Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools

Bc. Vladimr Zn

The Image of the Bosnian War in American Cinema

Masters Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tom Pospil, Dr.

2012

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ..
Vladimr Zn

Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor doc. PhDr. Tom Pospil, Dr. for his valuable advice, guidance and lending me some of the secondary materials. In addition, I would like to thank Nienke van Doorn and Jeff Handley for proofreading my text. Vedrana Mahmutovi, who provided me with her personal experiences, observations and views regarding the issues the thesis was concerned with. Last but not least I would like thank Duan Kolcn and Charline Ruet for their support and encouragement

Table of Content
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 2 2. The Bosnian War ...................................................................................................................... 9 3. Inventing Bosnia and Herzegovina. ........................................................................................ 18 4. Bosnia in the Film ................................................................................................................... 33 5. Behind Enemy Lines. .............................................................................................................. 42 6. Welcome To Sarajevo............................................................................................................. 50 7. Shot through the Heart .......................................................................................................... 59 8. Savior ...................................................................................................................................... 65 9. Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 77 10. Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 89 Resum (esky) ........................................................................................................................... 98 Resume (English) ......................................................................................................................... 99

1. Introduction Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and later the Special Envoy to Cyprus and Balkans, in his speech entitled No media, No War, compared the situation in Bosnia with the one in Rwanda. While in Bosnia the number of dead was only around 100, 000 people, in Rwanda the number was as high as 1,000,000, but Western media dedicated more space to European conflict, than to the killing in Africa. Richard Holbrooke links the two events when he quotes Christiane Annanpour, reporter for CNN in Bosnia and Herzegovina. When asked why she did not report on the conflict in Rwanda, replied: I was in Rwanda. I did cover it. I knew what was happening but the O J Simpson trial was on and I couldn't get on the air for CNN. (Holbrooke 20). Compared with the conflicts in Africa, the Bosnian War received more coverage in Europe and America where the public was served almost daily portion of horror and tragedy. Bosnia was a perfect place for stories of bloodshed and terror, as it was located on the border of the civilized, rational West and dark and mysterious East. Images of the country, where the Winter Olympic Games took place only a few years before, were juxtaposed with pictures of war crimes, mass graves, shelling and dead bodies. In 1946 Winston Churchill in his famous speech at Westminsters College in Fulton, Missouri, hung the Iron Curtain between free, democratic West and the communist East. However even after the fall of the communist regimes, the imaginary line dividing East and West of the Europe still prevailed in some form. This division is not the invention of the British political leader, Larry Wolff, in his detailed exploration of travellers accounts on Poland and Russia. In the Enlightenment literature with the appropriate title: Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, dates the origin of this division back to the Enlightenment and writings

of authors such as Voltaire, and other leading Enlightenment thinkers. Philosophies of Enlightenment articulated and elaborated their own perspective on the continent gazing from West to East, rather than from North to South as it were before. (Wolff 5). According to Wolff: The Enlightenment had to invent Western and Eastern Europe together as complementary concepts, defining each other by opposition and adjacency. (5) In the eighteenth century the lands of Eastern Europe were a sufficiently unfamiliar and unusual destination for the Western traveller, so that each carried a mental map to be freely annotated, embellished, refined or refolded along the way. Wolff explains the importance of the mental mapping in the following way: The operations of mental mapping were above all associations and comparisons, association among the lands of Eastern Europe, intellectually combining them into a coherent whole and comparison with the lands of Western Europe establishing the developmental division of the continent. (Wolff 6) Edward Said proposed the idea that Europe was defined by Orient, as the Orient was always part of Western imaginative and material culture. It constituted a reference point one could define against. (1-2) In a similar way, Western Europe defined itself against its Eastern part. The Balkan region, as former part of the Eastern Roman Empire and later Byzantine followed by the Ottoman Empire, was seen as the part of Eastern Europe. It shares, along with the whole of Eastern Europe, a position between the Orient and the Western Europe; it was characterized by the industrial backwardness, lack of advanced social relations typical of the developed world, irrational and superstitious cultures unmarked by Western Enlightenment. (Wolf 6-7; Todorova 12). The Balkans, on the other hand, cannot be described precisely under the terms of Orientalism as it was defined by Said. While Said talks about the exotic Orient and its exotic and

imaginary realm, which offered an opportunity to dream and possibility a longing for the exotica as opposed to prosaic and profane West. The Balkans on the other hand was depicted as place with unimaginative correctness and lack of wealth, with straightforward, usually negative, attitude. As opposed to exotic Orient, the Balkans had predominantly male appeal evoking the medieval knighthood. (Todorova 14) In addition to that, while Islam plays a crucial role in the definition of the Orient, there are only two places in the Balkans with a significant proportion of Muslim population. One of them is Bosnia and Herzegovina. However Orthodox Christianity, the dominant religion in this region, played an important role in its cultural, social and political definition against the Western Catholicism. While these two faiths mutually represented the notion of heresy in the region and within the Europe, it was the distinction between Christianity and Islam which was important. Another important aspect was that the Balkan countries were never under the direct colonial rule of Western powers therefore never experienced Western influences through economic, diplomatic and cultural means, unlike the direct control experienced in the Near East. The same situation applies in academia. Compared to what Said stated about the study of the Orient, Balkan studies were found only recently and have almost no tradition. (Flemming1228) When the communist regimes fell and dichotomy of the East vs. West disappeared, it was necessary to redefine the whole region. War in the former Yugoslavia helped to dust out the old images of the whole region, which became associated with the war and ethnic hatred once again. According to Vesna Goldsworthy, wars over the Yugoslavian succession were often referred to by the Western media to as the Balkan Wars despite protests of Yugoslavias neighbours in the Peninsula. This fact reflects the resonance of the Balkans as a name (32). The War on European soil between two white nations gained considerable attention in the news media and
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consequently a tide of publications about the Balkans appeared on the bookshelves. New histories of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo; countless memoirs by politicians, diplomats, and soldiers engaged in the region; accounts by foreign correspondents and relief workers; the testimonies of victims, survivors and camp inmates; diaries kept during the siege of Sarajevo; anthologies of poetry and prose; reissues of long out of print titles; and a variety of academic explorations of the Balkan peninsula. (Goldsworthy 28) Filmmakers did not fell behind in this trend and a number of documentaries and feature films about the peninsula were made and gained wide popularity. It should be noted that films produced or co-produced in the Balkans, which tried to explain the conflict, received number of significant film awards such as the nomination for the Academy Award for the best Foreign Language Film in 1994 for the Macedonian film Before the Rain (1994 dir. Milcho Manchevski). The two best films at the 1995 Canes film festival were Emir Kusturicas Underground (1995) and Theo Angelopoulos The Ulysses Glass (1995). Both try to explain the present war in the context of the past conflicts. Hollywood took up the challenge and produced four relatively successful movies in terms of critical reception as well as the box office performance: Welcome to Sarajevo (1997 dir Michael Winterbotton), Savior (1998 dir Predrag Antonijevi), Shot through the Heart (1998 dir David Atwood) and Behind Enemy Lines (2001 dir John Moore). The Bosnian War appears also in the films such as Peacemaker (1997 dir Mimi Leder) The Rock (1996 dir Michael Bay), The Hunting Party (2007 dir. Richard Shepard), the Whistleblower (2011 dir Larysa Kondracki), In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011 dir Angelina Jolie) and more. This work deals with four of the films: Welcome to Sarajevo (1997 dir Michael Winterbotton), Savior (1998 dir Predrag Antonijevi), Shot through the Heart (1998 dir

David Atwood) and Behind Enemy Lines (2001 dir John Moore). Its aim is to prove that images of the Balkans and the Bosnian War found in previous texts were reproduced in these films. The question is in what way did these films reproduced the old stereotypes and in what instances did they differ. There are few reasons for choosing these

particularly four films. First of all, they were produced around the same time, shortly after the end of the war and therefore they might capture the best sentiments of the West regarding the war depicted in the images presented every evening in the news and still present in the public collective memory. All of the analysed films offer images of war whether it is fought on the streets or Sarajevo or Bosnian countryside. Another reason why those four films are analysed is their mainstream appeal and the fact that they were co-produced by the Hollywood studios, which serves as one of the common denominator. At the same time, these movies were co-produced by different companies; some of them included the companies from the Former Yugoslavia and received various degree of support from the Former Yugoslav countries. They achieved various commercial successes which could be measured on the scale from blockbusters to total failure. Moreover each of the films is a work of different directors with unique artistic vision. This all offer perfect opportunity to compare different approach the filmmakers took in depicting the region, its people and the war. We will observe how depictions of the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina, fits into the paradigmatic pattern of imaging the Balkans set earlier and repeated throughout the nineteen and twentieth century.. In order to do so, first we will see how the actual events of the Bosnian war developed. Then we need to understand the evolution of the imaging of the whole region of Balkans and Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular both in the Western, predominantly British and American literature and culture and then especially in the British and American film. Therefore in the next few chapters we will see how the
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image of the region evolved throughout centuries Publications Imaging The Balkans by Maria Todorova and Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the Media written by Dina Iordanova were indispensable to my work, as they explained evolution of the image of the regions in the Western mind with complexity and especially the first sources served as the base for research most of the other sources dealing with the problematic. Appart from these Nevena Dakovics article The Treshold of Europe: Imagining Yugoslavia in Film offered a comprehensive list of the movies depicting Serbia in the last century and therefore served me as the ground work for my further research. Second part of this work (Chapters 5 to 8), consist of the analysis of four films Behind Enemy Lines, Welcome to Sarajevo, Shot through the Heart and Savior. We will look at the film through the lens of semiotic analysis and narrative theory. James Monaco in his book How to Read a Film claims that film language, although it lacks its grammar and vocabulary, but even eight or ten years old child can understand it the way the adults do (152). Film language as in any other means of human communication is made of system of signs and therefore can be analysed. Power of the cinema comes from the fact that unlike other language systems, where is a great difference between signifier and signified, in film it is not. Film is not composed of units as such, but rather continuum of meaning. Shot contains as much as we want to read in it and whatever units we define within a shot are arbitrary (Monaco 153). Several publications have influenced the way we analyse films in this work, specifically in relations to defining elements within the single shot as well as combination of the shots into sequences. The referential publications for this analysis were except the above mentioned publication by James Monaco also Understanding Movies by Louis Giannetti and Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. In addition, when we describe film settings and different ways of characterization of
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heroes from different nationalities and roles they play within the plot, apart from the above mentioned publications we took references from Manfred Jahn and his Guide to Narratological Film Analysis and Story and Discourse as well as Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film written by Seymour Chatman. All of the results found in this thesis depict the Bosnian war in Welcome to Sajevo (1997 dir. Michael Winterbotton), Savior (1998 dir Predrag Antonijevi), Shot through the Heart (1998 dir David Atwood) and Behind Enemy Lines (2001 dir John Moore). It analyzes the films as the art forms and does not attempt in any case to comment on the actual events or side with and of the party involved in of the war.

