Home Front
Women at War, Women against War
Over There
Hana Makhmalbaf’s third film Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame won the Crystal Bear at Berlin in 2008, voted for by the festival’s young viewers. Set in Afghanistan, Buddha is the precise and perfect example of global feminist cinema’s riposte to US international politics under George W. Bush, including his appropriation of white liberal feminism. Like Bloody Beans, it’s seen from a child’s eye view, and shows children enacting the war they have learned from their elders. This imitative play is a cautionary tale about the effect of a media dominated by narratives of spectacular violence.
Makhmalbaf places all of our girlhoods in a ‘frame of war’ through the Afghan girlhood she creates and depicts, contextualizing the familiar fears of rape culture as part of a continuum with the gendered violence of the war zone. Girls, she suggests, live war in our bodies; we are inherently political animals because of this. War films as a genre are used, appropriated and deconstructed by feminist filmmakers to make exactly this point: that war is not an exception (as it’s staged in mainstream war porn), but the rule for the 99 per cent. Rather than celebrating an orgy of violence, these filmmakers use the political immediacy of the war zone to raise questions about, in Judith Butler’s word, ‘grievability’, or whose lives and bodies count.1
Makhmalbaf was 18 when she made her first feature. She been banned from attending the premiere of her first release at the Venice Film Festival four years earlier, because minors are not admitted to unrated films, although she had made her first short film aged eight. Her focal character in Buddha Collapsed, Baktay (Nikbakht Noruz), is younger still: six years old, she wants to attend school and read funny books like her male next-door neighbour. She is shooed from his madrasa, kidnapped by boys playing at being the Taliban, and laughed out of the classroom at a UN girls’ school that she eventually reaches, where the girls are more interested in lipstick than learning.
Fig. 13: Baktay being kidnapped, Buddha Collapsed out of Shame
Makhmalbaf wrote the screenplay with her mother, Marzieh Meshkini, director of Roozi ke zan shodam (The Day I Became a Woman, 2000), the original girl-on-a-bike film echoed by Haifaa al-Mansour’s global hit Wadjda (2012). Mother and daughter redeveloped the script based on a casting recce in Afghanistan, where Makhmalbaf found that: ‘Unlike their counterparts in America who learn violence through Hollywood action films, the children of Afghanistan have learnt it by witnessing the atrocities suffered by their relatives. They have witnessed their fathers being beheaded in their own gardens’.2 Buddha Collapsed aims its documentation and intervention both at those living through the war, and at those who wage it.
Butler notes, as Makhmalbaf does, that war is primarily an audio-visual experience for most of us, so ‘if war is to be opposed, we have to understand how the popular assent to war is cultivated and maintained, in other words, how waging war acts upon the senses’.3 In this chapter, I pay attention particularly to films that attempt to undo the war waged upon our senses, films that reframe war by querying stereotypes of heroism and victimhood, and challenging the viewer’s expectations of a catharsis delivered via spectacular violence and embedded authenticity.
Buddha Collapsed starts with a brief excerpt of news footage of the event the sixth century CE sandstone Gandhara-style Buddhas being dynamited by the Taliban in March 2001. The rest of the film takes place in their physical and symbolic absence, a powerful evocation of the geopolitical situation in Afghanistan, and a refusal to replicate the frame of war imposed by both the Taliban and the US. The film shares its use of allegory with other films of the Iranian New Wave, specifically those of Makhmalbaf’s father Mohsen and her sister Samira. It also resonates with Fante Régina Nacro’s singular La nuit de la vérité (The Night of Truth, 2004), a rare example of a feature by an African female filmmaker to receive international distribution.
Nacro’s film is carefully set in an unnamed West African country; although it uses Dioula and Mooré, languages from Nacro’s home country, Burkina Faso, its two nations are the (fictional) Bonandé and Nayak, torn apart by a decade of civil war. A reconciliation dinner between the nation’s leaders becomes an inadvertent truth commission when Tomoto (Rasmane Ouedraogo) beats the Bonandé war drums. Tomoto is the village jester, a storyteller and inveterate stirrer. The film asks whether the truth Tomoto’s actions indirectly uncovers is worth the violent consequences, as the families of the leaders are drawn into conflict. Nacro’s film critiques both the neutrality of truth and reconciliation commissions and the over-used trope of the (almost always male) Fool whose actions appear carnivalesque. Tomoto certainly lends himself to cinematic spectacle, whether vividly narrating myths or drumming in the dark, but he risks social dissolution. His actions share a dangerous deniability – ‘it’s just a game’ – with those of the leader (Abdolali Hoseinali) of the boys’ gang in Makhmalbaf’s film.
