European Civil War Films

Memory, Conflict, and Nostalgia

Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415523202
• eBook ISBN: 9781136250644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

This book examines the ways in which late twentieth-century European cinema deals with the neglected subject of civil war. Exploring a range of films about the Spanish, Irish, former Yugoslavia, and Greek civil wars, this comparative and interdisciplinary study engages with contemporary debates in cultural memory and investigates the ways in which cinematic postmemory is problematic. Many of the films present an idealized past that glosses over the reality of these civil wars, at times producing a nostalgic discourse of loss and longing. Other films engage with the past in a melancholic fashion. These cinematic discourses articulate contemporary concerns, especially the loss of ideology and a utopian political horizon in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, a date that marks a significant break in European history and an accompanying paradigm shift in European cultural memory.

Filmmakers examined include Trueba, Cuerda, Loach, Jordan, Kusturica, Dragojevi?, and Angelopoulos.

1    Introduction

Learning and memory are closely interrelated. Without remembering the past, any act of learning would be impossible. Moreover, the idea that we can learn from the past in order to become more fulfilled and happier individuals is at the very core of the psychoanalytic method of remembering, repeating and, finally, working-through the past.¹ Sigmund Freud not only discovered the therapeutic dimension of memory, but he also foregrounded the complexity of the remembering process, which is subject to distortion, repression and displacement. In his essay on ‘Screen Memories,’ he argued that troubling or traumatic memories tend to find expression through highly distorted symbolic forms. Freud called such symbolizations ‘screen memories,’ as they urgently point to a repressed underlying reality that we cannot grasp consciously.² Thus, memories are not trustworthy, in fact, they can be extremely misleading.

Since Freud’s seminal work, memory and learning have become the objects of study by neurologists and clinical psychiatrists, who focus on the neurological and chemical processes in the brain to understand the physiological make-up of individual memory. However, memory is not only a major field of scientific enquiry, it also preoccupies the social sciences and a whole range of subjects in the humanities, including history, cultural studies, trauma studies, Holocaust studies and literary studies. Many contemporary studies draw on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, who provided the first social theory of collective memory.³ Halbwachs’s groundbreaking focus on the social frames that underpin all memory work has since been advanced by scholars, such as the Egyptologist Jan Assmann and the cultural theorist Aleida Assmann, who have both developed a comprehensive theory of cultural memory.⁴ Such academic research on memory is complemented by a cultural memory boom, which is manifest in the expanding museum culture, massive public interest in national heritage cultures, historical re-enactments, and period dramas. Cinema has also become a key vehicle for communicating stories about the past.

This book sets out to analyze how films have contributed to the cultural memory of civil wars in Europe. Comparing and contrasting films about the Spanish, Irish, Former Yugoslavian and Greek Civil Wars, I argue that the cinematic representations of these wars have made a decisive contribution to cultural memory, as they put forward particular historical allegorizations that in nearly all cases reflect present-day concerns. Wendy Everett argues that ‘filmic images have mirrored the major events which have marked the twentieth century, have investigated its harshest realities; and have increasingly shaped the way in which we Europeans see ourselves.’⁵ Marcia Landy claims that ‘cinema is a major source for learning about the various forms that history has taken and particular cinematic styles signal important cultural changes related to pedagogical conceptions of the nation or its critique.’⁶ However, while there have been numerous studies on historical films, cinematic representations of European Civil Wars have generally been neglected.

Historical studies on civil wars tend to concentrate on the economic and political reasons for their occurrence. According to Nicholas Sambanis, civil wars occur disproportionally in poor and less democratic countries, or where the organization of rebellion is financially viable. In either case, they retard economic development in entire regions.⁷ Civil wars are difficult to study and analyze for methodological reasons. Where they have occurred, they constitute a delicate and sensitive area of a country’s political and cultural past. Methodologically, it is often difficult to gather information, as archives may be inaccessible because of political conditions prevailing at the time of research, or because documents may have been destroyed. Carl Von Clausewitz argued in On War that all wars are always fought for a political purpose.⁸ Accordingly, civil wars are political phenomena, subject to historical analysis and public controversy. Civil wars, whether ethnic or revolutionary, produce passion and new forms of violence, which differ from the violence that characterizes transnational wars. In a civil war, people no longer fight an external enemy, who is visible, recognizable and distinct, but their own fellow countrymen, including their own relatives and friends. Due to methodological problems involved in studying or presenting a civil war, their sensitive nature and the risk of political instability within the affected society, civil wars tend to be repressed by post-civil war cultures thus creating the risk of mythologizing the past. This study aims to highlight the contribution of cinema to the cultural memory of civil wars in contemporary Europe.