2. The Bosnian War It is difficult to find a single cause of the Bosnian war. The territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the cultural and religious intersection for many centuries. After the death of Marshal Tito, a sense of nationalism grew in all republics of the former Yugoslavia. Nationalist tendencies grew stronger with the increasing public debt and rising inflation and decrease of the living standard of the regions population. In Serbia these nationalist tendencies were powered by the unrest in Kosovo region, which has historical ties to the Serbia, but presently, Serbs are a minority in the population. In 1991 the situation reached the point, where holding the country together was no longer plausible. On June 25th first two federal republics, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. This act resulted in war, which lasted in Slovenia only 11 days and after small number of casualties, the Yugoslavian National Army 1 withdrew their forces. The situation in Croatia was different and the war left many casualties and lasted until November 1991. It continued until 1995 with the climax occurring during Operation Storm in August 1995. The outcome of the war was total control of the Croatian military forces over its territory and mass exodus of the local Serbian population predominantly to Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the time Croatia and Slovenia declared their Independence, Alija Izetbegovi the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina faced the decision of whether to succeed or stay in the Yugoslavia coalition. Jasminka Udoviki and Ejub titkovac quoted him when he compared his dilemma to choice between leukaemia and a brain tumour. He chose leukaemia, because he saw the war in Bosnia as unlikely due to a lack of will for war among the Serbian conscripts, many of whom fled rather than being recruited for Croatian war as well as a weakening Serbian economy. (176)
1

Later YNA

Prior to this decision, the political situation seemed to be leading to conflict. In 1990, the Serbs began to form their own military in Bosnia. These formations were supplied and trained on the clandestine basis by the Serbian controlled Yugoslavian National Army (Ramet 203; Udoviki, titkovac 180 - 181) Guns were smuggled into the country and were sold to members of all ethnic group. Fear was used as very successful technique. Where words were not enough, the brutal force and rumour encouraged people from all ethnic group to sell their livestock and other valuable items to buy pistols, rifles, bazookas or other kinds of armoury in order to protect themselves (Udoviki, titkovac 181-182). Rumours spread amongst the people by the gun smugglers and trained agents were supported by state propaganda which was heard and seen in the media. Many Serbs believed the propaganda spread by the national media which promoted the idea of all Serbs in one state as the mean of security, not the imperialist ambitions of Serbia. (Herman, Peterson 2; Udoviki, titkova 176) The era of the Independent State of Croatia during the World War II were still alive in the collective memory of Bosnian Serbs.2 (177 - 178) As soon as April 26th 1991 the Bosnian Serbs proclaimed the Municipal Community of Bosnian Krajina and chose the town of Banja Luka as their capital. By September 1991 the Serbian Autonomous Oblast Hezegovina was formed with the capital Trebnje and soon the other municipalities followed. (Udoviki, titkovac 180; Ramet 203). The autonomous republic were supported by the Yugoslavian Army, which alone sent 5,000 soldiers to SAD Herzegovina. An Army with heavy artillery encircled the great cities of Sarajevo, Biha and Mostar. Between December the 31st and January the 2nd 1992 the governments of Yugoslavia coalition and Croatia agreed on a truce in Croatia, which allowed Miloevi to relocate some of his troops to Bosnia. At
. It is estimated that Ustaa regime had killed between 1941 and 1945 in total between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. (The Holocaust Memorial Museum).
2

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the same time the Serbian President issued a secret order to transfer all the Bosnian Serb officers to Bosnia, so when Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded, and the YNA would be required to withdraw its forces, the majority of the military were citizens of Bosnia, rather than citizens of other possible combatant regions. (Ramet 205) On August 1991, the Arbitration Commission of the Conference on Yugoslavia (commonly known as Badinter Arbitration Committee) was set up by the Council of Ministers of the EC. The commission was handed fifteen opinions concerning the split of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Opinion no. 2 concluded that that the Serbian population in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia were entitled to all the rights conferred minorities and ethnic groups[...]" and "that the Republics must afford the members of those minorities and ethnic groups all the human rights and fundamental freedoms recognized in international law, including, where appropriate, the right to choose their nationality" (Pellet 179) Opinion no. 4 suggested that recognition of the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Yugoslavia was not appropriate until a referendum on the issue was held. Bosnian Serbs organized their referendum on November 9, and 10, 1991 in their territories where the majority voted for staying within Yugoslavia. However this referendum was not recognized by the Muslims and Croats, because it was unilateral and expressed the opinion of only one ethnic group. A later referendum required by the Badinter Commission was declared on February by the government in Sarajevo for the entire country, with the overwhelming majority voting for secession. Radovan Karadiv told Bosnian Serbs to boycott the plebiscite which the majority of the Bosnian Serb population did (Udoviki titkovac 179; Ramet 206). The Badinter Commission made mandatory the favourable answer to secede by all three ethnic groups; however the EC considered only the Bosnian and Croatian referendum valid, as they represented the majority of population. According to Udoviki and
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titkovac, both EC and the Badinter Commission left unaddressed the key questions of the Serbian question. What guarantees of their political status, their sovereignty, and their human rights were the Bosnian Serbs to expect after Bosnias eventual secession from Yugoslavia? When the EC recognized Bosnian independence, despite the overwhelming boycott of one third of the population, it made the things worse. Recognition of Bosnia appeared to place the will of the Bosnian Muslims and Croats over the will of Bosnian Serbs, which only provided Radovan Karadzic fodder to his claim that foreign powers were against the Serbian sovereignty as they had been in the past. (Udoviki, titkovac 179) On January 2, 1992 the Bosnian Serbs left the Bosnian Parliament claiming that the Bosnian law no longer bound them and formed the Republika Srpska. On April 6, 1992 the EC have recognized Bosnia and Herzegovina and a full scale war erupted. (Udoviki, titkovac 180; Ramet 206-207) On April 6 1992, the fifty first anniversary of the day Hitlers bombardment levelled Beograd, the EC officially recognized Bosnia and Herzegovina (Udoviki,, titkovac 185). On this day the Bosnian Serbs opened a military front in the eastern part of the Republic and pushed westward. Within a week Bosnian Serbs controlled 60 % of the Bosnian territory. The Serbs began their offensive with the two objectives. In addition to turning Sarajevo to ruin, they aimed to conquer eighteen mile wide strip along the Serbian-Bosnian border and consolidate Banja Luka as its capital. On April 4 1992, Serb paramilitary forces lead by eljko Raznatovi-Arkan entered the Border town Bijelina, brutally killing the local Muslims. Arkan invited the foreign photographer Ron Haviv to document the operation and the images shocked the public. (Udoviki, titkovac 186; Husejnovi; Milner, Gates of Hell 10:55 - 12:10) . Other towns such as Zvornik, Bratunac, Srebrenica Viegrad, Gorade and Foa as well as smaller towns followed, and from each of them fled thousands of refugees. Serbian
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authorities made everything possible to cleanse the areas they governed from all the non-Serb population either forcing the Muslim and Croats to emigrate, sending them to concentration camps or killing them in various brutal ways (Udoviki, titkovac 186 190; The Gates of Hell 16:20 - 23:55). The day after recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the UN, the Serbs built barricades and started a siege which lasted until February 29, 1996. It was the longest siege in modern warfare. On May 2, YNA tried to take the city and despite better equipment, their efforts failed. On May 2 they completed the establishment of blockades of all major roads leading to the city, cutting off food and medical supplies. They also cut utilities such as electricity, gas, and water. The new Serbian general Ratko Mladi decided to break down the psyche of the city defenders and inhabitants when he issued the following order: Shell the Presidency, shell the Parliament. Shoot in slow intervals till I order you to stop .... Target Muslim neighbourhoods - not many Serbs live there. Shell them till theyre on the edge of madness.(The Gates of Hell 47:43 48:11) In June 1992, when the General Secretary of the United Nations, Boutros BoutrosGali, visited Zagreb, he received a report that Croatia, now heavily armed and confident, was using Serbian shelling of Sarajevo as a smoke screen to pursue their goals in Bosnia. Because Croats were perceived as victims of Serbian brutality in the Croatian War of Independence in 1991 and it was a country where democratic elections took place, Croatian activities were sporadically covered by the Western press. Thus two separate wars were fought against the Bosnian Muslims, one by Bosnian Serbs and one by Bosnian Croats. On July 3, 1992 Mate Boban, leader of the Bosnian Croats declared the independent republic of Herzeg-Bosna and integrated the ultranationalist

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units of the Croatian Defence League into his militia force and expelled Serbs from the areas in Western Herzegovina, which he considered to be the heart of Croat nation. On May 7 1992 Boban met with Radovan Karadi in Graz to outline the strategy of the partition of Bosnia, which was their long term objective. On the same day Bosnian Croats declared their independence, they signed a treaty of cooperation with the Bosnian Muslims, whose inadequately armed forces were needed for military support. The same year the concentration camp in Konjic was opened. Here treatment of the Serbian population mirrored that of Serbian treatment of other nationalities in their concentration camps in Kerarterm and Trnopolje. Despite the cooperation agreement Croats signed with Bosnian Muslims, they were buying arms from Serbian government in Belgrade and sold fuel to the Army of the Repoublika Srpska. (Udoviki, titkovac 191-192) Much of the 1993 was marked by the Croatian and Bosnian conflict. Fights around the Gorni Vakuf, in Leva Valley were accompanied by the ethnic cleansing by the Croatian forces. During the nine month siege of Mostar, the historic Turkish centre of the town was destroyed including the bridge over the river Neretva, This bridge was considered as one of the most handsome structures of the Balkan region. The bridge to most Bosnians, symbolized the emblem of diverse community of faiths and emblem ethnicity. In November 1993 the partition of Mostar was concluded and the Croatian forces openly displayed the symbols of the Ustae era (Ramet 211 212; Udoviki, titkovac 192 195). Despite these hostilities, Croats signed a treaty proposing the federation with Bosnian Muslims, under the threat of economic embargo of Croatia by the American government, In June 1992 the United Nation Peace Forces (UNPROFOR) were sent to Bosnia in order to protect the Sarajevo International Airport. UNPROFORs mandate and strength were enlarged in order to ensure the security and functioning of the airport in
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Sarajevo, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance to that city and its environs. In September UNPROFOR's mandate was further enlarged to enable it to support efforts by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to deliver humanitarian relief throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to protect convoys of released civilian detainees to the the International Committee of the Red Cross. In 1993 the UN established five safe area zones that were under the protection of the international forces. One of these towns was Srebreneica. In the summer 1994 the luck of war turned on the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian side and they experienced their first victories, taking back the territories they had lost whilst the Serbs continued in ethnic cleansing of the territories they held.. On July 1995 Ratko Mladi decided to capture the thirty kilometre wide band of territory along the western bank of Drina River, including the safe areas of Srebrenica, ep and Gorade. Bosnian government realized that without the support of Western countries, it was unable to save Srebreneca when the Serbian armed forces approached. Bosnian military forces left the area leaving only 400 Dutch UNPROFOR peacekeepers, who were unable to protect the population. The Srebrenica Memorial in the Potoari list 8.372 victims of the massacre, but the number might be higher. The U.N. Security Council issued a resolution demanding the withdrawal of the Serbian forces from Srebrenica, but by that time the entire population of the town had been driven away and the concept of safe area had collapsed. (Pax Americana 00:50 07:50 Ramet 236 237; Udoviki, titkovac 197) On August 30, 1995 NATO launched the airstrikes on the Bosnian Serb military infrastructure and units. In the following two months Bosnian and Croatian armies advanced as far as twelve kilometres from Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska. (Ramet 237 240 Udoviki, titkovac 197-199)

