Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema

Adriana Martins, Alexandra Lopes, Mónica Dias, Adriana Martins, Alexandra Lopes, Mónica Dias

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137575197
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137575203
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema is a transdisciplinary volume that addresses the cinematic mediation of a wide range of conflicts. From World War II and its aftermath to the exploration of colonial and post-colonial experiences and more recent forms of terrorism, it debates the possibilities, constraints and efficacy of the discursive practices this mediation entails. Despite its variety and amplitude in scope and width, the innovative and singular aspect of the book lies in the fact that the essays give voice to a variety of regions, issues, and filmmaking processes that tend either to remain on the outskirts of the publishing world and/or to be granted only partial visibility in volumes of regional cinema.

© The Editors (if applicable) and the Authors 2016

Adriana Martins, Alexandra Lopes and Mónica Dias (eds.)Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema10.1057/978-1-137-57520-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Towards a Poetics of Conflict in Film

Adriana Martins¹ , Alexandra Lopes¹ and Mónica Dias¹

(1)

Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal

End Abstract

‘Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle’ (Bresson 1997, p. 28). Bresson’s exhortation may translate in nuce the various tensions and anxieties, as well as the multiple potentialities that are the focus of the present collection of essays. This volume looks into the ways in which film articulates and foreshadows conflict, and conflict resolution, in society.

In fact, conflict has been an unavoidable part of human existence from the outset. As a being-towards-death (Heidegger 1962), human existence participates to some extent in the ‘not yet’ in its horizon. Therefore, death becomes the one trace of the conditio humana that renders all humans equal, as it is the one certainty human beings share,¹ despite differences of gender, social class, race, age or religion: ‘In Dasein there is undeniably a constant “lack of totality” which finds an end with death. This “not-yet” “belongs” to Dasein as long as it is’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 286). While undeniably constitutive of the being-in-the-world of men and women, death also articulates one other common experience that may well resonate of human beings’ essential equality: the apparently at-homeness in conflict, regardless of its nature. One of the striking aspects of this very condition, one that translates an essential equality among human beings, is that it is so plural in nature that it becomes arduous to propose typologies comprehensive enough to describe and explain all the different conflicts that have beleaguered humanity throughout history. Moreover, the very patterns of conflict are in permanent transformation, in tune with ever-changing definitions of power, place, human being. Technological development also adds to the complexity of determining what conflict is. This collection of essays brings together different perspectives and angles of analysis, displaying different notions of ‘conflict’ related to time and geography. Consequently, the volume embraces the broadest definition of conflict as ‘a situation in which two or more parties seek to undermine each other because they have incompatible goals, competing interests, or fundamentally different values. In this sense, conflict is a natural part of everyday life rather than an exceptional circumstance’ (Baker 2006, p. 1). ‘Conflict’—and, a fortiori, ‘post-conflict’—is a fluid, controversial concept, with imprecise borders and difficult to map. From the onset, conflict inhabits the human heart: torn between nature and culture, biology and intellect, human beings are often at war with themselves. In ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, Freud proposes three main causes that produce suffering and lead to the belief that happiness was not on the agenda of the ‘Creation’:

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other. (Freud 2005, p. 729)

In 1957, Beckett put it deftly in his concise manner: ‘[Y]ou’re on earth, there’s no cure for that’ (Beckett 1986, p. 118). Conflict is difficult to categorize, inasmuch as it is part and parcel of human existence.

However diverse, it is possible to devise and compare politics of conflict according to criteria that vary from the geo-political to the ethical, from the economic to the historic, among others. First and foremost, a ‘politics of conflict’ refers to at least two aspects. The first is the ‘archival’ attempt to organize into a coherent body the factors that lead to conflict, and to identify their main particularities and implications on various levels. When referring to a ‘politics of conflict’, one is primarily seeking to classify situations that oppose different groups. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes has famously compiled three ‘principall causes of quarrell’ that would be akin to the nature of human beings (‘men’ at the time):

First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.

The first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. The first use Violence, to make themselves Masters of other mens persons, wives, children and cattell; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their Persons or by reflection in their Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name. (Hobbes 1996, p. 88)

The second, and perhaps more important, aspect is relational and results from the etymology of the word ‘politics’, for ‘polis’ in Greek refers not only to ‘city’ and ‘community’, but also to polītēs, a word meaning ‘citizen’. In other words, when discussing a ‘politics of conflict’, we are addressing, more than a set of administrative policies, a community of citizens that experience conflict at a given time. This paves the way to the reflection on individual and collective subjectivities: how communities are fostered, who is considered, by law and custom, a citizen or a foreigner—foreigners being often those who move about, almost always by necessity: migrants and refugees who are seen as threats, as ‘swarms’ instead of people –, who has a voice and who is dispossessed of voice in the public realm, whose narratives are told and whose are silenced, how and to what extent people are affected by the experience of conflict, what/who remains central and what is classified as ‘collateral’. As Zygmunt Bauman argues:

Qualifying certain destructive effects of military action as ‘collateral’ suggests that those effects were not taken into account at the time the operation was planned and the troops were commanded into action; or that the possibility of such effects was noted and pondered, but was nevertheless viewed as a risk worth taking, considering the importance of the military objective… […] Thinking in terms of collateral damage tacitly assumes an already existing inequality of right and chances… (2011a, p. 5)

‘Collaterality’, as Bauman defines it (2011a), may well be the concept that best defines the power relations that both inhabit and give rise to conflicts.

Moreover, by highlighting collaterality in conflict and post-conflict contexts, the human ‘factor’ is put centre stage against statistics and figures, thus allowing for a ‘humanization’ of the scholarly debate on conflict. By stressing the human dimension of this discussion, the editors clearly position themselves in ethical terms, by asserting that people do matter.