Existing debates on cultural memory have been concerned with the Second World War and the Holocaust at the expense of other historical traumas.⁹ This is understandable since the experience of two world wars has had a decisive impact on the contemporary European political landscape. For example, in many eastern European countries, the memories of the terrible reign of Nazi Germany and of Soviet oppression influence current political debates and attitudes. The political memory of warfare continues to center on the two world wars at the expense of other themes, such as the impact of civil wars on post-war identities in Europe. However, civil wars feature in the collective memory within the respective countries where they were fought. They have had complex subcutaneous effects on national identities. They produce new forms of violence and thus require different models of investigation to deal with them. Most importantly, civil wars often result in deep bitterness in communities that share a limited geographical area. In many cases, the memory of civil wars has been repressed by the official cultural memory because of the divisiveness of such intra-national conflicts.

This book focuses on late twentieth-century films about civil wars from a comparative perspective to illuminate how they impact on cultural memory.¹⁰ Through a close textual reading of Fernando Trueba’s Belle Époque (1992), José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly’s Tongue (1999), Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996), Loach’s later The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006), Emir Kusturica’s Underground ( 1995), Danis Tanovi

’s No Man’s Land ( 2001) and Theo Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players (1975), I explore the ways in which the above filmmakers have not just dealt with the memory of the civil wars, but also with questions of historical agency. In this book, I seek to identify common ways in which these filmmakers deal with the subject of civil war. From a methodological point of view, the films discussed here will not be subjected to exclusively semiotic analysis; although elements of such an analysis will have a role to play, a wider cultural perspective is necessary. Accordingly, I shall analyze the cinematic language employed in each of these films, including prominent signs and symbols, with a view to understanding how they allegorize history. In this way, I hope to achieve a greater understanding of how these films mediate the Spanish, Irish, Former Yugoslavian and Greek Civil Wars, while also referencing contemporary political concerns.

My analytical framework draws on current theories on collective and cultural memory and on the notion of postmemory, three concepts that require further elucidation. My thesis seeks to analyze how the filmmakers under discussion approached the difficult theme of civil war and whether their cinematic choices are inflected by the temporal, spatial and cultural distance from these periods.

Films often engage explicitly with particular discourses on history. The historian Robert Rosenstone wrote: ‘perhaps film is a postliterate equivalent of the preliterate way of dealing with the past.’¹¹ However, I believe that films can be very useful in offering nuanced interpretations of complex aspects of the past. In the films under study, the filmmakers deal with a past they never experienced themselves from a contemporary perspective. They make use of various stylistic and representational elements in order to deal with the difficult subject of civil war. In some of the films about the Spanish Civil War, a romantic and melodramatic approach is taken to allegorically pass their message. In the films about the Irish Civil War, the Civil War is pictured through personal and family relations in order to dramatize the opposition of the two sides, which is one and the same, and invite audience identification. In the case of Michael Collins, a spectacular, heroic approach was also taken by Neil Jordan, as in war films about international wars. In the two films about the Former Yugoslavian Civil War, satire and comedy are prominent modes of representation of the civil war. On the other hand, Theo Angelopoulos’s Brechtian treatment of the Greek Civil War aimed at inviting critical distance. Films are seen in this project primarily as cultural artifacts that articulate both the personal preoccupations of filmmakers and matters of wider social and cultural concern. We live in a visual world today and cinema is a powerful medium that often influences cultural memory and identities.

This project has the following six-part structure. In Chapter Two, I explore the notions of collective and cultural memory and recent interventions in this debate before introducing the concept of postmemory. These methodological reflections are complemented by a brief discussion of the key concepts, guiding my analysis of the films, namely nostalgia, allegory and emplotment, melodrama, the carnivalesque and the gaze. Against this background, Chapter Three focuses on Spanish representations of the Spanish Civil War, as well as Ken Loach’s representation of the Spanish Civil War as an important example of an international perspective on the conflict. Chapter Four compares and contrasts Neil Jordan’s national narrative about the Irish Civil War with Loach’s postmemorial representation of this conflict. Chapter Five examines Former Yugoslavian representations of the Former Yugoslavian Civil War and Chapter Six is dedicated to Theo Angelopoulos’s innovative representation of the Greek Civil War in the Travelling Players. Each chapter is prefaced by an historical exposition, as the films under discussion implicitly or explicitly engage with questions of historical representation. However, this is not an historical study. Finally, on the basis of these case studies, the conclusion identifies general trends at work in the material as well as similarities and differences.