Buddha Collapsed played at many major international festivals, but I saw it via a slightly different venture: the 2008 Human Rights Watch (HRW) film festival in London. The London and New York HRW film festival began in 1997; from 2009, it became an international touring programme, predominantly screening documentaries, with a focus on international current events from a liberal perspective. The 2008 London programme featured several films that offer a rich context for Buddha Collapsed, particularly the opening night film, which was written and co-directed by an Iranian woman living in France, Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 2007). Satrapi adapted her own autobiographical comics, telling the story of the post-revolutionary Iran into which Hana Makhmalbaf was born. While Satrapi’s dark comedy did receive popular distribution in the West, it had a dual place at HRW, as a film concerned with human rights and as a film faced with censorship. As Patricia White reports, the Iranian Farabi Cinema Foundation objected to Persepolis’ screening at Cannes. ‘For Iranian officials, this exilic woman filmmaker is not a proper representative of the nation – though of course condemning her film made her just that’.4 In a particular and painful sense, it was censorship that renewed the Iranian identity of both the film and the exiled Satrapi.
There were also two documentaries at HRW that related to Buddha Collapsed. Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers’ Lioness (2008) focuses on the traumatic experiences of the first US women soldiers sent into direct ground combat, in contravention of official policy, due to a shortage of active combat troops caused by the US’ dual illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture (2007), meanwhile, offers a startling insight into the effects of US foreign policy on domestic human rights. It looks at the case of artist Steve Kurtz, who was arrested as a bio-terrorist in 2004, after his wife Hope’s death from sudden heart failure while Kurtz was working on a project about food bio-engineering. Leeson had to employ dramatizations, featuring Thomas Jay Ryan (Steve) and Tilda Swinton (Hope), to subvert legal restrictions on representing aspects of the ongoing case. The scenes in which Swinton and Ryan discuss the project have an air of heightened reality, connecting play and profundity, reminiscent of Makhmalbaf’s allegorical war games.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Robin L. Riley note that: ‘Feminists critiquing and organizing against war in most places in the world will thus need to contend with the effects of US imperial wars in their own backyards, whatever part of the globe they happen to be living in’.5 By co-programming these documentaries, HRW does not prioritize the North American point of view and experience. Rather, it queries it by including critical voices from within alongside a range of global voices.
The HRW films’ complex range of approach to representation challenges the viewer’s expectations of what exactly we hope to gain from watching human rights films. They offer more than a sense of satisfaction in the rightness of our own politics or the mastery of issues occurring ‘over there’. An animation, a fiction feature and two documentaries: the mix of modes also queries the idea of war film as a genre and war’s relation to aesthetics. All three films press on the metaphor of the ‘theatre of war’, the risk and rewards of performance with reference to war as ‘the real’, and the ways in which mediatized representations of war inform lived experience – for people of all genders.
Armories
In ‘We Have Always Fought’, her Hugo Award-winning essay ‘challenging the “women, cattle and slaves” narrative’, Kameron Hurley is concerned with the erasure of women fighters from the historical record, citing in particular Shaka Zulu’s female troops as well as pirates, sailors and soldiers who might be read as transvestite or transgender.6 Comments on her article also call attention to the Soviet women soldiers and pilots, whose struggles for full equality after the World War II can be seen in Larisa Shepitko’s film Krylya (Wings, 1966). Few other feminist filmmakers have explored these aspects of the historical record, either within the war genre or outside it. Participation in military and paramilitary fields is a part of women’s history, but feminist cinema, at least in the West, tends to focus on women as the victims of war and violence; fighting, at best, on the home front.
Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012) and Lucia Puenzo’s Wakolda (2013) both, differently, exemplify the feminist potential of the grey area between warrior and victim, soldier and civilian, through their use of adolescent girls as figures of complicity and resilience. Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) and Puenzo’s Lilith (Florencia Bado) are both daughters of Nazi-supporting families; after the war ends, they are shown continuing the Resistance fight within their own subjectivities, seeking to define themselves against their families’ politics. Dragging her siblings across Germany in 1945, Lore makes a literal and psychological journey from faithful believer, through disbelief about her parents’ complicity in the Final Solution, to a final act of sharp rebellion against both the regime and postwar forgetting.
Puenzo’s Lilith has to extricate herself, her family and their German-Argentinean community from their thrall to a German doctor (Àlex Brendemühl) living in Patagonia, who offers to draw on his gruesome medical experimentation to normativize her embodiment. Lilith, small and underdeveloped compared to her classmates, contrasts with Puenzo’s more typical female warrior, the Israeli spy Nora (Elena Roger), who has identified the doctor as Josef Mengele. Yet the film suggests that Lilith’s resistance is more successful than Nora’s, a challenge to both the typical war film and the current investment in female action heroism.
Kathryn Bigelow and Susanne Bier, the only two women to win recent Academy Awards as feature filmmakers, have both directed war films. As White puts it, ‘Given the content of Bigelow’s combat film, the moment seemed to represent the convergence of American exceptionalism with the director’s own’.7 Angelina Jolie likewise followed her Balkan war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) with Unbroken (2014), a biopic of athlete and prisoner-of-war Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), which adheres to the Greatest Generation trope of World War II films. Hence the importance of Lioness and Beth Freeman’s Canadian equivalent Sisters in Arms (2011), which interrogate the complex and often contradictory experiences of women in active combat. Freeman’s film received international attention the year after its release when the USA lifted its combat role ban.8
While underlining Hurley’s argument that women have always fought, Freeman’s is an intimate documentary that includes her sister Tamar, an army medic, among its central subjects. Freeman has said that while her sister’s move from reserves to regular forces was a prompt, making the film led to a broader ‘decision… to present a female voice/perspective on frontline combat, whatever that was’.9 Master Corporal Kimberley Ashton, a combat engineer and armaments specialist, whom we see interviewed in an armory, represents the full range of that perspective, from applying for active combat because of a line in the application that stated women were not physically strong enough, to her eventual decision, after the traumatic death of a close colleague and her husband’s PTSD diagnosis, to transfer out of combat to raise her daughters.
‘I’ll always be a sapper, regardless’, she says of losing her rank, a statement that blurs the traditional distinction between battlefield and home in a way that seems positive, in contrast to the bleak nightmare of unsurvivable PTSD for female combatant Suzy (Joanne Froggatt), who returns home from Iraq in British drama In Our Name (Brian Welsh, 2010). Freeman’s film balances video diaries by combatants with at-home interviews that contextualize combat. It overlaps with a sub-genre that seems particularly compelling to female filmmakers: critical films that explore the liminal zone between front line experience and returning home. Kimberley Peirce returned to cinema after nearly a decade with Stop-Loss (2008), a feature film critical of the US military’s policy of recalling soldiers who had completed their tours, due to the same shortages that also saw the subjects of Lioness called to the frontline. After the suicide of his comrade Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) – tellingly named to represent maximum masculinity – decides to flee from Texas to Mexico with the assistance of his mother Ida (Linda Emond) and his girlfriend Michelle (Abbie Cornish), but turns back from this feminized act of dishonour, returning to active duty as ordered. Liza Johnson’s Return (2011) tells a similar, albeit quieter and grittier, story about National Guard reservist Kelli (Linda Cardellini) choosing to return to the front line.
Peirce’s film joins Bigelow’s and Bier’s better-known contributions. While they may not depict women in active combat roles, they have been widely covered as ‘courageous’ war films by women filmmakers, as if filmmaking were itself an active combat role. It was 2007’s Things We Lost in the Fire, the US remake of her film Brødre (Brothers, 2004), that brought Bier to international attention. Both films concern a woman who opens her house to her lost soldier husband’s brother, only for her husband to return from the war. In this version of Martin Guerre, the home becomes a claustrophobic version of the battleground and the woman and her children an allegory for contested territory. Bier foregrounds this familiar trope and unnerves us with the ways in which domestic and military violence are as connected as domestic and foreign policy. Bigelow, likewise, uses claustrophobia – tight shots, a small ensemble, deadlined narratives – to engage her viewer in the realities of war. The Hurt Locker follows directly from her prior film, submarine drama K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), made for what was then the highest budget ever granted to a female filmmaker in Hollywood.