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On November 1995 delegations representing Bosnian Muslims lead by Alija Izetbegovi, Bosnian Croats , lead by Frranjo Tudman and Bosnian Serbs, who were represented by the Serbian president Slobodan Miloevi met. Radovan Karad and Ratko Mladi as convicted war criminals were banned from negotiations. The peace treaty known as Dayton Accord was signed on November 22, 1995 and brought an end to fighting. According to the Accord, the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina was split into two self governing entities, Republika Srpska and Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The state is governed by central government with rotating system of Presidency. The state would retain a central bank and a constitutional court. There is no precise statistics concerning the casualties of the war and the number of victims has been subject to the political debate. The Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo, on its website, published statistics from research done in 2007. The results were positively evaluated by three international institutions. (Programske aktivnosti) The research aimed to identify all the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as missing persons, whose remains are not yet found and whose death or disappearance was a direct result of military operations. The statistics showed that from 1991 to 1995 in total 97.207 people died or were missing. From these, 60 % were soldiers and the rest are civilians. 66 % of victims were Bosnian Muslims, 26% were Bosnian Serbs and 8 % were Bosnian Muslims. 83% of the civilians killed were Bosnian Muslims. 7,3 % of all of the civilian victims were children. (Ljudski gubitci u Bosni I Hercegovini 91 -95). The number of causalities caused by indirect causes of the war might be even higher. According to United Nation Refuge Agency the Bosnian conflict forced more than 2,2 million people to leave their home of which more than one million returned home. (Pohl, Husein)

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Bosnian War was certainly the conflict which shattered the views of many people, who hoped that fall of communism would bring better and more peaceful world configuration. It tested the ability of the Western world to solve the conflicts occurring in its immediate proximity, directly on the European soil.

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3. Inventing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even before the war in the former Yugoslavia, the perception of the whole region of South-Eastern Europe was marked by the stereotypical views held in the West. These views continue colouring information about the region today. The whole Balkan region is viewed negatively with connotations of instability, and backwardness. How this image of the Balkans was shaped and how the picture is reflected in the images of Bosnia and Herzegovina are projected by the British and American mass media are important issues to be analysed to gain a fuller understanding of the subject area. Until the end of the nineteenth century the word Balkans was known only to a few travellers3. (Mazower 1 -2) Over time, the meaning of the term widened to denote the whole peninsula. The connotation that the Balkans where the other of Europe, the tribal, backward and violent Europe was gained during wars and political unrest at the turn of the nineteenth century. (Todorova 2) In the preface of the 1913 Report for Carnegie Peace Endowment, Nicholas Murray Butler, acting director of the organization used the expression civilized word to denote the countries of Western Europe putting it in contrast to the Balkan world. He states The circumstances which attended the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 were of such character as to fix upon them the attention of the civilized world. (7) This expression appears several more time always to refer to otherness of the Balkan countries. Balkan people are described as the brave soldiers, whose morality, courage and devotion in combination with nationalism empowers them to win any war, however on the other hand Folk-songs, history and oral tradition in the Balkans uniformly speak of war as a process which includes rape and pillage, devastation and massacre. (108) In another instance the report found out

Until the nineteenth century the mountain chain, that divides Bulgaria from east to west and runs parallel to the Danube, was known in the English language and world travel literature under the ancient term Haenus. (Mazower 1-2; Todorova 22)

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the common feature which united Balkan nations was that the war was not waged by the armies but by the whole nations as the report confirms: The local population is divided into as many fragmentary parts as it contains nationalities, and these fight together, each being desirous to substitute itself for the others. This is why these wars are so sanguinary, why they produce so great a loss in men, and end in the annihilation of the population and the ruin of whole regions. We have repeatedly been able to show that the worst atrocities were not due to the excesses of the regular soldiery, nor can they always be laid to the charge of the volunteers, the bashi-bazouk. The populations mutually slaughtered and pursued with a ferocity heightened by mutual knowledge and the old hatreds and resentments they cherished. (148) In 1993 the same institution decided to republish the 1913 Report with an introduction by George Keanan. The Report was titled grandiosely: The Other Balkan Wars; A Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect. The former ambassador to Russia and Yugoslavia was, according to the then director of the Carnegie Peace Endowment Fund ,Morton Abramovitz, about to serve as the bridge between the wars that happened at different times during the century(Todorova 4). The Balkan Peninsula and its people have always created this feeling of the other, different world in the eyes of Westerners. Since the time when Ottoman forces set foot to the Balkan land, there were two conflicting views in European thought. The first was the notion of crusade against the infidel and the second the notion of admiration of the Ottoman Empire. Christians saw the fall of Constantinople as the proof of degeneracy of Orthodoxy, the ultimate failure of Byzantium as the imperial system and a divine punishment for mans sins. (Mazower 6) In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a fragmented Europe floundering in the

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numerous religious wars and political unrest looked upon the Ottoman rulers as the Grand Signores. He was depicted as the most powerful man of the known world and admired for the power, reach and efficacy of his Empire and the grandeur of its capital. (Mazower 7) As the Ottoman military power declined the attitude towards the empire changed. Now the Ottoman government was described as tyranny or despotism. The religious tolerance and peace admired before, was no longer mentioned in connection with the Ottoman Empire. Instead there was more emphasis on the question of its lack of legitimacy, its reliance on corruption extortion, injustice and the natural unavoidability of its decline. The enlightenment with its emphasis on the secularity put the political and religious nature of the Ottoman state in the basket of backwardness. Besides, the West was undergoing an industrial revolution and a transformation of its economic system, the growing importance of industry on the economy in contrast to the still predominantly agrarian society of the East. Balkan became the Volkmuseum of Europe. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the region of south-eastern Europe was gradually gaining its significance on the geopolitical map of Europe, especially with the political ambitions of the European Powers. Intensifying activities of the Balkan nations for the political sovereignty, drew attention to the population that had been up to this time lumped into one category, that of Turkish Christians. A mixture of nineteen century romanticism and the Realpolitik on the part of observers, created a polarized approach of demonizing these populations. After the War for Greek independence, the British favoured the policy of balance of powers in Europe, which included the suggestion that Ottoman Empire must be preserved. The literature of the time reflects this view with few exceptions. Between 1861 and 1863, two British women, Georgina Mackenzie and Adeline Irby, travelled extensively through Serb Macedonia, Bulgaria,
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Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, publishing their travel account in 1866 under the title Travels in Slavonic Province of Turkey-in-Europe. It was accompanied by the drawings of Felix Kanitz and it introduced the British public to a virtually unknown subject: the plight of the Slavs. Both travellers were pro-Serbian and in 1869 they found the Orthodox School in Sarajevo and were involved in relief works. After Mackenzie died in 1874, Irby continued the school until her own death in 1911. They were Victorian ladies of their era, who had great faith in their religion, great belief in progress, great confidence in their nationality and their background; and they were possessed of a passionate call that drove them on. (Todorova 98) In Bosnian, Irby had found a purpose for dedication and was their unswerving champion, although she never forgot her class and country and was proudly conscious of her superiority of birth, breeding and civilization. She wrote: The Bosnians always remained semi-barbarians, and despite the efforts to produce a better class of peasant woman, the dishonest outweigh the honest, and their lasting weakness was their inability to work hard. (Todorova 98) In the summer of 1876 it was no longer considered bad to have Serbian friends. New books on Southern Slavs were published which criticized a Western public for paying little attention to the state of dominant nations of the peninsula. William Gladstone commented in 1876 on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina: more than a third of the population is exiled or homeless and where the cruel outrages . . . are more and more fastening themselves, as if inseparable adjuncts, upon the Turkish name. (XII) The passionate debate about the contemporary issues in the English society found its analogy in the awareness of the other nations and in both cases the intellectual society could see no resolutions of the contemporary issues except through charity.

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American travellers in the region were quite rare in the 19th century but began to be more numerous towards its end. Numerous accounts were written by tourists, diplomats, journalists and missionaries. In the eighteenth century Greece was considered an essential destination of the grand tours to Europe that American wealthy gentlemen undertook. Many published their travel memoirs. In 1819 the first American mission was established in Smyrna. Its aim was the conversion of the predominantly Muslims and to a lesser extent, Christians to the right faith. In 1869 there were already 21 missionary stations, with 46 missionaries and 185 schools. At the end of the century the number reached 17 principal stations and 256 substations with 184 missionaries. U.S. diplomatic relations in the Porte sought firstly to protect the rights of the U.S. citizens. Journalists, particularly Januarius McGahan correspondent for the English liberal London Daily, played an important role in informing the western public on the situation in the Balkan. McGahan was granted the accreditation by the Russian army to cover the Russian-Turkish war in 1877-78. Another American journalist to cover the war was Edward Smith King a reporter for Scribners Monthly, a veteran journalist who had made his name by reporting the American Civil War and the Carlist War in Spain. In 1880 he wrote the first book from Turkey in Europe portraying the Balkans as the border zone between the West and the Orient. In his book of poems, he was inspired by the Balkan legends and folk songs. In his first novel The Gentle Savage about the Oklahoma Native Americans trying to resist the European sophistication he compares the Balkan mountaineers to Native Americans inhabiting the land and his Herzegovinian guide, Tomo, reminded him mostly of the stalwart bronze- coloured men who I had seen in the Indian Territory.(Todorova 107)) William Curtis,

correspondent of the Chicago Record wrote a book about his travels through Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece titled Turkey and His Last Provinces, which describes

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Serbia as peasant state with its lack of anti-Semitism which he contrasted to Romania. Curtis was taken aback by the general feeling of equality which he considered as the greatest obstacle in Balkan countries to achieve progress. All through these years the Americans showed signs that their views were clearly in line with England and that they belonged to the same cultural sphere as England. (Todorova 101 - 108) Accounts from later years suggest two opposing views. First was the aristocratic sympathy with the ruling elites and disdain for the peasants and the new states. The second view was a notion originating from the enlightened linear thinking of evolution with its dichotomies of progressive-reactionary, advanced-backward, industrializedagricultural, urban-rural, rational- irrational, historic-non-historic and so on. This view saw the Ottoman as the obstacle to progress, which had become the key word of the time. The new parliamentary democracies were characterized as the classless states of equality, which were seen as threat by some and the positively by other writers. What the two views shared was the total dislike of the peasantry, which was seen as belonging to the economic and social order. From the most sympathetic view it was seen as class retreating from the stage and serving as a source of curiosity and repository of archaic customs and beliefs. In the other extreme, it was predicted for disappearance. (Todorova 110-111) Maria Todorova sums up the aristocratic bias against egalitarian society as: urban bourgeois rational culture against what was perceived as the superstitious, irrational, and backward rural tradition of the Balkans, whose sole value lay in providing the open-air Volksmuseum of Europe. (111) The aristocratic view gave way to the burgois attack on corruption and sensuality, the oriental and exotic was substituted with a preoccupation of propriety and accompanied by intolerance. (Todorova 111)

