CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2000

 

Screening Politics: Cinema and Intervention
Frank Stern ^*

 

Belgrade, November 5, 2000–A mob of angry Serbs flooded Yugoslavia’s capital today to protest the rule of President Slobodan Milosevic and demand that he call general elections. Repeating a strategy it had used in April, state–run television tried to distract tens of thousands of protesters from political action by broadcasting pirated copies of Western hits such as the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough and the Oscar–winning American Beauty.

The twentieth century ushered in the age of cinema. At the turn of the century, films emerged as the new cultural agents, introducing events and images from remote corners of the world to mass audiences in the urban centers of Europe and the United States. By 1910, a growing segment of the urban population was gazing at images flickering across white screens. Movie houses supplied what millions of spectators were expecting: information, entertainment, moving stories, thrills, and modern heroes and heroines. Curious gaze, cultural hunger, and political sightseeing mingled with the expectations of a growing lower– and middle–class audience. At the turn of the century, with the Boer War reconstructed for a film audience and war in the Balkans recorded in moving photographs, politics and the new visual art began to intertwine. The moving images proved useful for political and military interests when it came to reaching a broad segment of the population and creating consent or encouraging rejection of the real or imagined enemy. They also provided a forceful voice for independent critics of contemporary events.

Artistic expression influences political interventions just as political interventions have an impact on cinematic representations of past, present, or future events. Cinema has become the modern tool of visual intervention in politics, culture, and international relations.

 

Interventions of the Mind

Our basic images of international crises and catastrophes such as World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the recent war in the Balkans have been thoroughly influenced by moving pictures. Films are aesthetic representations of realities, whether we are viewing documentaries or feature films that refer to politics or culture. Films elaborate meaning–either by creating new images of reality or by confirming and changing these images–and they provoke emotional responses that contribute to intellectual debate. Films are the interventions of the mind, either before the real events or in hindsight, offering interpretations that can be as antagonistic as the actual events. Today, these interventions of the mind are produced, marketed, and promoted by sophisticated means of technology, communication, and cultural discourse. Cinema is at the very heart of visual culture, which not only defines the modernism of the past century and the beginning of the twenty–first century, but also creates a bond between art and political power.

Films may try to tell a story in a seemingly objective manner. They may also, however, carry an overt ideological message or create subversive images that can encourage a range of attitudes from a democratic belief in equality to hatred of “the other.” Such effects do not derive exclusively from the highest standard of film art and form, but can result from any effective representation of the cultural or political other through narration, visual aesthetics, and cinematic imagination, as long as these resonate with the spectator. The cinematic attempt to influence political conflict focuses on the individual minds of participants, bystanders, and viewers. Feature films and newsreels may evoke conscious reflections on a given conflict, enhance or fight stereotypes, or distract from a crisis situation through illusionary images–as the feature film Wag the Dog did so effectively. Although the filmmakers created a believable vision of the Oval Office, they did not imagine that a real war in Albania would ensue and prove to be less hilarious than their digital playfulness.

Intervening films move a political question or a strategic goal into the visual sphere. Today, the visual sphere has to be understood as an essential part of the public sphere. Departing from traditions of nineteenth century literature, cinema dissolves the questionable distinction between high and popular culture. Through film, the private sphere has become politicized and has gained a new social dimension. Messages are no longer kept in a literary bottle, but are visualized and constantly imposed on the mind. Hence the researcher of modern culture and politics has to ask not only what the images on the screen represent, but also how they convey meaning.

The functions of film can work in a totally unexpected way, since cinematic interventions cannot be reduced to subtle or blatant propaganda, emotional outcries, or moral didactics. Several years ago, at the time of the military confrontations between Serbs and Bosnians, Saturday nights brought one hour when the weapons usually became silent. A strange calm drifted over the front lines of the Balkans, and the United Nations observers could relax. It was the midnight hour when a German TV station that could be received in the Balkans broadcast the weekly pornographic film. One could call this a cultural intervention, although no number of pornographic movies would have prevented the return to fighting. As this example illustrates, films may not always lead to the reactions intended by filmmakers or producers.

 

The Virtual World of Film Histories

Cinema creates a virtual world of its own, and the relationship between what is happening on the screen and what is happening in social, political, and international reality is transformed into a visual dimension of the individual mind. It is not just the representation of reality we are exploring in political and historical analysis, but the reality of cultural representations.

What do popular culture and the cinematic imagination achieve by crossing over into the territory of the real or imagined other? How do cinematic representations influence the public and private spheres, creating an atmosphere of awareness or even a climate of intervention or non–intervention in historically relevant situations and processes? What is history in the movies beyond the history of cinema? Film illustrates ex post historical events and contributes to the development of the viewer’s historical consciousness. Academics frequently question whether the depiction of a historical context in a film meets the standards of historiographical works. The increasing number of historians, sociologists, and other specialists on film sets underscores a new attention to this concern. But the cinematic imagination cannot be reduced to a cultural or artistic illustration or a historical fact. It creates a reality of its own.