In this way, this book attempts to answer the following questions: What type of historical allegorizations do these films promote? Do they represent history in terms of a heroic, tragic, romantic, didactic or carnivalesque narrative? To what extent is their metatextual message inflected by a presentday perspective that reflects the filmmakers’ view of history? What kind of cultural memory do they promote?

2 Collective and Cultural Memory and their Limitations

Postmemory and Cinematic Modes of Representations

Against this backdrop, this book attempts to illuminate how people remember civil wars by investigating the contribution of films to the cultural memory of civil wars. Collective and cultural memories shape societies through advancing ideologies, values and ethics. Society also shapes collective and cultural memory and, in this process, it reinforces its sense of cultural identity. In this chapter, I shall discuss the concepts of collective and cultural memory as well as the more pluralistic notion of postmemory. At the end of the chapter, I shall debate those modes of representation that are of immediate relevance for the films under discussion: nostalgia, allegory and emplotment, melodrama, the carnivalesque and the gaze.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The study of memory was originally generated and conducted within the sphere of psychology and psychiatry. However, memory is not only individual, but also social. In 1925, Maurice Halbwachs placed memory within a social framework when he stated that ‘it is in societies that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in societies that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories.’¹ Although he conceded that it is the individual who remembers, for Halbwachs this active memory work always takes place in a social context. Hence, individual memories, outside such frameworks, tend to fade away or are less accessible. Social frameworks give us our social memories or what Halbwachs called collective memory.

Halbwachs did not accept that there are individual memories per se, as stated above. We never remember mere isolated events, because we are always part of a group. As he argued, memories ‘are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them, upon condition, to be sure, that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment, their way of thinking.’² In other words, we do not remember on our own; other people impel us to remember and we remember through other people. Halbwachs’s assertion implies two very important assumptions. First, it presupposes a collective identity, since people remember when they belong to a group. Second, it suggests that there can be many collective memories, since one can be a member of different groups at different times, because, as he claimed, ‘we change memories along with our points of view, our principles, and our judgments, when we pass from one group to the other.’³ There are many collective memories, which are changeable by definition. Furthermore, what a society needs to remember at a given point in time determines this memory-work. Halbwachs contended:

Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.⁴

Halbwachs insisted that collective memories are reproduced for the sake of society’s present order and stability. All memories are individually held, but are communicated in a social domain. Hence when a society deems it necessary, it can divert its attention from inconvenient memories to more useful ones for the sake of stability. Halbwachs explained that regardless of whether a society ‘is directed toward the past or toward what is a continuation of the past in the present, it participates in present-day functions only to the extent that it is important to adapt these functions to traditions and to ensure the continuity of social life throughout these transformations.’⁵

CULTURAL MEMORY

Halbwachs’s societal model of collective memory has influenced many other theorists and has led to an expansion of interest in memory in the humanities all over the world. Halbwachs’s model has also been contested and complemented by work from outside sociology. Jan Assmann distinguishes collective memory and its social basis, as analyzed by Halbwachs, from cultural memory and its cultural basis. Jan and Aleida Assmann proposed to call Halbwachs’s notion of social memory ‘communicative memory,’ since it embodies oral traditions, based on everyday communication among members of a society.⁶ While Halbwachs insisted that society enables us to remember, Jan Assmann argues that ‘the converse is also true: our memories help us to become socialized. Socialization is not just a foundation, but also a function of memory.’⁷ He explains:

As always man is the sole possessor of a memory. What is at issue is the extent to which this unique memory is socially and culturally determined. Halbwac...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Advances in Film Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Collective and Cultural Memory and their Limitations: Postmemory and Cinematic Modes of Representations
• 3 The Spanish Civil War:Cinematic Postmemories of the ‘Last Great Cause’
• 4 Cinematic Representations of the Irish Civil War:Michael Collins and The Wind That Shakes The Barley
• 5 Cinematic Representations of the Former Yugoslavian Civil War: Underground and No Man’s Land
• 6 Representation of the Greek Civil War in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players: The Uses of Intertextuality
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix I
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index