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The Balkan became the focus of larger scale attention during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. The First Balkan War was seen as just war to push out the Ottoman Turks, as the opposition of progress and give freedom to the inhabitants living there. The second war was viewed with discontent as the result of greed over the territory of the newly established states. In a way it resembled the enthusiasm and the discontent of the previous generations with the states of the Balkans and their consequent development. The Balkans then, were disdained for its backwardness and nationalism, which were ascribed by some as the result of the ancient hatred among the nations. Despite the Western nations building their empires overseas, they were looking with discontent on the imperialistic ambitions of the Balkan states. The final blow to the image of the Balkan was given by Gavrilo Princip and the shooting of Franz Ferdinand de Este in Sarajevo, which signalled the outbreak of the World War II. The Balkans were described before the war as the Powder Keg of Europe which exploded on the 28th of June. There was prevailing spirit blaming the Balkans and especially Serbs for the horrors of the war.(Todorova 120) An English traveller to the Balkans, Mary Edith Durham returned the Order of King Sava that she has received from the Serbian state with the letter addressed to King Peter considering him and his nation guilty of the biggest crime in history. Durham travelled through the Balkans from 1903, leaving behind the travel accounts accompanied by her drawing. On her travels she had a Balkan guide who explained to her that the Balkan people knew only to love and to hate, they are not capable of something medium and this should describe the Balkan man in general no matter if he is Albanian, Serb, Greek or Bulgarian, Christian or Muslim. (Durham Chapter 1) Durham described her experience as coming several centuries back in time and wipe out your western prejudices. (Chapter 1) Violence was the term associated with the
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Balkans also for Agatha Christie. She writes in her detective novel: Secret of Chimneys with the character Boris Anchoukoff coming from Herzoslovakia, the land of violence, brigandry, and mystery, where the national hobby is assassinating kings and having revolution. (Todorova 122; Flemming 1218) K.E. Fleming comments that: Syldavia and Herzoslovakia, then, are sort of Balkan everycountries, composites (both in name and character) based on several assumptions: that Balkan countries are more or less interchangeable with and indistinguishable from one another, that there is a readily identifiable typology of politics and history common throughout the Balkans, that there is such a thing as a Balkan ethnic or racial type. (1218) The assassination of King Alexander in 1934 drew another English traveller Rebecca West to travel across the former Yugoslavia, which she described in the highly praised travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She expresses her prior knowledge about the peninsula in the following way: Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans -- all I knew of the South Slavs. I derived the knowledge from memories of my earliest interest in liberalism, of leaves fallen from this jungle, of pamphlets tied up with string, in the dustiest corners of junkshops, and later from the prejudices of the French, who use the word Balkan as a term of abuse, meaning a rastaquouere type of barbarian.(West, chapter IV) This book was published in 1941 at a time, when the Yugoslavian kingdom was to be invaded by German and Italy. West described the discomfort her German cotravellers felt when they crossed the border of Croatia as the train was getting late and the food was bad. She felt uneasy about the reception of the Balkans and their wish to
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travel to the Dalmatian coast. According to the Germans she was travelling with, they were accustomed to the presence of Germans and thus the services of the local hotels were more similar to those in Germany. (West Chapter V In the same manner Archibald Lyall noticed the uneasiness with which Westerners see the Balkans and ascribe it to a certain lack of comfort, a certain indifference to rules and timetables, a certain je-men-fichisme with regard to the ordinary machinery of existence, maddening or luminously sane according to temperament and circumstance. (Todorova 127) Except for the lack of punctuality of the means of transportation, Lyall noticed strong presence of the cult of gun which lead to the Skuptina murders in Beograde, yet he expresses feeling of safety walking the Balkan cities as, the Balkans kill only to manage affairs among themselves not interfering with strangers. It was the ethic complexity which frustrated the Westerners. As Lyall remarks: Everywhere east of the Adriatic there are at least ten sides to every question, and it is in my mind that one thing is as good as another. (Todorova 128). This complexity of the Balkan states was ascribed to the earlier stage of their development than the nation states of the Western Europe. After the World War II the borders dividing the Orthodox and Muslim from the Western Catholic were substituted by the new borders of the Iron Curtain dividing free West from communist East. Communist Russia was viewed by some scholars as the successor of the Ottoman Empire and the countries of the Balkans were left to fall under this regime with the exception of Greece, which was considered as the cradle of Western civilization as the only Balkan nation worthy to fight communism. (133-136) Robert D. Kaplan in his book The Balkan Ghosts describes this birth of the Greek tourism myth, which started in late 1950s and lasted despite the military dictatorship of George Papadoupoulos between 1967 to 1974. (249-260) While in Yugoslavia it did not matter who should rule, in Greece the communist were called gangsters and Greece was
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the only Balkan member of the NATO from 1982 until 2007, the only member of the EEC. During the Cold War the Yugoslavian regime was tolerated as it opposed Moscow, it was granted generous loans from the Western banks to revitalize its economy after the war. During this time, the Balkans as geopolitical notion Balkan as derogatory term disappeared from the conversation of the Western politicians and journalists in favour of the term Eastern Europe. The Balkans and Balkanization came into prominence in 1990 and the wars in Yugoslavia. (Todorova 135 -136) Robert D. Kaplan in foreword to the second edition of the Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History writes: Balkan Ghosts was completed in 1990, before the first shot was fired in the war in Yugoslavia. It was initially rejected by several publishers, who thought the Balkans too obscure a region for significant book sales. (X) Few years later in 1993 the book became international bestseller and although it tells very little about Bosnia, it is believed to be one of the books that influenced President Bill Clinton against intervention in the conflict. The failure of Communism and the consequent wars in former Yugoslavia caused increased interest for the region in South-East Europe. As Kaplan further continues in the region, where there were only a few Western journalists, became the central stage of the world events. American soldiers were deployed in Macedonia to prevent spreading of violence from the bustling regions of other Yugoslavian countries to the south. This was a country, which he describes as a place, where he could barely meet stranger. (X) American historian Barbara Jelavich in 1983 wrote: To the outside observer, the Balkans appears to be a puzzle of confusing complexity. A geographic region inhabited by seven major nationalities [sic!], speaking different languages, it has usually impinged on the Western

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consciousness only when it has become the scene of war or acts of violence, (Goldsworthy 28) To confirm this observation, the Balkan wars of the 1990s produced a tide of books: new histories of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo; countless memoirs by politicians, diplomats, and soldiers engaged in the region; accounts by foreign correspondents and relief workers; the testimonies of victims, survivors and camp inmates; diaries kept during the siege of Sarajevo; anthologies of poetry and prose; reissues of long out of print titles; and a variety of academic explorations of the Balkan peninsula 4 . While the coverage of Bosnia and Herzegovina alone in the American media was sporadic, from May 1992 to February 1996 Bosnia became regular feature of the nightly news. ABC, CBS, NBC, each carried on average 15 stories per month dedicated to the war. New York Times published from January 1992 to January 1996 84 stories per month. The coverage peaked in August 1992, May 1993, August 1993, February 1994, December 1995. (Rhyme, Bennett, Flickinger 598) The U.S and British media presented the war in two basic positions. First, the Bosnian War was seen as a result of ancient ethnic hatred and the outside interference should be kept to minimum. The second position advocated and called for large scale international intervention, because the people affected by the conflict were just like us. (Robinson 378 - 379) In both positions, Bosnia although it had no oil and mineral resources, nor did it possessed as important geopolitical position as it did during the Cold War, was still perceived as the country in the heart of Europe. People who were fighting were it was a story of war between outwardly simile white Europeans unfolding in a relatively prosperous and familiar environment. (Malik 144; Robinson 384) On one

See Bosnia, Uncertain Path to Peace - Reading List providing context to the photo essay Bosnia Uncertain Paths to Peace published by the New York Times

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hand Bosnia, was portrayed as sometimes centre of the cosmopolitan Europe,, where different nationalities, cultures, religions were co-existing side by side in peace, As such it was viewed as the failure of Europe and civilized world, which was partially guilty of inactivity. On the other hand, Bosnia was portrayed from the Orientalists or Balkanist perspective portraying the old ethnic problem, which the British public could not understand. It was accompanied by a discourse of return to the tribal, primitive, barbaric side of Balkan, with its mysterious bloodthirsty inhabitants (Robinson 390). After the images of Penny Marshall and Ed Vuliany from Omarska and Trnopolje concentration camps media drew analogy between the Ustae concentration camps in Jasenovac and World War II and the present, which even increased the pressure for international intervention in the conflict. Sarajevo was compared to Warszawa ghetto and President Izetbegovi compared himself to Czech president Bene. In Geneva, talks about the Vance-Ovens Peace Plan in January 1993 were compared with the Munich Conference in September 1938 (390). Quite opposite to the Balkanist interpretation of the war presented by Todorova (152) Myers, Klak and Koehl presents us with a comparative study of the national U.S. newspaper coverage of the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda. In their finding, unlike the conflict in Africa, European conflict was rarely viewed as tribal and the warring sides as blood thirsty. More than about the ethnic cleansing and tribal hatred, newspapers were reporting about the military strategies and emphasizing the countrys place within the civilized world (30-43) Throughout the war, media presented its two competing images. First of them was the civil war theory, backed by the U.N, which saw all of the warring sides responsible for the war. Another theory was the idea of an aggressive Serbia trying to seize neighbouring territory and create Greater Serbia. This interpretation was favoured by the United States. First interpretation ignored the fact that external forces, especially
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Serbia and Croatia were involved in a war. Second, one focused on Sarajevo forgetting the other parts of the country especially Mostar. One dimensional reporting often did not mention the multi-ethnic dimension of the people, nor that people of different ethnicities might intermarry. Moreover, some of the commentators expressed the cultural determinist view ascribing predispositions to murder others.(Robinson 392-396) For reporters providing information from Bosnia, still faithful to the notion of objectivity, left the requirement of neutrality, which according to Kursaphic has a place in civil society but not during the war. (80) Journalists who reported from the war were often trapped in the quasi-Stockholm syndrome and their reporting depended on which side they were reporting from. This trend was described by Dutch journalist Ruigrok and in Germany by von Oppen. A term coined by Michael Bell former correspondent in Yugoslavia who describes the effect in the following way: In place of the dispassionate practices of the past I now believe in what I call the journalism of attachment. By this I mean a journalism that cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor. This is not to back one side or faction or people against another; it is to make the point that we in the press [] do not stand apart from the world. We are a part of it. (8) Journalists serving in Bosnia saw their role as influencing the public to pressure political representatives in their countries to action leading to cessation of violence. They appealed: to the international community to bring peace into the country, and bring the responsible for the war crimes in front of the justice. Some of them like Ed. Vulliany and Roy Gutman later witnessed in front of ICTY. (Kurtasic 80). Media theorist in the

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late 80s and early 90s termed the effort and power of the 24/7 news media to influence the foreign policy as CNN effect. Media may function alternatively or simultaneous as a policy agenda-setting agent, an impediment to the achievement of desired policy

goals, and an accelerant to policy decision making (Livingston 2). The positive role of the media was seen when the infamous Serbian and Croatian internment camps were closed soon after being reported on the media. On the other hand it had also the negative effect when France and Great Britain enforced the role of UNPROFOR as Peace keeping not Peace enforcing units. Commander adhered to what they considered as strict impartiality to avoid becoming participants in warfare (Malik 148). Journalists serving in Bosnia on one hand realized their power to influence public opinion, but on the other hand they were faced with the continuing bloodshed and inability of the international community to stop the killing. The Balkans, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been view throughout history as the bridge between the East and the West. Not quite the oriental East and not quite the West. It was often characterized by its lack of civilization and backwardness, and yet the land of chivalry and brave soldiers. It came into prominence in the Western media and literature especially during the times of war, due to its proximity to the main European centres. In these times it was often presented as the European moral failure and the Civilized World had to intervene in order to stop the bloodshed. Violence was often presented as the work of dark forces hidden within its inhabitants and the present conflicts as a part of continuum of Centuries old ethnic conflict, interrupted by the brief periods of peace. The image of the region often depends on which nation did different authors choose as their favourite ones and the following interpretations of the region is presented in favour of this nation views disregarding others.