The 1925 film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein depicted in a revolutionary new film language the Russian Revolution of 1905. It created the founding myth of the Russian Revolution as a movement carried by the masses and transformed images of these masses into icons revered by future filmmakers. Potemkin, however, was less the depiction of the 1905 revolution than of the ideological and aesthetic impact of the later revolution in 1917. It was not just made for a Russian audience, but intended as a visual intervention in the Western European ebb and flow of Communist movements. When the film was brought to Germany in the late 1920s, it was banned because the authorities feared its revolutionary message.

In 1936–37, the German semi–documentary Olympia, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, was exported to all Western countries to prove that Nazi Germany was a democratic and open society. This film attempted to create a perception of reality under Nazi rule. It won a number of prestigious film awards but fell from grace, particularly in the United States when, in November 1938, the world learned of the pogrom against the Jews. The attempt to intervene in the perception of Nazi Germany abroad was foiled by growing awareness of political realities in Germany. The change of perception ruined the reception: Riefenstahl, who was touring the United States with the film at the time, was immediately asked to leave.

Films may establish visual icons of historical reality and consciousness, define public attitudes, mobilize people for a common or less–common cause, and create patterns of private behavior. Political and historical films represent historical consciousness. At the same time, they influence or create facets of historical consciousness, or even distort historical events. Hence it is obvious that not only aesthetic but also ethical questions are involved in these films. Cinema is more than entertainment: It is the visual backbone of modern Western culture and beyond. It is the intervention of the conscious and subconscious mind.

 

Screen Images Prepared for War

In the first decade of the twentieth century, short newsreels about events around the world began to appear in Europe and the United States, places where the lower and middle classes were looking for entertainment, and more importantly, for information and images about what was happening outside their immediate environment. For these initial filmgoers, the screen became the first public sphere, not social life or politics–a defining characteristic of early twentieth–century mass society.

The pre–1914 wars in the Balkans, for instance, yielded images of marching soldiers, firing artillery, and countless corpses strewn across the fields that soon became part of popular cinematic perceptions. Over twenty cameramen filmed the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. By 1913, most Balkan governments had banned filming by foreign correspondents, so the film companies resorted to staging the action–which soon became a media event or pseudo–event. In the Balkan Wars a Danish cameraman and a British aristocrat who had failed to arrive in time for a deadly battle staged some battles on location. Most faux films in Europe at the time were anti–British and depicted the Boer War. In the United States, the Edison Company led the market in Boer War fakes. Out of marketing considerations, however, they produced two versions: one in which the Boers won, and one in which the British, dressed in Civil War uniforms, were victorious.

Images of war and death strengthened peace movements, while at the same time distancing the viewer from the terror of war. Thus, they also readied populations for war, particularly if the films were combined with newsreels about domestic affairs that were imbued with nationalistic overtones. In Germany, the most popular movie star of the time was Kaiser Wilhelm II. No movie show could start without pictures of him attending a parade of marching Germans or of touching moments from the private life of the royal family peppered with the hugging of kids and pets. In France, the many depictions of heroic and suffering women led to the reincarnation of Alsace–Lorraine as a beautiful female victim, abused by Germanic Huns, crying silently, and demanding national redemption. During the years leading up to World War I, cinema all over Europe contributed to a nationalistic atmosphere and to the fervor of preparing for battle–notwithstanding the many images of casualties in the Balkans.

The mainstream images that prepared the public for war had all the characteristics of interventions of the mind: They prepared the private eye for the collective onslaught. The piano accompaniment of the silent film show combined patriotic marches with sound effects of explosions and the delicate tunes of the Viennese waltz, implying through music that the ruling classes of Europe were gradually dancing into war and disaster. Cinema became a central instrument for what George Mosse has called the “nationalization of the masses.”

In this context, World War I was the birth pang of film as propaganda, sometimes hiding its ideological and political qualities behind the screen of emotions, but more often deliberately mobilizing heart and mind for the national cause and against the imagined or real enemy. Film aesthetics developed as aesthetics of destruction, war, and self–sacrifice. The German film empire UFA was founded in 1917 once the German High Command realized during the course of the war the power of the films it had inspired. The film industry, the war industry, and the army were in dire need of movies that could mobilize the public. General Ludendorff, chief of staff of the German army under Hindenburg, insisted on influencing the masses in the interest of the state and defined film in this regard as an “effective war weapon.” By 1917, however, it was too late to start a new war of propaganda. Nevertheless, within a very short period, UFA evolved as the biggest and most influential film corporation in Europe. At the same time, in the United States Charlie Chaplin produced short slapstick clips in which he beat up the kaiser with a huge hammer that bore the inscription “War Bonds.”