Like its predecessors in Bigelow’s oeuvre, The Hurt Locker is concerned with toxic masculinity. It has Point Break’s pitch-perfect grasp of genre even as it deconstructs it. A similar strategy can be seen in Antonia Bird’s powerful docudrama The Hamburg Cell (2004), one of the earliest films to address the 9/11 attacks, and a rare film to look empathetically at the bombers. The adrenalized elation of Bigelow’s action films can be read as ‘complicitous critique’, in Linda Hutcheon’s valuable term: an attempt to use the thrills of mainstream film against itself, engaging an audience only to confront them with the cost of their own investments.10 But there is more at stake in using this approach with ongoing current events than with surfing. Alisa Lebow, in her study of war documentaries, suggests the term ‘paramilitarist’ for films that ‘excel… in the “war is hell” approach, in which the politics and historical contexts for war are understood as less significant than some generic humanism that sees war as a form of the sublime, in which everyone is living more authentically in the face of death’.11
Whereas King in Stop-Loss returns to base out of moral concerns and Johnson’s Kelli returns out of necessity, William James (Jeremy Renner) returns to Delta Company because he is not only inured but addicted. Bigelow makes this explicit from the opening intertitle, a quotation from war correspondent Chris Hedges: ‘The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug’.12 The quotation is addressed to the viewer as much as to James, but since we experience the ‘rush of battle’ through his point of view, a rush that has potent parallels with action movies and first-person shooter video games, complicity here may be stronger than critique.
Bigelow’s film forms an instructive contrast with Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, discussed in chapter three, which resonates with the analogy between toxic masculinity and colonial violence; Denis makes far more clear-cut the emergence of that violence from the repression of homoeroticism, particularly from the dehumanizing eroticization of the non-white Other. Sam Whitsitt identifies The Hurt Locker with the western, particularly with with The Searchers (a lone wolf classic) and with The Last of the Mohicans, with James as Natty and his African American subordinate Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) as Chingachgook.13 In overlaying the solo and companionate stories of colonial conquest, Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal insist on these twenty-first-century conflicts as a continuation of imperial wars, renewals of manifest destiny extended to other landmasses.
This Bloodpath
Bigelow’s follow-up Zero Dark Thirty, whose climax was already international news, forms a fascinating comparison with a Canadian short film that resituates the war narrative, also focusing on a female avenging angel. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ ‘A Red Girl’s Reasoning’ (2012) extends Butler’s ‘frames of war’ further, asking who gets to define the parameters of conflict. As Delia (Jessica Matten), clad in bike leathers, tracks down two white men – one a cop and one a criminal, their interchangeability implied by intercutting – her voiceover insists:
I’ve been on this bloodpath for six, long, lonely years. But white boys have been having their way with Indian girls since contact [onscreen, Delia’s boot connects with the groin of the man she’s fighting]. Forget what Disney tells you: Pocahontas was 12 when she met John Smith. It’s pretty little lies like this that hide the ugly truth.
Delia’s bloodpath, ‘both a calling and a curse’, drives her to avenge First Nations women subjected to gendered and raced violence throughout the long war of colonialism that is still ongoing. Her reference to Pocahontas is a reminder that, as Cowlitz/Watlala writer Elissa Washuta titles a recent blog post with dark irony, ‘Violence against Indigenous women [is] fun, sexy, and no big deal on the big screen’.14 Lived reality is the exact inverse of the wish-fear fantasies of the western: it is Indigenous women, not white women, who are most at risk. Indigenous communities in North America have been at war since 1492.