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In this chapter we saw the evolution of the image of the Balkans in the literature and the news media.discriminating the other ones. The inhabitants of the peninsula are either viewed as backward bloodthirsty peasant-soldier always ready to pull the trigger in order to kill or an exotic noble savage who reminds the West the long forgotten medieval values and who needs to enlightened by the civilization. In the past authors presented the Balkans as the predominantly rural region; however this picture has changed with the Bosnian War and the siege of Sarajevo. Besides from the traditional Balkanist view, media presented Bosnian people of all ethnic groups like the ordinary Europeans or Americans and the war was not caused by the Balkan mentality, but was a side-effect of the fall of the Communist regimes throughout the Eastern Europe. In this chapter we saw the evolution of the image of the Balkans in the literature and the news media. Nonetheless we have left out one important medium, the film. In the next chapter we will see how the region, more specific countries of the Former Yugoslavia were presented in the moving pictures.

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4. Bosnia in the Film There are several publications written about the Balkan image in Western film. One such publication was an article written by Nevena Djakovi titled The Threshold of Europe: Imagining Yugoslavia in Film which gives a brief overview of Yugoslavian image in American films. Bulgarian born scholar, Dina Iordanova in her book Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the Media, provides a description of the Balkan depicted by the Western as well as Balkan filmmakers themselves. Alexej Timofejev focuses on the depiction of Former Yugoslavia during the World War II in the American, British, German and Soviet cinematography. Dakovic dates one of the first cinematic images of Serbia by foreign filmmakers to 1904. It was footage of the coronation of the King Peter I by Englishman Arnold Muir Wilson. The film is composed of several thematic blocks, procession, coronation and travel though the Oriental parts of the country. According to Dakovic, the film is marked by strong local ethnic colours such as Turks, Albanians and the highlander population shown in a variety of costumes. This was the first film to present the exotic, historic and other motifs which contributed to the romantic curiosity and attention by the public and this image was broadly used to depiction the Balkans in later productions. (Dakovic 70) Since that time, Serbia and the Balkans were represented in Western cinema in two forms; either the films were set in the region or film characters came from there. Nevena Dakovic identified three patterns of Balkan representation in film; the romantic pattern, ironic pattern and historical pattern. However there is no clear border between these styles of representation, all have used the established exotic, romanticised characterisation of the Balkan region.

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Films, which see the Balkans under the romantic pattern comes predominantly from the classical Hollywood era. According to Dakovic, this pattern refers to Serbia as an idyllic, make-believe place; an image that joins the Hollywood pastiche scenery album of romantic places like Scotland of Brigadoon (1954, dir. Vincent Minelli), or the Shangri La of Lost Horizon (1937, dir. Frank Capra). (70) In this bucolic world, love is the way opposite cultures are brought together, and the predictable melodrama premised on fascinating haunted love and rendered more exhilarating by being set in a regional unpredictable history. (Dakovic 70) Cecil DeMille found the commercial potential of stories set in the Balkan when he shot Unafraid (1915) and Captive (1915). In these films, the vivid mountain area of Montenegro serves as the backdrop for its heart breaking love stories. Three screen adaptation of Antony Hopes Prisoner of Zenda (1894) were important points in framing Serbia. It introduced to the screen Ruritania, a country somewhere beyond the forest like Transylvania. Ruritania, which became the archetypal symbol of the Balkan land because of its historical allusions evoked dynastic, melodramatic adventure and drama of errors are more specifically, and more easily, identified as the barely disguised turbulent Serbian monarchical chronicle. The aura of the Balkan mystery is expressed in Jacques Tourneurs Cat People (1942) which can be associated with the regions in two ways. First its heroine Irena Dubrovna is of Serbian origin. Secondly, the story connects to the Balkan region in its utilization of medieval legends dealing with Werewolves. Irene initiates a line of cursed Balkan beauties, a combination of Slavic sacrificing self-destructiveness and erotic, sensuous southern/even half gypsy women that inspire passion trimmed with death. Serbia and the whole Balkan region caused filmmakers to look at it in the romantic way, where love could solve all of the problem or a place of mysterious and dangerous exotica, which could have dire consequences. (Dakovic 70 72)

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On the other hand, the Balkans were represented on the screen in yet another image. According to Dakovic, this ironic pattern is recognizable in narratives that do not explicitly deal with, or mention, but rather peripherally imply Serbia/Yugoslavia to be a semi-developed, godforsaken, impoverished or economically backwards Third World State. From 1950s Yugoslavia started its Westernization and modernization in an attempt to reshape its identity. While the communist countries of Eastern Europe might have symbolized the intermediary between two regimes, in the Westerners mind Yugoslavia was a place of cheap tourist resorts, economic decline and industrial products of poor quality such as the Yugo which appears as the unreliable car in Die Hard (1995). Other subthemes such as tourism or economic immigration in search of better living condition are of no better faith. The later theme is often covered by Yugoslavian migrs like the screenwriter in Arthur Penns Four Friends (1981). Dakovi sees the film as the Bildungs-film dealing with the coming to maturity of a boy of Yugoslav origin. Danilo's (Craig Wasson) journey to adulthood meanders between the American sixties, traumas of Vietnam, work in the steel mills of East Chicago and the patriarchal customs of the "old country" cherished by his hardworking, homesick father who dances "kolo" with his compatriots. In the cultural clash the second generation immigrants pay the high price for their assimilation and acculturation. A vast number of examples confirm that the downplayed role of Yugoslavia in this mode is hugely deceptive: tourism: Murder in the Orient Express (1974, dir. Sidney Lumet;) Evil Under the Sun (1982, dir. Guy Hamilton), /The Hunter's Bag (1997, dir.. Maurizio Zaccaro) Yugo: Dragnet (1987, dir Tom Mankiewicz;) The Crow (1994, dir. Alex Proyas). Backfire (1994, dir. A. Dean Bell); Drowning Mona (2000, dir. Nick Gomez;) emigration: Broken English (1997, dir. Gregor Nicholas).(Dakovic 72-73)

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On the other extreme is traditional, historical pattern. Yugoslavs are seen in the war resulting from the 1914 assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo depicted in De Mayerling Sarajevo (1940, dir.. Max Ophls) and Ultimatum (1938, dir. Robert Wiene and Robert Siodmak). The assassination is seen both as an admirable fanatic gesture against oppression and as the ironic, even stupid end of an epoch regarded with nostalgia, undoubtedly done by Serbian conspirators (Dakovi 73). During World War II, Serbs are depicted as the only ones who still fight fascism in Europe. American and British propaganda used armed resistance of Draa Mihailovi as the tool to mobilize the public morale. American film Chetnik - The Fighting Guerillas (1942 dir. Louis King) casts Philip Dorn, as the main character of Draa Mihailovi, a Dutch migr, who, between 1937 1939, was shooting action movies in Berlin. His wife Jelica was played by another migr, Anna Sten, a successful actress in the USSR. The film uses several of facts such as a name of Mihailovics wife and number of their children and place where the anti-fascist movement took place wrong, but otherwise Alexander Timofjejev says, the creators depicted quite reliably the living condition of the guerilla leader. Timofejev explains that scriptwriters of the film were not asked to search the real details in depth, but their task was to show the spirit of the freedom of first European guerilla fighters. British producer Michael Balcon and director Sergej Nolbandov shot a film in London inspired by the positive image of the Yugoslav royalists in the British press which was called Chetniks. Later, though the British government shifted their support from Draa Mihailovi and his supporters to the partisans of Josip Broz Tito, the film plays on the abstract motives of partisans fighting Germany. Producers changed the name from Chetnik to Undercover. (Timofejev 4043). Films shot after the World War II dealt with the resistance against German fascist occupation, Civil war between the two resistance groups and the socialist revolution

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going on at the same time. This notion is mirrored in films concerned with either flimsy, illegal operations behind enemy lines, Operation Cross Eagles (1969, dir.. Richard Conte) The Secret Invasion (1964, dir. Roger Corman), Bomb at 10:10 (1966 dir. Charles Damic) or with the relations between the patriotic anti-communist Chetniks and the revolutionary yet equally patriotic communist partisans and their international supporters (Dakovic 73-74). During the Cold War period, Belgrade and the whole of Yugoslavia served as a dangerous spy nest where human life had no price, corruption was common practice and military secrets were betrayed. One of the most notable films is Mask of Dimitrios (1944 dir Jean Nagulescu) based on the Eric Ambers 1939 novel with the same name. It tells the story of writer Cornelius Leyden (Peter Lorre) who searches for Greek spy, arch criminal and womanizer Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott). Retracing Dimitrios takes Leyden to Belgrade, which resembles Budapest, people have nonSerbian names and their language reminds one of a soft Slavonic whisper. He encounters two corrupt government officials Wladislaw Grodek (Victor Francen) and Karel Bulic (Steven Geray). In the scenes of their encounter, we are exposed to the typical Balkan imagery such as macho gambling in smoky coffee houses, desirable but unfaithful wives and betrayal of military secrets. According to Dakovic it seems like a concentration of all of the typical motifs, crystallized collective images of the Balkans where accuracy is of no importance to an audience that does not know much about the topic. (74) An important part of James Bond From Russia With Love (1963 dir. Terence Young) is set in the Orient Express travelling through Yugoslavia. It stops in Zagreb and Beograd, which looks very much like dim military towns resembling the towns in Russia. During the stops in these cities, the Russian agent manages to get onto the train, but does not accomplish his mission. The idea was to emphasize Yugoslavia as the

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hole in the Iron Curtain enabling the loosening of the Eastern Bloc Grip. Also Bonds thinking On whose side is Tito? alludes to Titos policy receptive towards the both sides of the Cold War. In 1990s the Balkans as an actual war zone became a profitable topic for various filmmakers. Nevena Dakovic says that Yugoslavia became the equivalent of the Third World anguish in Europe and is frequently spoken of in different ways. For example hunger in Bosnia is mentioned in with blissful indifference during courteous dinner chitchat in Home for the Holidays (1995 dir Jody Foster). The Bosnian War provides a background for displaying the skills of almighty protagonists such as Nicolas Cage presents in the movie Rock (1996 dir. Michael Bay) when he prevents an emotionless Serbian anarchist from hiding a deadly weapon into a toy sent to a Bosnian refugee camp. Another such display is presented in the movie Peacemaker (1997 dir. Mimi Leder), where Dusan (Marcel Lures) a man, who lost everything in the war, seeks his revenge and plants an atomic bomb in the UN building in the heart of New York. (Dakovic 74 - 75) War torn pictures of Sarajevo started to appear on screen as early as 1992. Sarajevo gained the war torn city reputation, as it was destroyed several times and again resurrected and reconstructed by the artists. Sarajevos reputation as the originator of the apocalypse of the World War I. was forgotten and replaced by the image of dynamic cosmopolitan location that had now fallen prey to the dark forces. Before the war, the city was an ordinary city, with an Oriental, not quite European look, but still modern with its architecture and the place where the 1984 Olympic Games took place. (Iordanova 235). Media scholar Dina Iordanova thinks that if there was no war, the city would be depicted as the larger summary of the Balkan cities, thus urban monsters