‘Collaterality’ refers to conflict in yet another important way: it conceives the world in an ‘us versus them’ framework that results in ‘otherization’ processes that produce fear. In turn, these often uncritical processes feed on ‘[h]uman uncertainty and vulnerability’ that are ‘the foundations of all political power’ (Bauman 2011a, p. 52).

Although conflict can be experienced individually, the essays in this volume focus on conflicts that transcend the individual and implicate communities and the sense of belonging and/or exclusion they foster: culture, thus, becomes a site of enquiry. Inasmuch as political and social conflict presupposes a disruption in the normal course of events/life and in the relationships between individuals and the collectivity, its experience forces individuals to come face to face with the ‘Other’ that, to some extent is being discursively created at the same time as the conflict develops. This encounter results in the production of change, of transformation, underscoring the premise that conflict is irremediably connected with cultural identity, as the concept is understood by Stuart Hall (2000). Reflecting on cultural identity and Caribbean cinematic representation, Hall uses the concept in two senses.

[The first] defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms of the idea of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history.” (Hall 2000, pp. 704–705)

Despite acknowledging points of similarity, the second sense entails ‘points of deep and significant difference which constitute “what we really are” or rather—since history has intervened—“what we have become”’ (Hall 2000, p. 706, italics in original), what makes ‘[c]ultural identity, in this second sense, [is] a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being”. It belongs to the future as much as to the past’ (Hall 2000, p. 706). Hall contends that, because cultural identities undergo constant transformation, ‘they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power’ (Hall 2000, p. 706). This awareness of the metamorphic nature of human condition—its continuous evolving into something else through experience—emphasizes the gesture towards the future that inhabits the human. Art, in general, and cinema, in particular, abide this utopian trace of the conditio humana by presenting a fictional alternative to the ‘real’. Many of the films discussed in this volume bear witness to this potentiality of art—that of producing spaces and conditions that are not yet extant. Fictionality² becomes a sort of utopos, a testing place for the possibility of changing the real by raising awareness to difference and potentiality, instead of uniformization.

As the experience of conflict often implies the imposition of/submission to power and acquiescence or resistance to normalization, the configuration of cultural identity will be dependent, among other aspects, on how individuals position themselves both towards themselves and the ‘Other’ as far as the dominant regimes of representation are concerned. As Kwame Appiah (2005, p. 107) recalls, ‘we make up selves from a tool kit of options made available by our culture and society. We do make choices, but we don’t individually, determine the options among which we choose.’

Bearing in mind that every politics of conflict entails and translates one or more regime(s) of representation, it makes sense to examine not only the politics of conflict per se, but the politics of the representation of conflict with a view to understanding, on the one hand, how conflict is constructed in political, ideological and aesthetic terms, and, on the other, if, how and to what ends a politics of conflict representation produces/is produced by what could be termed a ‘poetics of conflict’. Here it may be worth going back to the aforementioned ‘human factor’ because the acknowledgment of the existence of a poetics of conflict necessarily leads to the question of how modes of representation are received and perceived, as the impact of this poetics has to be assessed in performative terms, bearing in mind the evolving and transformative nature of cultural identity, as Hall claimed.

Within the framework of this hermeneutic exercise, the articulation of a politics and a poetics of conflict may contribute to imagine not only what a post-conflict geography might look like, but also its impact on epistemology, ideology and aesthetics. This act of imagining—that is, creating images that shape future landscapes, subjectivities and policies—may be decisive in the process of coming to terms with a past of trauma, violence and suffering, a present marked by incertitude and mistrust, and the expectation of a future of stability and peace, should conflict resolution be eventually attained.

In the analysis of the ‘trajectory’ that covers the movement from a politics of the conflict representation to a poetics of conflict, the essays in this volume zoom in on cinematic representations for various reasons. First of all, cinema has been one of the privileged cultural products through which past and current conflicts have been represented and critically examined in the past 100 years. Secondly, as a medial construction, cinema is a field of contention and dissent, a kind of battleground, for it interrogates the very act of representation, and often reflects the problems and conflicts experienced in the framework of filmic production. In an increasingly hypermediated world, in which ‘media and events of historical significance are inseparable’ (Garde-Hansen 2011, p. 1), cinema is a key medium to address and mediate the experience of conflict and post-conflict in the 21st century and to tackle issues of cultural memory, for ‘[n]ovels and movies must be read and viewed by a community as media of cultural memory’ (Erll 2008, p. 395). It is in this reflexive architecture that strategies of remediation and premediation intersect, since, mainly from 9/11 onwards, remediation, more than representing the past and the present and shedding a new light on both, has assumed a pre-emptive character as Richard Grusin (2010) has demonstrated through the analysis of mediality after the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001.³

Furthermore, because of the centrality of the visual in present-day societies, cinema as an art form has the potential to make a politics of conflict interact with a poetics of difference and strife. This interaction can be translated into new modes of representation, and these, in turn, have epistemological and ideological implications, since, by deconstructing and questioning the politics of conflict, films produce new cultural meanings and open up new venues for debate.

Having as shared ground the need to (1) examine the transformative character of cultural identity in conflict/post-conflict settings; (2) understand the aesthetic and epistemological, as well as the social/political efficacy of mediations of disruption; and (3) discuss the transformative potential of a poetics of conflict, this collection of essays brings together the work of researchers from different countries and research backgrounds (film studies, visual culture, comparative literature, memory studies, peace and conflict studies, translation studies, culture studies, among others), who address cinematic representations of different conflicts in different communities and at different times, and their causes and consequences (violence, memory, forgetting, trauma, repression, exile, neutrality, etc.). Underly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Towards a Poetics of Conflict in Film
• 1. Managing Oblivion and Silence
• 2. Coping with Terrorism
• 3. Bodies in Transit
• Backmatter