Tailfeathers is planning to develop ‘A Red Girl’s Reasoning’ as a feature; the short leaves the viewer with a long take of Delia, in her leathers, riding her motorbike through a tunnel, reflections sliding over her helmet in an optical illusion that turns the future ahead of her into the past behind her. Her possible act of vengeance remains in the viewer’s imagination: she has tied up and poured gasoline on a rapist, after he shuts down the opportunity she’s offered for reconciliation, calling her ‘a dirty fucking squaw’. In response, she places her lit cigarette between his lips. Thus, Tailfeathers navigates the ethics of non-violence: neither the rape nor the revenge are represented, but only inferred. Delia – who has told us that her bloodpath is a curse – appears, finally, like a cyborg riding into an unknown future. Her actions, and Tailfeathers’ filmmaking, are exhilarating and, in Corinn Columpar’s useful term, ‘unsettling’, shifting the cinematic point of view from settler to Indigenous culture.15
Like Bigelow, Tailfeathers freely appropriates popular genre semantics to frame her story, including the action genre’s return to the Strong Female Character (SFC). Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya (Jessica Chastain) is part of the lonely SFC trend. Boal and Bigelow based the character on a CIA analyst called Jen, who may be a cover name for a composite, or may not exist at all.
According to [to Greg Barker’s 2013 documentary] Manhunt, there was a team of female analysts known within the CIA as ‘The Sisterhood’, who issued report after report warning about the threat bin Laden posed to America – and whose warnings were repeatedly ignored… Maya is something of a composite of these women.16
Jen’s (non-)existence has proven one of the many points of dissonance or compression for which critics have taken Bigelow to task, the most serious being her spec(tac)ularization of torture. Emily Bazelon, writing for Slate in defence of the film, nevertheless states that: ‘At the end of the interrogation scenes, I felt shaken but not morally repulsed, because the movie had successfully led me to adopt, if only temporarily, Maya’s point of view: This treatment is a legitimate way of securing information vital to US interests’.17 As with James, so with Maya: Bigelow’s powerful filmmaking creates a point of view character with whom white liberal viewers might align themselves, even against their politics and against all evidence that torture does not work.
As a proxy for the viewer, Maya initially seems troubled by the torture meted out by other CIA operatives to Ammar (Reda Kateb), but when left alone with him, adheres to the policy of torture legitimated by confession, telling him, ‘You can help yourself by being truthful’. Maya – whose name, tellingly, means illusion in Sanskrit – is as much in thrall to the addiction of war as her Hurt Locker counterpart James; more so, perhaps, in that she is a singular female operative who has internalized the machismo of her surroundings in order to succeed. Her final moments are framed very differently to his: where James returns to the companionship of his battalion, to the neverending cycle of creating and diffusing violence, Maya is alone, crying. Bigelow offers this as a potential reaction to the viewer, asking us what it would mean to cry, instead of punch the air, on hearing of the successful completion of the mission in Abbottabad. In some ways, Maya’s tears are as inscrutable, or at least ambiguous, as Delia’s mirror-visored helmet in ‘A Red Girl’, a kind of mask of tragedy that refuses to be coded as either masculinist triumphalism or feminine emotional susceptibility.
US cinema is exported globally, acting as ideological ‘soft’ warfare. Likewise, it was ideologically crucial for Soviet cinema to portray its women as liberated, equal and powerful, as seen in Sally Potter’s television documentary I am an Ox, I am a Horse, I am a Man, I am a Woman: Women in Russian Cinema (1986). One country has continued the Soviet tradition of the female soldier sub-genre: Israel. Within a different political context, there is a similar rationale, wherein female soldiers represent the nation-state’s view of itself as modern, progressive and powerful. Female soldiers are at once a marker of Israel’s self-described status as a liberal democracy, in which women have equal rights (it is the only country that drafts women), and of its preparedness or toughness, such that even women are deployed in combat.
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz refers to the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) as ‘gender-integrated but not women-liberated’, contrasting the armed forces with the largely female-driven, and often invisibilized, peace movement since 1987.18 Unlike the female peacenik, the female soldier is part of the Israeli cinematic self-image to such an extent that Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation (2014) can mock it, focusing on a group of female conscripts marking time behind the lines in a Human Resources office. Like Lavie’s dark comedy, Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hager’s Karov La Bayit (Close to Home, 2005) examines the normalization of army life for its female characters, but its protagonists Smadar (Smadar Sayar) and Mirit (Naama Schendar) do not have the security of a desk behind which they can hide their involvement in an occupation. We see the micro-aggressions of the checkpoint through Smadar and Mirit’s point of view, but we also see that their high-handed and arbitrary behaviour towards Palestinians takes place in the context of their gradual attrition of all the army rules, including Smadar’s off-hours shoplifting game. Both Zero Motivation and Close to Home chip away at the heroization of the IDF, while simultaneously normalizing female army service, and using that femininity, potentially, as a post-feminist strategy to disarm criticism of the films as mocking and/or glorifying the army.
Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated The Invisible War (2013) unpicks the representation of female soldiers as the (anti-) heroic face of nation. A campaigning documentary exposé of rape in the US military, it focuses on survivor testimony. Its release has supported, and been supported through, the Invisible No More coalition working to end male-on-female sexual assault in the military.19 Kori Cioca, one of the survivors who appears in the film, summed up the army’s attitude in an interview with Bitch magazine, telling interviewer Natasha Guzman, ‘I understand there’s no honor or valor in being raped in the military’.20 Cioca, tellingly, does not say that there’s no honour or valour in being a rapist in the military: what she identifies is the insistence that soldiers must be invulnerable. This underlies the narrative frisson available in depicting the female soldier or spy as vulnerable – to the enemy.
Rape is both a weapon of war and a metaphor for it. Dick’s film draws on and inverts the use of rape as a narrative trope by which female characters are commonly embedded in the war genre, undertaking the process observed by Yifat Susskind of international women’s right organization MADRE. Stating that ‘the most destructive power of rape as a weapon of war lies in the deep-rooted stigma attached to it’, she quotes an impassioned argument by Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed, that we should not see ‘a ruined, raped girl, but… a prisoner of war who was strong enough to survive weeks of torture and brave enough to escape’.21
That transformational strategy, in which rape is recoded from shame to survival, is palpable not only in Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey and her international activism for the recognition of rape as a war crime, but also in fiction features by Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Zbanić and Irish filmmaker Juanita Wilson. Internationally-co-produced and -distributed (albeit on a small scale than Jolie’s), their films address the use of rape as a weapon of war in the Balkan conflict from the point of view of resourceful female survivors.
Zbanić’s Grbavica (Esma’s Secret, 2006) gives its secret away in the English title: the film’s plot drives powerfully towards the main character, Sara (Luna Milović), questioning her mother Esma (Mirjana Karanović) about the identity of her father, whom she has been told was a war hero. Under pressure, Esma reveals that she was raped by a Chetnik, a Serbian paramilitary, in a prison camp. The mother-daughter bond is stronger than the act of the father, erasing it. When Sara joins her fellow students on a field trip for the children of war heroes, she claims allegiance to her mother and preserves her secret.
Esma’s secret is only secret to Sara, not to viewers: the use of rape as a weapon of ethnic, as well as gendered, violence was widely reported in coverage of the Balkan conflict. Wilson’s first feature As If I Am Not There (2010) draws on testimony to the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague collected into a novel, S. A Story about the Balkans, by novelist Slavenka Drakulić.22 It tells the story of Samira (Natasa Petrovic), a schoolteacher who leaves her modern family in Sarajevo to take a job in the country. After her first day in the village, Samira and the women are taken hostage by Serbian soldiers. Samira is singled out for her youth and beauty and gang-raped. The scene is uncompromizing, utterly bleak and grey, using Petrovic’s powerful gaze – focused on a fly – to convey the internal effects of the soldier’s actions. The film enters trickier territory when Samira is romanced by The Captain (Fedja Stukan), a charismatic warlord who offers her a bath and food, separating her from the other women being kept in a hay-loft by the soldiers. Her decision concerning the Captain is denied to her by the soldiers’ abandonment of the farm.
Samira ends up giving birth in wintry Stockholm, where we see her at the start of the film, in Wilson’s feeling strategy to ensure that we know her protagonist survives. The frame narrative implies that Samira, looking detachedly at her daughter, has to recall the events in Bosnia in order to form a maternal bond. As in Esma’s Secret, the bond between mother and daughter is a healing complement to, and sets the stage for, testimony. Yet there is a question of whose testimony is deemed presentable. There has yet to be a similar wave of prestige arthouse cinema testifying to the use of rape as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or by UN peacekeepers, or by US soldiers in Vietnam, or child marriages occuring in Syrian refugee camps.