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symbolizing the incompetence of all communist undertakings littered with depressing housing projects and marked by the characteristic urban architecture of socialism (235 236). After the war, the cinematic image of the city has changed and into the foreground came the pictures of suffering, appreciation and respect for Sarajevos martyred citizens with a degree of attentiveness not normally granted to inhabitants of the region. These pictures were put in contrast to the earlier city photographs, which captured the European look or the Oriental character of the city, diverse landscape of Christian Churches and Mosque inhabiting the same landscape stressing the contested multiculturalism. (236) Iordanova then denies Sarajevo its cosmopolitan status before the war, because cosmopolitanism implies mobility and involves people coming from all over and dispersing again in all directions, while Sarajevo was a crossroads with steady traffic flow arriving from known places and travelling in established directions. Iordanova claims that the city gained its cosmopolitan status because of the siege. Contrary to the claim that this crazy but charismatic town was the place that most embodied tolerance and multiculturalism and that is why it had to be destroyed, Iordanova believes that Sarajevo came to embody tolerance and multiculturalism precisely, because it was destroyed -its crazy charisma emerged parallel with its destruction. (237) Decisions on comings or going on leaving or staying were crucial in the politics of representation - the way Sarajevo was narrated depended on the arrival and departure of the film-makers, who portrayed the city. Tensions arouse between the Westerners and their perception how the city and its inhabitants should be represented, which was only partially told by the people who lived there. Films made by Sarajevans, which had only limited exposure, usually documentary footage produced by the Sarajevans was widely used in Western productions, but largely unaccredited (Iordanova 237). Western
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tradition dictated that the city was to be depicted as a Balkan location, where Western travellers could face controversial experiences and then reassert their superiority by resolving the problems competently. Without the massacres, the city would still be considered semi oriental and its inhabitants would not be known beyond the borders of the republic. Had the massacres not been witnessed by international eyes, they would have appeared briefly at the end of the news and been forgotten for next day - had the images of suffering not been transmitted worldwide. Bosnia was conceptualized as a secular melting pot and this atmosphere enabled the intellectual to establish the project of intellectual solidarity, fully comparable to that of Spanish Civil War, but this time dark forces were fought not with arms, but with art and creativity. (Iordanova 238 -241) This fight was not visible only during the cultural activities that were sponsored by the Western intellectuals in the city during the war, but also on the screen. Western filmmakers left their own comfortable homes and environment and moved to Sarajevo where they told their stories from being present point of view in an attempt to depict what the war really meant. Marcel Ophuls left Paris in 1993 for a few months to shoot The War Correspondent (1994). Bill Tribe leaves London to shoot his personal war account titled Urbicide (1993). (Iordanova 242) Australian director Tahir Cambis desired to leave civilization and Sarajevo was the place for his exile. The film Exile in Sarajevo (1997) was a product of this journey. It covers last six months of the war and its impact on the life of civilians. His personal account depicts such moment as the killing of young girl after winning a dance contest and falling in love with his Bosnian sound recordist Alma Sahbaz. (Iordanova 243; Stratton) Apart from documentary, the Bosnian War was topic of numerous feature films that shaped the public view of the region as a whole. Even they follow the travelogue structure, where a Westerner arrives in the Balkans, explore or undergo controversial
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experience and who then report on them on the safety of their home. British Welcome to Sarajevo (1996 dir. Michael Winterbotton) and Spanish Comanche Territory (1997 dir. Gerardo Herrero) are written from the perspectives of journalist reporting on Bosnia. Savior (1998 dir. Predrag Antonijevi) follows a mercenary fighting for Serbs, Behind Enemy Lines (2001 dir. John Moore) tells the story of American pilot shot down in enemy territory. In Harrisons Flowers (2001 dir. lie Chouraqui) wife of a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer travels to Croatia to find her husband. Another way to depict the conflict in the Balkans is through the human interest stories which include intensified emotional appeal such as Shot through the Heart (1998 dir David Atwood), which is a story of friendship and gradually shifts to depiction of one of them as a monster killing woman and children approaching a water tank on a Sarajevo street. The two most recent Western films about the Balkans, As If I Am Not There (2010 dir. Juanita Wilson) and In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011 dir. Angelina Jolie) tell about the atrocities and raping that encounter Muslim women in Serbian prison camps. To add authenticity, some of these films are shot in the local language with local actors. However authentic these films might appear, use of the topics and images only reiterate the old stereotypes of the Balkans as the troublesome region on the periphery of Europe. Dina Iordanova, in her book Cinema of Flames: Balkan Films Culture and the Media, describes drama, blood and tragic mindset as the essential part of the general Balkan narrative. The narrative of the peninsula is about the area doomed to cyclical conflict, and which can never escape the shadow of its history.(72) Balkan and especially Bosnia and Herzegovina appears as the dark place on the map of civilized Europe, mysterious, exotic and romantic region of the past with inferior products of industry and love for war and armed conflicts.

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5. Behind Enemy Lines. There are not a lot of movies of which its directory says: "It [the script] was so horrendously out of whack I had studied the wars in Bosnia. I'd been there. I took that stuff very seriously. [This script] was genuinely ridiculous with the actors escaping in World War I biplanes and stuff." (Piccalo) This Director was Irish born John Moore and he was speaking about the original script of his debut film Behind Enemy Lines. Even later, when the scriptwriters David Veloz and Zak Penn rewrote the script, Moore told Owen Wilson, who was about to play the leading role of Lt. Chris Burnett, that there was not a single good line in the movie. Despite this, he accepted the role of director film with estimated budget $40,000,000. Until this film, Moore was shooting short films aired on Irish networks as well as television commercials, most notably for Dreamcast video game, which was aired during the MTV Music Awards 1997. Many reviewers of Behind Enemy Lines see the quick editing of the movie and larger than life hero performance on the battlefield resembling a video game itself. (Harrison; Wilmington) The plot of the film bears slight similarities to the story of Air Force Pilot Capt. Scott OGrady, O'Grady was an F-16 pilot who was shot down in Bosnia in 1995. Subsisting on a diet of ants, O'Grady hid from Serb soldiers for six days before a dramatic rescue by Marine forces. (Harrison; Humphries) Although this title has been used for discovery channel about OGrady, this film is not the true story. It is set in Southern Bosnia, however the map of the U.S. headquarters show events occurred in the Srebrenica region and Dayton Accord becomes, in the film, Cincinnati Accord. Despite Moores effort to shoot the movie in Bosnia, producers of the movie chose a safer location in Slovakia. Nor did the efforts to cast Serbian actors succeeded. Serbs refused to play in the movie because of its anti-Serbian sentiment. Instead actors coming from

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other Slavic nationalities, such as Russian, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks were to play the Serb villain or Bosnian civilians. Lt. Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson) is a fighter jet navigator serving during the Bosnian conflict. He is based on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. He feels frustrated with his job, because of a lack of action. He requests to leave the service, but his commander Admiral Reigart (Gene Hackman) ignores this request and instead sends him on a Christmas day on a reconnaissance flight over Bosnia. Burnett and his pilot Stackhouse detect Serbian activity in what is supposed to be a demilitarized zone. NATO aircrafts are prohibited in this area. Despite this, Burnett persuades Stackhouse to fly closer and photograph the mass graves Serb general Miroslav Lokar (Oleg Krupa) is constructing to hide an act of genocide on the local M uslim population. Desperate to avoid discovery, Lokar orders the plane shot down. In a breath taking scene with fast cutting between shots, the fighter tries to out manoeuver those shooting at them, but they are eventually hit. The airplane crew is forced to eject from the plane. Stackhouse wounds his leg while landing. Because there is no signal to call for help; Burnett decides to climb to the top of a hill and call from there. Meanwhile the Serbian army find the pilot and executes him. Burnett observes this scene and screams in horror thus unintentionally revealing to the enemy his presence. Tracker (Vladimir Mekov) and colonel Bazda (Marko Igonda) are sent to find and kill him. Burnett succeeds in his efforts to communicate with Admiral Reigart who promises him the rescue team to be sent, but first the Admirals decision must be green lighted by the NATO Commander Admiral Piquet (Joaquin Almeida). The European officer following does not want to risk the peace in Bosnia and cannot authorize the rescue team to be sent into the de-militarized zone. Instead he commands

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Reigart to reroute Burnett to the safe area. While he is escaping his prosecutors, Burnett accidentally falls into the mass grave, he hides under a dead body. Reigart watching Burnetts hiding via a thermal satellite, decides to report the situation to the media. Burnett encounters Tracker in deserted factory riddled with landmines, which in impressive way gradually explodes one by one. While travelling, Burnett is picked up by a car with Bosnian civilians. He befriends one, listed in the credits as Ice Cube. He offers Burnett bottle of Coca Cola and impresses him with his knowledge of the Public Enemy songs. When they arrive in the town Ha.he is confronted with the Bosnian civilians living in poor conditions and discovers they were photographing the mass murder of local Muslim population by general Miroslav Lokar. Lokar arrives in the town, just when a Bosnian man threatens to kill Burnett, accusing him of causing the troubles. When Lokar arrives, Burnett succeeds in switching uniforms with a dead Serbian soldier. The Serbs then play a game with the media and claim he had been killed by the Bosnian Muslim guerrilla fighters, so the rescue team to pick up Burnett is called off. Navigator decides to activate the saving signal transmitting device and take the hard drive with the mass grave photographs. On the hill, Burnett physically encounters the tracker for the first time and in the fight he kills him, but at that moment the Serbian army arrives in full force, with trucks loaded with soldiers and tanks. Burnett is saved as he jumps off the cliff and catches the leg of a mariner hanging on a rope connected to the helicopter with Admiral Reigart on board, who has left the USS Carl Vinson to save his soldier, despite not having consulted with the NATO command. The photographic material Burnett has saved is used as evidence of war crimes and genocide during the ICTY trial against General Lokar. Admiral Reigart was offered the administrative job, which he refuses to take and retires with all the honours, while Burnett stays in the navy.
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Regarding the setting of the film, two facts should be noted. First of all, the film was shot in Slovakia instead of Bosnia and Herzegovina, because producers considered the original location to be too dangerous. Secondly the inaccuracies of the geographic setting of the events it should be noted. While the place of the mission and landing is said to be in southern Bosnia, the big screen map gives the location in Eastern Bosnia, a region which would correspond the location of Srebrenica. A simple search on the internet site providing routes for motorists, corresponds approximately with that position56. The region of Southern Bosnia is located near Mostar, which is about 458 kilometres from Bijelina.(Bosnia and Herzegovina Google Maps; Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nokia Maps). In the movie, the settings in the Slovak High Tatras with its high snowy mountains peaks and dense forests creates a feeling of isolation, desolation and mystery. Dark and cold colours used during the outdoor Bosnian scenes suggests hostile and cold environment, where all kinds of evil can happen. The colours change when it begins to be clear that Burnett is going to be saved. USS Carl Winson is, on the contrary, shot on glaring in the sun with a few clouds surrounding it, creating a notion of the oasis of freedom in the hostile Balkan environment. Similarly, in the interior scenes the U.S Navy headquarter is either lit by a solid electric light bulbs or by the blue glare of monitor screens suggesting the free spirit and technical superiority. In contrast, interior scenes from the Serbian headquarter is shot in dark colours with lack of light, especially in the scene when the Serbian engineers succeed in deconstructing the shot down fighter, the place reminds one of a shed or a medieval workshop rather than twenty

Three towns were shown on the signpost in the scene when Burnett hitchiked the car to Ha. These towns were Bijelina and Janja. Bijelina is located on the East of Bosnia near the border with Serbia. After calculation of the distance between Janja, and Bijelina and their distance from Srebrenica revealed that the town Ha might correspond to Srebrenica.

