Breathing Bodies

Abstract

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women.(McSorley, 2012)War films celebrated for their use of sound, such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998), The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008), and, more recently, American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014), have tended to focus on the subjective and phenomenological experience of war from the perspective of soldiers, whose agency and placement within the very centre of the action drives the film's narrative (Hochberg, 2013, p.45).1 By contrast, the two Iranian films I will discuss here, Bahram Beizai's Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bashu, gharibeye koochak, 1990) and Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand, 2004), record the experience of war from the perspectives of those whose lives have been radically and violently disrupted by it, but who have had no active role in shaping its outcome. Focusing on the experiences of children, both films use sound design to articulate a sense of their characters' fragmented subjectivity and powerlessness through techniques such as point-of-audition, close-perspective miking, and non-synchronous sound and image. In both films, characters rarely speak about their trauma. Instead, embodied sounds and vocalisations are heard on the soundtrack at key points in the narrative to align the spectator with their perspective while emphasising the characters' vulnerability at the centre of the larger, global 'sensate regimes of war' in which they have no voice or control (Butler, 2013, p.110).In this way, they also have strong affinities with other 'anti-war' films, which, although set in very different historical and geographical contexts, also feature children as their central protagonists, such as Diamonds of the Night (Demanty noci, Jan Nemec, 1964) and Come and See (Idi I smotri, Elem Klimov, 1985). However, there are important differences between them. While Nemec and Klimov's films, both set in World War II, were made decades after the events they depict, Bashu was filmed during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and Turtles during the US invasion of Iraq, shortly before the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003. Both of the Iranian films feature non-professional child actors 'indigenous to the world represented in the films', who had themselves lived through this time, thereby adding a further level of immediacy and urgency to the performances and the very notion of embodiment that I discuss in this essay (Lury, 2010b, p.285). Through close comparative analysis of the sound design in each of these films, I argue that sound plays a crucial restorative role by articulating a sense of characters' agency and subjectivity so often denied to civilian victims of war, both in official records and in their cinematic representation. As such I claim that the films offer a radical alternative to dominant conceptualisations of war as depicted in Hollywood cinema, challenging and broadening our understanding of the genre as well as potentially deepening our understanding of the impact of war on the lives of civilians and refugees.Breath and the Sounding BodyIn her book The Place of Breath in Cinema, Davina Quinlivan asserts that 'the notion of breathing stimulates new ways in which to question the nature of seeing, perceiving and sensing things which are not always entirely visible in film' (2012, pp.1-2). For Quinlivan, breath destabilises and makes permeable the boundaries between self and other, between inside and outside the body, and between the seen and unseen on screen. The audiovisual representation of the respiring body can therefore hold an ambiguous power and fascination. Breath, of course, is often spoken of as the material manifestation of the life force; phrases such as one's 'dying breath' convey poignantly the precariousness of the line between the animated, feeling body, and the corpse. …