................................................................................ 18 4. Bosnia in the Film ................................................................................................................... 33 5. Behind Enemy Lines. .............................................................................................................. 42 6. Welcome To Sarajevo ............................................................................................................. 50 7. Shot through the Heart .......................................................................................................... 59 8. Savior ...................................................................................................................................... 65 9. Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 77 10. Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 89 Resumé (česky) ........................................................................................................................... 98 Resume (English) ......................................................................................................................... 99 1 1. Introduction Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and later the Special Envoy to Cyprus and Balkans, in his speech entitled “No media, No War”, compared the situation in Bosnia with the one in Rwanda. While in Bosnia the number of dead was “only” around 100, 000 people, in Rwanda the number was as high as 1,000,000, but Western media dedicated more space to European conflict, than to the killing in Africa. Richard Holbrooke links the two events when he quotes Christiane Annanpour, reporter for CNN in Bosnia and Herzegovina. When asked why she did not report on the conflict in Rwanda, replied: “I was in Rwanda. I did cover it. I knew what was happening but the O J Simpson trial was on and I couldn't get on the air for CNN.” (Holbrooke 20). Compared with the conflicts in Africa, the Bosnian War received more coverage in Europe and America where the public was served almost daily portion of horror and tragedy. Bosnia was a perfect place for stories of bloodshed and terror, as it was located on the border of the civilized, rational West and dark and mysterious East. Images of the country, where the Winter Olympic Games took place only a few years before, were juxtaposed with pictures of war crimes, mass graves, shelling and dead bodies. In 1946 Winston Churchill in his famous speech at Westminster’s College in Fulton, Missouri, “hung” the Iron Curtain between free, democratic West and the communist East. However even after the fall of the communist regimes, the imaginary line dividing East and West of the Europe still prevailed in some form. This division is not the invention of the British political leader, Larry Wolff, in his detailed exploration of traveller’s accounts on Poland and Russia. In the Enlightenment literature with the appropriate title: Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment , dates the origin of this division back to the Enlightenment and writings 2 of authors such as Voltaire, and other leading Enlightenment thinkers. Philosophies of Enlightenment articulated and elaborated their own perspective on the continent gazing from West to East, rather than from North to South as it were before. (Wolff 5). According to Wolff: “The Enlightenment had to invent Western and Eastern Europe together as complementary concepts, defining each other by opposition and adjacency.“ (5) In the eighteenth century the lands of Eastern Europe were a sufficiently unfamiliar and unusual destination for the Western traveller, so that each carried a mental map to be freely annotated, embellished, refined or refolded along the way. Wolff explains the importance of the mental mapping in the following way: “The operations of mental mapping were above all associations and comparisons, association among the lands of Eastern Europe, intellectually combining them into a coherent whole and comparison with the lands of Western Europe establishing the developmental division of the continent.” (Wolff 6) Edward Said proposed the idea that Europe was defined by Orient, as the Orient was always part of Western imaginative and material culture. It constituted a reference point one could define against. (1-2) In a similar way, Western Europe defined itself against its Eastern part. The Balkan region, as former part of the Eastern Roman Empire and later Byzantine followed by the Ottoman Empire, was seen as the part of Eastern Europe. It shares, along with the whole of Eastern Europe, a position between the Orient and the Western Europe; it was characterized by the industrial backwardness, lack of advanced social relations typical of the developed world, irrational and superstitious cultures unmarked by Western Enlightenment. (Wolf 6-7; Todorova 12). The Balkans, on the other hand, cannot be described precisely under the terms of Orientalism as it was defined by Said. While Said talks about the exotic Orient and its exotic and 3 imaginary realm, which offered an opportunity to dream and possibility a longing for the exotica as opposed to prosaic and profane West. The Balkans on the other hand was depicted as place with unimaginative correctness and lack of wealth, with straightforward, usually negative, attitude. As opposed to exotic Orient, the Balkans had predominantly male appeal evoking the medieval knighthood. (Todorova 14) In addition to that, while Islam plays a crucial role in the definition of the Orient, there are only two places in the Balkans with a significant proportion of Muslim population. One of them is Bosnia and Herzegovina. However Orthodox Christianity, the dominant religion in this region, played an important role in its cultural, social and political definition against the Western Catholicism. While these two faiths mutually represented the notion of heresy in the region and within the Europe, it was the distinction between Christianity and Islam which was important. Another important aspect was that the Balkan countries were never under the direct colonial rule of Western powers therefore never experienced Western influences through economic, diplomatic and cultural means, unlike the direct control experienced in the Near East. The same situation applies in academia. Compared to what Said stated about the study of the Orient, Balkan studies were found only recently and have almost no tradition. (Flemming1228) When the communist regimes fell and dichotomy of the East vs. West disappeared, it was necessary to redefine the whole region. War in the former Yugoslavia helped to dust out the old images of the whole region, which became associated with the war and ethnic hatred once again. According to Vesna Goldsworthy, wars over the Yugoslavian succession were often referred to by the Western media to as the Balkan Wars despite protests of Yugoslavia’s neighbours in the Peninsula. This fact reflects the resonance of the Balkans as a name (32). The War on European soil between two “white” nations gained considerable attention in the news media and 4 consequently a tide of publications about the Balkans appeared on the bookshelves. New histories of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo; countless memoirs by politicians, diplomats, and soldiers engaged in the region; accounts by foreign correspondents and relief workers; the testimonies of victims, survivors and camp inmates; diaries kept during the siege of Sarajevo; anthologies of poetry and prose; reissues of long out of print titles; and a variety of academic explorations of the Balkan peninsula. (Goldsworthy 28) Filmmakers did not fell behind in this trend and a number of documentaries and feature films about the peninsula were made and gained wide popularity. It should be noted that films produced or co-produced in the Balkans, which tried to explain the conflict, received number of significant film awards such as the nomination for the Academy Award for the best Foreign Language