20,000 Bosniak Muslim women and girls were raped during the Balkan conflict, according to UN figures.23 A genocide within a genocide, the figures bear witness to the central way in which war is different for women. Esma and Samira are combatants; they endure, resist and contemplate enacting violence. Their stories require us to reframe our understanding of the war film in the same way that ‘A Red Girl’s Reasoning’ contests our frame of war. For women, rape culture is an everyday war. As acts of representational justice, these films alter the war genre away from masculine heroics, even when undertaken by bored female soldiers. But the frame is still narrow.
Lighthouses
Both war films and anti-war films focus on military action: invasions, explosions and exposition set the pace of the narrative. Denis’ Beau Travail is a counter-example of a female filmmaker immersing herself in the masculine world of the armed forces, but producing a film of inaction and delay, where desire and violence blur out of boredom. In White Material (2009), she uses a female character as a focal point for a similarly tense examination of the (un)calm before the storm.
White Material has strong resonances with Marguerite Duras’ novels about her family life in Indochina before the anti-colonial First Indochina War (1941–1949). Duras’ Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall, 2008) which was adapted for the screen by Rithy Panh, tells the story of a French woman building a King Canute-like sea wall. The saline inundation prefigures the coming revolution, and also her willed ignorance of both natural and political forces. Isabelle Huppert, who played the mother in Panh’s adaptation, took the role of Maria Vial in White Material a year later. Maria owns a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country in which civil war is imminent. She gives shelter to a rebel leader, Le Boxeur (Isaach De Bankolé), and finds herself in a tense conversation with a local warlord (Ali Barkai), navigating both sides of the conflict with wary respect. Meanwhile, her drunk husband (Christophe Lambert) and psychotically violent son (Nicholas Duvauchelle) enact the legacy of European colonialism, trying to dominate the locals and Maria, creating an unbearably tense situation as their irresponsible and arrogant actions undo the delicate balance of survival that Maria has negotiated.
As in Duras’ work, there is an autobiographical note to Denis’ return to Cameroon, the location of her first film, Chocolat (1988), which drew from the filmmaker’s childhood memories of time spent in the country with her father, a colonial administrator before independence. White Material was co-written with French-Senegalese novelist Marie NDiaye, winner of the 2001 Prix Femina. Her novels, as described by Andrew Asibong, take place in ‘a world of obscenely casual betrayal and humiliation, much of which is facilitated by social and familial structures of cruelty, complicity and abuse’, a description that resonates with Denis’ films and their continual analogy between the patriarchal colonial state and family home.24
White Material shares many qualities with the documentaries that Lebow describes as ‘unwar films’, which look:
away from the main event, as it were, to that which is happening just outside the field of frenetic action… [to] do the destabilizing work of unthreading the very fabric of the militarist paradigm… engag[ing] various techniques and approaches to make the imperceptible perceptible.25
Lebow gives as an example of these techniques the use of offscreen sound to indicate the potentiality of violence without spectacular depiction. In Denis’ film, this latter mainly comes through the radio, through which the rebel leader announces his plan to clear the country of ‘white material’, likely a reference to the coded ‘hate radio’ broadcasts of Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda.
In Maria Saakyan’s film Mayak (The Lighthouse, 2006), it is the sound of the train that similarly promises and threatens. Saakyan was forced to leave Yerevan, Armenia at the age of 12 because of war in the South Caucasus; she subsequently studied film at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. We meet Lena (Anna Kapaleva), the protagonist of The Lighthouse, returning from Moscow to her home village, intending to bring her grandparents back to the capital with her. Only the elderly, the damaged and those with small children remain in the village, whose exact location remains indeterminate.
Like Maria in White Material, Lena is an active character whose plans are thwarted by the chaos in which she finds herself, created by the illogic of the encroaching war, to which the villagers respond with humour and gentleness. There are startling episodes of violence: one night soldiers with guns come to the village; and Lena’s games on the hillside with her friend’s toddler son are brutally interrupted by the appearance of a helicopter. The village represents an unwar, rather than a peace, a reminder of the continuing cycle of conflict and its effects. Even so it stands determinedly apart, insisting on the right to frame its own narrative in its own temporality.
It Came Into My Room
War comes close even in contemporary films that appear to be exempt from it; some are in denial, but some engage obliquely. As a thriller in which the cops are useless; a romance in which the male protagonist might be a serial killer; a New York film in which the only diegetic landmark is practically in New Jersey, Campion’s In the Cut is not an obvious war film, whether pro-, anti-, para-, or un-. But it was the first film given a permit to shoot in Manhattan after 9/11, the shoot having been delayed from winter 2001 to summer 2002. Campion pairs the protagonist’s loss and endangerment with the city’s, framed by the coming of Homeland Security.