 

From Screen Pacifism to the Allied War Effort

Among the cinematic responses to World War I were pacifistic films that tried to create a popular anti–militaristic atmosphere, which filmmakers hoped would contribute culturally to the rejection of any future war effort. The most important work from the new genre of anti–war films was All Quiet on the Western Front (1931), based on the literary bestseller by Erich Maria Remarque. Heated debates about Remarque’s novel were still going on when the film opened in the United States in 1930, where it subsequently received an Oscar. In Berlin, however, the Nazi party mobilized its members to terrorize the audience, the police intervened, and finally, the courts decided to censor what the Weimar audience was allowed to see. The film was banned for months because, to quote the decision, it exhibited “an uninhibited pacifistic tendency.” The Ministry of the Army chimed in with the argument that the “film discriminates against the image of the German soldier” and was harmful to the “whole image of Germany abroad.” American filmmakers had “intervened” with the cinematic adaptation of a German novel, influencing the controversies in the Weimar Republic between the visions of the ultranationalistic right and the republican’s dream of a peaceful democracy. As a consequence, the German version was recut, and it was not until 1984 that the original version was shown again in Germany.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the cinematic experiences of World War I were transformed into veritable propaganda machines. No other field of culture and public life achieved such intense attention from the Nazi leadership as did German film. Highly emotional films about the suffering of the German minority in Czechoslovakia and Poland, for instance, were crucial in creating popular support for the occupation of the Sudetenland and for the attack on Poland. The fictional images on the screen prepared the spectator’s mind for the real intervention which, in turn, was filmed on location, and then screened as documented evidence of the need to intervene. The 1941 German film Heimkehr (Return) depicted the constructed plight of ethnic Germans in Poland longing to get “back into the Reich.” The film justified the German attack on Poland and aimed to create mass support for the politics of Lebensraum (living space).

The Allied film industries responded to the Third Reich’s “Ministry of Illusion” with fierce efforts. The real battles of armies were almost superseded by virtual battles and dramas on the screens. Three films that have become classics since the 1940s are particularly noteworthy: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), and Sam Woods’ For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), which was based on the Hemingway novel and depicted an episode of the Spanish Civil War. This last film is a remarkable example of film as intervention. The film aimed less at the creation of historical consciousness about the Spanish Civil War than at a collective, emotional identification with the ongoing Allied efforts to combat Nazi Germany. It was the Allies’ alternative to many Nazi films.

 

Torn Curtain and Beyond

In the decades after World War II, the moral divide on the screen was obvious, making the spectator’s decision with whom to side rather easy. Cold War movies on both sides of the Iron Curtain left no doubt about where the despicable adversaries were to be found. Images of the past were evoked to fight present–day battles and to foster political support for power politics, real or ideological interventions. There are many such films, but perhaps the most outstanding illustration of the relationship between visual interventions and real political or military interventions can be found in film material depicting the aftermath of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

In October 1961, television, newsreels, and photos around the world showed Russian and U.S. tanks facing each other at Checkpoint Charlie. The usual commentary was: “The world is holding its breath.” Fear of an imminent military confrontation and of World War III surfaced. The Cold War threatened to explode into a hot war between the superpowers. At stake, however, were not the liberties of the Berliners but General Lucius Clay’s decision to challenge the East German regime’s interference with the free movement of Americans into the East. A U.S. diplomat on his way to the opera in East Berlin had been stopped, and the East German border guard asked for his passport. The American refused, and Clay ordered a platoon of U.S. troops to the Wall to escort the car to the opera. The next day the conflict escalated, and on October 25, General Clay ordered ten M–48 tanks to line up. Dozens of jeeps and personnel were ordered to drive back and forth across Checkpoint Charlie. In the early morning of October 26, ten Soviet tanks lined up at the Wall. Soviet MiG fighters buzzed the city skies. The filmed standoff created a strong visual impact. At school, young Berliners were allowed to view the show and enjoy it. Whether the guns and cannons were fully or semi–loaded or empty is still a point of contention. In the end, no shot was fired. The White House was irritated and called the Kremlin, and one by one the tanks were withdrawn on both sides in a streamlined choreography. When Kennedy heard about the incident, he demanded to know why an American was going to the opera in East Berlin in the first place. October 1961, then, was the end of General Clay’s Berlin career. Today the visual documentation influences the memory of the first confrontations over the Wall. At the time, the documentation created a visual intervention; the powerful imagery helped both powers to prove their strength and attain mass support in their countries. In the end, we do not even know which opera moved the tanks to the Wall.

