(Dis)solving Bosnia: John Moore's Behind Enemy Lines and Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land

Abstract

Self‐congratulatory Hollywood products such as Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), Wag the Dog (1997), and Behind Enemy Lines (2001) tend to simplify the Bosnian conflict by creating an easily demonized Other and re‐creating an historically false interventionist West. John Moore's Behind Enemy Lines, for instance, readily accommodates the paradigms of the Hollywood action hero genre so that its male protagonist Chris Burnett, predictably acting on his own, might engage in the Bosnian conflict in a manner in which the West never did. The film culminates with his ascendance via helicopter past the statue of an angel on a mountain. He thus both literally and metaphorically transcends the conflict in order to provide photographic evidence of Serbian genocide against an oddly Americanized Bosnian civilian population, as if such evidence of genocide did not already historically exist in abundance from a variety of news services. In contrast, films made by actual ex‐Yugoslavians, such as Vukovar (1994), Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996), and Savior (1998), more fully confront the complexity of the conflict, even as they tip their balance of empathy in favor of and against one ethnic group or another. In contrast to the facile dichotomizations of heroes and villains found in Hollywood films, these films confound easy moral positioning. The Oscar‐winning No Man's Land (2001), a Belgian production directed by Bosnian Muslim Danis Tanovic, portrays the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims as close mirror images of one another. While the psyche of novice Serb soldier Nino proves refreshingly free of gratuitous cruelty, the Bosnian Muslim Cera serves Tanovic as his archetypal victim. The film leaves him lying alone on top of a mine that would explode should he make a move. As such, he functions as a metaphor for the country itself. The film thus exposes the impotency of both the Western military in its attempts at intervention and the Western media in its attempts at mediation, as Cera, and by extension Bosnia, is abandoned by the self‐interest of others. The careful positioning of morality among ethnic groups in all these films consistently reflects their production arrangements. Taking sides in the Bosnian conflict proves as problematic in cinema as it did in history, as myths of intervention remain entangled with the interventions of myth.