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century military headquarter. Ha, the Bosnian Town where Burnett escapes to, is an embodiment of the chaos and horror of war. Instead of the ceasefire expected as a result of the Cincinnati Accord, Lt. Burnett, upon his arrival to Ha, finds that there is still shooting going on. Serbian antagonists are depicted as men of mystery, with at first hidden and later overt inclination to inhuman brutal deeds. In the first scenes of the film we see unidentified soldiers moving in slow motion, engaged in an action we later find out was the genocide of the Muslim population. We see them in close or middle shot but the full purpose of their actions is not revealed. This notion of mystery is preserved in the next scene when we are introduced to General Lokar and Colonel Bazda. The first close- up shot catches generals dark eyes blinking as we hear the television newscast reporting a the signing of the Cincinnati Accord in the background. The next long shot establishes viewers relationship to the scene but again does not reveal much about the main characters. Through the arch, we observe the Serbian signs hanging on the wall dividing the picture on two parts. On the right part there is the television set standing on the antique table next to an antique chair under the window which appears to be the major source of light of the room. On the left part of the picture we see two figures watching television. Colonel Bazda is standing in front of General Lokar. All the scene reveals is one leg lying on the table under the Serbian coat of arms, while the other figure is lying on the ground. Throughout the whole scene we do not see Lokars face in full. We see either close up shot of his eyes or his lips. We see Bazdas face expressing hidden anger. The whole closeness of the scene creates the tension within the characters and identifies them with anger and hatred. When the Serbian military discovers the flight, we see through the tracking shot of soldier announcing to Lokar of the NATO aircraft presence. The atmosphere in the dark castle is tense compared to the relaxed
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atmosphere on the USS Carl Vinson. While Americans are playing football or eating dinner, Serbs are cleaning their guns. The other main antagonist, Tracker Sasha, wears a track suit while other Serbian military personnel wear uniforms. What is surprising, is thatTracker was called to command the shot down of the jet fighter and seems to enjoy a lot of authority, while we are not clear about his military rank. Tracker has greasy dark hair and like other Serb soldiers he is often pictured with a cigarette. Tracker speaks very little and when he speaks it is usually very short, brief and commanding. In the first scene army headquarters, the general tells Bazda, that he should think more and be ruled less by emotions and he would live longer. Serb officers without any sympathy steps on Stackhouse wounded leg. They show no respect to the Geneva conventions and Tracker executes him mercilessly and cowardly from the back. Tracker is stripped of showing any emotion when Bazda steps on a landmine and pleads with him for help. Instead of helping his friend he runs away. The Bosnian Serb Army is shown expressing no feelings of remorse when searching for Burnett in the mass grave, their only feelings are of disgust over the smell of decomposing bodies. Serb brutality is deliberately highlighted in the scene when Serbian Army enters the town plundering and levelling the buildings with tanks. Even the civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina were depicted as people, who hate foreigners. When Burnett hides in the shelter with other civilians during his stay in Ha, they give him accusing glances and the Muslim woman claims that they should use the American in some way while another civilian in black coat threatens him with gun accusing him of bombings and the cause of Lokars entry into the town. The only friendly depiction of the Bosnian people takes the form of Americanized character titled Ice Cube, who offered Burnett a bottle of Coke and knew by heart the popular American song by Public Enemy. Despite his long hair and dirty

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looks, he is depicted as a positive character that follows Burnett when he escapes the town and joins him. But for Burnett this is a personal fight that only he can win. Bosnia in Behind Enemy Lines reiterates the pictures of mass murder and despicable Serbs that appears in the media. The surreal depictions of the land and its inhabitants gives no signs of place and if we exclude the pictures of genocide and the language, it could be the story about any place in the world. The deserted nature and unfriendly armies is a formula used in many action films. The scene where Stackhouse witnesses the arrival of the Serbian army resembles the scene of Native Americans coming to attack from classical western movies. Even the dichotomy between the antagonists and protagonists in the movie resembles the formula used when describing the Wild West. The hero is white, always clean and orderly dressed and mannered in comparison to semi-barbaric and dirty anti-heroes7. (Warshow) Bosnia as part of the Balkans was the border of civilization, where the laws of man were yet to prevail over the law of the nature. Behind Enemy Lines received mixed reactions from film critics, many times more interesting than the film itself. The press saw the film as either too positive and a realistic depiction of the war, which shows Americans in the best light (Piccalo; Rosen) or as being too pathetic, full of clich and far from reality (Harrison; Kempley; LaSalle), The films reception varied depending on the political attitude of journalists and the papers for which they were writing. However according to Box Office Mojo it grossed $91,753,202 in total of which 64 % came from domestic market, which makes this film the most commercially successful of all those that were analysed. Arsen and Gordon in their article in Newsweek magazine ascribe the success of the movie to the

See for example depiction of the Western hero in Robert Warshow, The Movie Chronicle: Westerner

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tastes of the audience and their change after 9/11 and the coming war in Afghanistan which raised demand for patriotic war films. While before the terrorist attacks the audience after the first screening regarded the film as being over the top, but the situation changed and in the fall of 2001 the film was decribed as just exactly what America needs

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6. Welcome To Sarajevo Welcome to Sarajevo was the first foreign film to be shot in the war torn city itself. It was filmed in 1996 just a few months after the Dayton Accord was signed. The film schedule was to be over nine weeks, but according to Martin Trevis the production mixer of the film, only twelve days of them were shot in Sarajevo due to high insurance costs. (Trevis) The film received predominantly positive reviews and in 1997 its Director Michael Winterbotton was nominated for the Golden Palm Award in the International Canes Film Festival. The plot of the film is loosely based on the book by the ITN reporter Michael Nicholson The Natashas Story. Michael Winterbotton, in an interview with Betsy Pickle describes the film in the following way: "I saw it as a series of short stories," says Winterbottom. "At the end of the film, you've seen lots of people's stories. Hopefully, by adding all the stories up, you get some sort of impression of the city." The dominant plot is the story of an ITN reporter Michael Henderson (Stephen Dillane), who covers the Yugoslavian Wars first in Vukovar, later Sarajevo. In the Sarajevo he meets Flynn (Woody Harrelson), an American heavy drinking and smoking macho reporter, who is chasing sensations and adventure. ITN hires a local driver Risto (Goran Visnji), who also serves as their interpreter. When he is assigned to film the story from Ljubica Ivizi orphanage run by the devoted Mrs Savi (Gordana Gadzi), Henderson promises Emira (Emira Nusevi) a nine year old orphan he will take her out of Bosnia. According to a U.N. official, children cannot be evacuated because the Serbs want the city to be empty and any evacuation would mean collaboration with the Serbs. On the last day of Hendersons assignment the ITN producer Jane Carson (Kerry Fox), introduces him to the American aid worker Nina (Marisa Tomei), who organizes the supply food to children and escorting babies and children to relatives abroad.. She pitches the story as
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the epic tale of exodus. Together they visit the orphanage where they pick up the selected children. Emira cannot go, because she does not fit into any of the official categories, so Henderson decides to take her at his own risk. On their journey through the territory held by the Serbs, the bus is stopped and some of the kids, presumable with Serbian surnames are taken out. Serbian Chetnik leader (Dragan Marinkovi) almost picks up Emira, but instead of her he takes the baby she is always carrying. Emira quickly adapts to her new home in England, where she learns English and becomes a part of the family. Then, out of a blue, Jane Carsson phones Henderson to inform him, that Emira has a mother. Henderson decides to find Emiras mother (Vesna Orel) and ask her sign the papers for adoption. He does so with the help of eljko (Draen Sivak), a former bartender at the Holiday Inn, where most of the journalists were accommodated. After Munira, Emiras mother, watches the video of Emira and talks on the phone with her, she signs the adoption papers. Welcome to Sarajevo is a film interwoven with a several subplots. One of them tells about Risto, the Bosnian translator, who has studied in England. In the first scene we see him carrying the water tanks into a shelter, where his friend lends him a jacket to attend a job interview. He gets the job and works as a driver and translator for the ITN crew. On one occasion journalists sit with Risto and his friends and watch him burning the books as he tells them about burning of the National Library of Sarajevo including the precious richly decorated old manuscript of Hagada.. Through the course of the war he joins the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, because, in his own words: I used to think my life and a siege were different things and now I realize there is no life in Sarajevo apart from siege. The siege is Sarajevo. If you are not part of it you are dreaming, you are asleep. He had killed a man and claimed it was a therapeutic experience for him. He is shot dead in his own apartment as he returns from a meeting
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with Henderson. This occasion personally touches journalists, for whom the war was in many respect only a job, which they witnessed every day, but never experienced it by losing someone close. Flynn and Annie McGee (Emily Lloyd) obtain permission from Radovan Karadi allowing them to pass through the Bosnian Serb borders. On one of their visits they film the story of the concentration camps in Omarska and Trnopolje with a picture resembling the Nazi practices during the World War II. Apart of these, the film is loaded with micro-stories from various places. First of all, the kids from the orphanage tell, on the camera. their tales. This is shown on TV with Hendersons voice over. There is a story of eljko who first appears as a bartender making money on phone calls and profiteering. Later we see him driving a nice car. We are not told how he earned it, but as Jane Carson suggested, he is a gangster. The film offers a rich depiction of the city and its inhabitants during the war. The combination of the actual news footage with the steady cam handheld camera imitating the news camera creates the feeling of reality and authenticity. In addition to the real news footage from Bosnia, we see also Western politicians like John Major, Bill Clinton and Lord Owen. However the film is a work of fiction and there are several misconceptions about the war. Roy Gutman who was covering the Bosnian War for Newsday was seeing this movie with his colleague Ed Vulliany from the London Observer, also veteran journalist who covered the war. Who the hell is this guy?" I asked my fellow previewer, Ed Vulliamy of the London Observer, who won every prize in British journalism for his coverage of Bosnia. "You," replied Vulliamy. "Hey, but I wasn't there," I shot back.
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"It must be you." (Gutman) Gutman explains that he wrote and researched the story of Omarska and Trnopolje based on the accounts of refugees in Zagreb, Croatia. The first Western journalists to visit the concentration camps were Ed Vulianny accompanied by ITNs Penn Marshal and Ian Williams. The story that created outrage in the Western public and connected the Bosnian War with the Nazi practices of genocide was actually filmed in Budapest, not Sarajevo. Gutman further explains that not only was Flynns triumphal return invented, but so was the bar, heavy drinking, the recovery of the corpse and almost everything in the film. The shooting during the wedding, which caused the Serb nationalists to build a road barricades, had occurred, but it happened on March 1992, a month before the war, the church was not Roman Catholic, but Serbian Orthodox. (Gutman) For Graham Broadbent one of the film producers: the key to succeeding with Welcome to Sarajevo was finding a way to personalize the kinds of stories that had been told on the news. Then he adds: Because, frankly, we were all bored with Bosnia," he says of Western society. "Every night the news had another Bosnia story, and it sank further and further down the agenda. (Pickle) Frank Cottrell Boyce told Gutman that Welcome to Sarajevo was meant to be a "paean to journalists" and was written as a polemic and a "gross oversimplification" simply because the public did not follow the original events. According to Boyce, filmmaking is a different business" from journalism, he said, adding that he expected to be criticized for rearranging the facts, characters and sequences. "I don't mind that so long as it gets people talking,". He admits that the character of Flynn was added to the story, because a story involving an American journalist gives the film the tag of global story and a greater possibility of success in the American market. Winterbottom was more brief. "You invent characters