 

The Balkans: Realigning Film and History

Once the Iron Curtain was torn down and the walls of a bipolar world had crumbled, the cinematic mirror of Europe became blurred. The Balkans in the mid–1990s became the focus of political and cinematic uncertainties. The European public debate, particularly in Germany and France, focused on the question of political and military intervention. The question was particularly difficult for Germany. In the early 1990s, its foreign policy and international political and military involvement were still rather limited, and the German public was still grappling with the military legacy of the past.

Without going into the countless news reports and documentaries about the Balkan crises and wars, six films produced in the mid–1990s deserve mention for their influence on the European debates over the Balkan Wars. Three of the films aim at documenting the end of Yugoslavia and implore solidarity among different ethnic groups. None of these three films provides sufficient explanation, but all provide graphic testimony of the horrors of war. The six–part 1995 BBC film Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation indicts the Serbian and Croatian leadership, reveals their virulent nationalism, and deplores the lack of international intervention. The 1994 film Vukovar tries to mobilize the public and explain Yugoslavia’s dilemmas through a fictional Croatian–Serbian love story. Due to its unfavorable portrayal of Croatian nationalism, the film was sharply criticized by the Croatian government. The film poses questions of identity and ethnic belonging, and confronts both the private and the political spheres through the displacement of the individual in a time of nationalistic powerplays. The third film, Bosna! (1994), was co–directed by the French philosopher Bernard–Henri Levi and co–sponsored by Bosnian state television. It seeks to appeal to the cultural memory of the audience. More than any other, this film asks for international intervention to prevent any further military confrontations in the Balkans. All three films were part of the ongoing public debate about the results and, to a lesser extent, the causes of the Balkan Wars. The involvement of Bernard–Henri Levi, not only in this film, but also in French and European politics concerning the Balkans, demonstrates how intellectual debate and film can be tightly linked.

In his cinematic narrative and in his visual material, Bernard–Henri Levi refers to images of World War I, the Spanish Civil War, Auschwitz, and political confrontations since 1945. It sides with the Bosnians and accuses governments, media, and the military of not siding with humanity. Bosna! is a documentary film essay about the legacy of the twentieth century, an accusation of the humanities failure to intervene. This human failure, however, has its political agents–the United States, the European Union, and particularly France in the mid–1990s. Bosna! tells the story of the Balkans, as well as of Europe.

 

Debating Universal Human Rights

Films like Bosna! document not only events, but also attitudes about events. To bolster their cause, they refer to historical analogies and to the collective visual icons of Western culture. Such films not only ask for political and military interventions in favor of universal human rights and Western democratic civil rights, but also function as cultural interventions based on the best traditions of the European Enlightenment. They proclaim the defense of democracy and humanism as a popular cause, and they freely cross borders in their discourse between the screen and the audience.

Three outstanding feature films of 1995 illustrate the controversial nature of linking politics and aesthetics. Emir Kusturica’s 1995 film, Underground, led to a sharp clash between the French intellectual, Alain Finkielkraut, and the Austrian writer, Peter Handke, who defended the Serbian cause in his writing. National loyalties, intellectual reasoning, and some subversive tensions in the Franco–German relationship that influenced the whole western European discussion on intervention came to the forefront in the 1996 Handke–Finkielkraut debate. Following the discussions in the media, the German government decided to take part in the military intervention, completing the process of restoring German sovereignty and cementing its position in NATO.

The film Before the Rain by Milcho Manchevski focuses on the European perspective and shows that the Balkan wars may draw all Europeans into the abyss. Theo Angelopoulos’s film Ulysses’ Gaze transcends current politics. This movie by the Greek filmmaker combines history and mythology in a fictional film essay about the Balkans, ethnic diversity, European (and hence Western) myth, and a resulting deep–rooted universalism. His ambition is less to inform or to endorse political action than to encourage spectators to rethink the political history of the Balkans. The entire movie is a representation of cultural memory, of counter–images that repel the simplified and gory portrayal by the media. The film offers a cultural definition of the human condition in our time. It refers us back to basic European and Western myths.

Theo Angelopoulos once stated in an interview that the twentieth century began and ended in the Balkans. Hence, Ulysses’ Gaze embodies the very idea of Europe, of civilization, of power, and of the best traditions of realpolitik. Above all, the film defends the beauty and humanism of European civilization, despite its troubled last century. It is, like so many good films, a filmmaker’s search for the ultimate documentation, for visual intervention.

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Endnotes

Note *:   Frank Stern is Professor of Modern German History and Chair of the Center for German Studies, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Back.