Franny (Meg Ryan) lives near Washington Square; despite Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 declaration of the ‘Free and Independent Republic of Washington Square’, it is one of the most surveilled sites in the world. In the film, there are frequent point-of-view shots that imply someone is watching Franny in the rearview mirror of a car. One of the Poems in Transit that Franny reads on her journeys across the city by subway is a Seneca song: ‘It’s off in the distance / It came into my room / It’s here in the circle’. War, whether international or domestic terrorism, is close, and the paranoid response of Homeland Security brings it closer still.
‘It came into my room’ could be the tagline for Jennifer Reeves’ contemporaneous New York (anti-)thriller The Time We Killed (2004), in which an agoraphobic writer thinks she hears a murder in the apartment across the lightwell from her. Like In the Cut, it reworks noir both by focusing on a female detective-protagonist, and by recasting the thriller’s violence as a gendered war. Robyn (Lisa Jarnot), who has agoraphobia, is the opposite of risk-taking Franny, travelling only in her memories and imagination. Robyn could be seen as an avatar of the confessional individualism of US post-feminism and of US political isolationism in general. In Reeves’s words, ‘the horror of the US military “shock and awe” campaign brings to light the terrible cost of self-absorption and passivity, and shakes Robyn out of her self-made isolation’.26
Fig. 14: Robyn trapped in her room, The Time We Killed
Shutting herself away does not allow Robyn to shut herself off: the world comes into her room, in the same way that a murder takes place in the gardens under Franny’s window at the start of In the Cut, entering her dreams and setting off the narrative connections (often poetic rather than rational) that will lead her to become a cop-killer. Both In the Cut and The Time We Killed are committed to killing the violent Father we carry in our heads and to releasing us into the world. They don’t present an easy resolution of the ‘return’ of peace, but a recognition that US post-imperial wars are not specific, discrete and privileged above other narratives. Intersecting post-imperial wars and rape culture, they reveal that war is everyday and continuous, so we have to practice ‘unwar’ as we do non-violence. This is the realization reached by She (Joan Allen) in Yes (Sally Potter, 2004) when she returns to Belfast where she was raised by her aunt (Sheila Hancock) and sees the ‘peace wall’ topped with razor wire that still divides Protestant Shankill Road from Catholic Falls Road, despite a dismantlement clause in the 1998 Good Friday accord.
She is fleeing a dead marriage to a British politician (Sam Neill) and a passionate but complicated relationship with He (Simon Abkarian), a Lebanese political refugee living in London. He is in Beirut tracing bullet holes in walls while she is in Belfast; the film intercuts histories of colonial violence and their aftermath, a reminder that the immediate conflict that frames their relationship – the post-9/11 wars – are neither singular nor special. They are part of the long histories of imperialism. There is no peacetime in which to love, only the courage to step out into the risky public space of unwar, in which the divisions of rage persist. She fulfils her communist Aunt’s dying wish, travelling to Cuba, where He meets her. Neutral ground – but for She, who is a US citizen, also a risk of losing her identity, a contravention of national rules. Indeed, the production had to relocate from Cuba to the Dominican Republic at the last moment, after Bush cracked down on US citizens such as Allen travelling to Cuba. As Giuliana Bruno comments in her ‘virtual’ letter to Potter, ‘This form of cultural travel was not easy to achieve. You were shooting in times of war’.27
Through her relationship with He, She attempts to stand outside her privileged first world identity, and to stand in solidarity with those experiencing the fallout of Western imperialism, whether in Northern Ireland (an English colony), Lebanon or Cuba. A geneticist who works on embryology, She demonstrates that the feminist imperative for non-violent solutions arises through a political alignment with the vulnerable rather than through any essentialist claim to nurturing femininity. Insisting that we have always fought differently, these films negotiate a politics of non-violence that is never a policy of victimhood, never ceding our place in the narrative. As do Franny and Robyn, and like Makhmalbaf’s Baktay, Potter’s She learns that to travel, especially as a woman, is at once a necessity and a risk, a walk on dangerous and contested ground.