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to make the film more engaging," he said. "This is not a documentary; this is a fictional film." (Gutman) The filmmakers were not interested in dealing with the political complexities of the war. It does not seek to ask questions of the origins of the conflict and gives simple answers to questions of responsible, who is evil and who is not. The opening scene, which begins with black and white footage from World War II and show celebratory remarks of the Serb military officer congratulating his soldiers for seizing the besieged city of Vukovar. Then with tracking shot we approach Vukovar. We see burned houses and the picture is gradually changing from black and white to colour, transporting us from the past to the presence. In the background we can hear the Chetnik song Spremte, se, spremte etnici8. Chetniks were known to the outside world as Serbian nationalist and monarchist guerrilla fighters during the World War II fighting first against Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, and who, though the course of the war, changed sides and collaborated with Axis forces against Titos partisans. A Serb sniper is filmed in the wedding shooting scene. The next time we meet a real Serb is when the kids are leaving on the bus to Croatia and they are stopped by a Serbian Chetnik Leader. We first see him with the U.N official and the aid workers. From the opening moments it is clear he cannot speak English .Then as he comes in to the bus, we get a better glimpse of his long hair, and camouflage uniform. He starts to call out children with Serbian sounding surnames he gets easily angry first by Greg, the camera man, who was shooting the incident, then by the two protesting aid workers. He loses his nerve and locks off his machine gun. And when Henderson protests as the Chetnik is trying to take Emira and the baby, he threatens to kill everybody on the bus. He takes the baby and leaves the bus. During all these scenes he is shown as shouting and pulling the hair of
Get ready chetniks, The original of the song tells about Jovan Babunsky, a chetnik military leader Jovan Babunsky active in the first decades of the 20th century
8

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the little girls. From the time the Chetnik enters the bus we see him from a slightly low angle, suggesting he was shot from the position of cameraman sitting on his seat. Even later when the cameraman is told to stop shooting, he continues and the angle becomes even lower until the walls of the bus frame the scene creating a feeling of tension. Pictures of the Chetnik leader are intercut with the high angle medium shots to close shots of the children sitting on their seats with frightened faces. As he is leaving the bus the camera aims at the childrens faces and tilts as they are disappearing from the frame to leave no doubt that they are leaving. The Chetnik leader hands the baby to his soldier and takes a gun from another one in a medium shot. We see only part of the figures, because the scene is shot in the natural setting with no additional lighting. Then we see the Chetniks leaving the place shouting, waving their hands up and down like barbarians who won a fight and now were taking their prey. The last time the expression on a Serb solders face is show is during the scene we witness execution of the Bosnian civilians. First we see an old man with two pieces of luggage approaching the bus and hear gunshots on the background. Then the scene is cut and we see the origins of the shooting. Five civilians are standing on the edge of a flat place, tied together with a rope. A Serbian soldier shoots them one by one causing the first to die to drag the others after him.. As the soldier continues with the executions, the picture cuts to the middle shot of his calm and bored face. In another shot the soldier approaches the edge of the flat place and then we are given a birds eye view of the heap of bodies with another soldier finishing the one who is still alive. Serbian soldiers control the boarding of passengers onto the bus. From the background we hear the soldier asking: Who is the next? and we see an eye level shot of the executing soldier. Civilians are ordered onto the bus accompanied by commands to move faster. As the civilians are leaving another soldier is spraying on the wall the name ivko in the
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Cyrillic script. The same inscription was seen previously, when Henderson is taking a walk in nearby ethnically cleansed and destroyed village while he and the children, who were on the bus, stay overnight in Serbian held territory. In most instances the Serbian enemy is invisible. We see only burning buildings, and corpses left after the shelling or we hear distant gunshots. The invisibility of the enemy adds up to the terrifying effect of the war, because we never know when and death might come as, for example, the surprising death of Risto. The enemy is never shown fighting face to face, but always attacking from hidden position with minimal risk of life, unlike the journalists and Bosnian civilians who are risking their lives even in the presumably safest place that one is supposed to have, his or her own home. Winterbotton allows Bosnian civilians to behave in a manner recognised as normal for European people, or to put it into the perspective of the British and American viewers, people like us. They just have the bad luck to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The image of Bosnia as a familiar and civilized place is established during the opening credits. After Michael Henderson reports from war torn streets of Vukovar and informs us that thousands of refugees fleeing to Bosnia, where there is peace and safety, the director cuts the scene and together with the opening credits we see archive footage of Sarajevo during the 1980s. The picture of busy streets full of people, cars on the old Latin Bridge, one of the most renowned city sights. But probably the most famous picture that public connects with Sarajevo and which appeared during the opening credits is the montage of archive footage from the Olympic Games events. The opening scene continues in keeping with an atmosphere of ordinariness and normality common to the other parts of the world. The hairdressing salon is a normal salon not different in any way from those in other parts of the world. The first flaw in this picture

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of normalcy and ordinary life is visible when the songs The Way Young Lovers do stops suddenly into silence and cuts to a tracking shot the mother of the bride starting the gas electric generator. In the next shot we see priests in the Catholic Church lighting the candles and preparing for the wedding. Van Morrisons song is now accompanied by the sound of shooting rifle and machine guns. We are definitely thrown into reality when we follow the bride and her company going on to the street and two sudden shots kill brides mother. Because we are already aware of the settings, Risto Babi had to be introduced to us in this way as an ordinary man with the water tanks escaping the shelling. All through the next encounters with him and his friends we are lead to believe in his ordinariness or at least peacefulness associated with the Western ordinary man. We are told by Jane Carson that he is educated in England, he reads books, and he and his friends speak good English. They burn books only because they are forced to do so by the war. Flynn presents a picture of a Bosnian Muslim prisoner to the ordinary family. The homemade burek increases the feeling of home. The only thing that distinguishes that they are Bosnian Muslim civilians is the fact that they smoke too much in comparison to English or Americans. It was the war that is responsible for deformation of human characters like the ones of the Svercer who rob Henderson and Risto as they are on a search for Munira, Emiras mother. Unlike the Serb Chetnik, Harum the cello player, has his long hair orderly and clean despite the siege. Depiction of Sarjavoo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in Welcome To Sarajevo was influenced by the focalization of the narrative, which was predominantly presented as seen through the eyes of a Westerner. Round characters sharply contrasted with flat, rather functional characters of Bosnian Serbs and characters of Bosnian Muslims, which are portrayed as characters one can possibly meet in ones neighbourhood. However, none, except Risto, have not much space to develop their characters through
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the movie. Not all movies have characters from Western countries, as in this movie, but all of the characters are Bosnian Muslims/Croats or Bosnian Serbs. Will this affect different depiction of the warring sides and the Bosnian settings?

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7. Shot through the Heart Shot through the Heart is based on the true story of a Bosnian soldier, Vlado Sarzinski, written by freelance journalist, John Falk and published in the November issue of Details magazine in 1995. Producer Francine LeFrak commented for St. Louis Post-Dispatch on her choice to base her movie on this article: "It was a true story that needed to be told on screen, because it depicted the ravaging effects of war on friendship and family." (Pennington) Only the opening and the closing scene were shot in the city, because, according to David Atwood director of the movie, the airport was damaged and sometimes unusable. He lists unstable Sarajevo microclimate as the main obstacle that forced him to shoot the film on the former Russian army base in Budapest. Shot through the Heart tells the story of two sharpshooters, Croat Vlado Selimovi (Linus Roache) and Serb Slavko Stani (Vincent Perez). They represent the Yugoslavians in the shooting at the Olympic Games in Barcelona 1992. Because of the breakup of the country, there was no united entity to represent. Nevertheless they buy tickets and prepare to watch the Olympic Games in Barcelona. That weekend Vlado and Slavko decide to spend the weekend together with Vlados wife, Maida (Lia Williams) and their daughter, Nadja (Karianne Henderson). They shoot, drink beer and dance in a country inn. On their return, they are stopped at the barricades and Bosnian Serb militia, who ask them to present their papers. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadi had declared the border of Republika Srpska only that morning. Vlado refuses to present his papers and cannot believe what has happened. They are allowed to pass only after Slavko bribes the Bosnian Serb soldier.

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The next day unemployed bachelor Slavko is called to join the Serbian army. He proposes that he and Vlado leave Sarajevo for Vienna for 10 000 Deutsche Marks. Vlado rejects this proposal because he cannot believe the reality. Slavko leaves Sarajevo and assumes responsibility for cadet training, while his friend remains in Sarajevo and hopes to continue managing his business. Sarajevo becomes a dangerous place as Serbian forces attack civilians on the streets as well as shelling the buildings where the Muslim population live. One night, Vlados house is hit and he escapes to his friend Mio home, a Serbian doctor, who is not called to the army and who is married to Muslim Amela. Vlado then joins the Bosnian Army and decides to fight the occupants. Slavko calls him again and proposes him that he has the last possible chance to get him and his family out of Sarajevo, but Vlado rejects this offer, because he is now involved in fighting and his family refuses to go without him. Cadets trained by Slavko are then sent to Vano Polje, the suburb, where Vlado lives and the next day Leila, Mios daughter is killed. Maida decides to take her daughter and leave for safer part of town in Koevo. Meanwhile a Serbian sniper is terrorizing the streets surrounding water tanks in the suburbs killing everything in sight. Vlado is called out to eliminate him. He finds that the sniper responsible for deaths of women and children is Slavko and decides to conceal him. He finds him residing in a mountain cottage living in a luxury and peace, while the inhabitants of Sarajevo have to suffer hunger and their lives are constantly in danger. Slavko finishes their friendship and the next day Vlado shoots him. From that time the street surrounding Vano Polje are safe. The film ends with a closing scene in the cemetery where Lejla is properly buried and we see in the following shots tombstones of people who died during the siege.

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Despite the fact that the real Sarajevo appears only twice in the movie, these settings play an important role in the film. "It's all so confusing in a way," Sarzinsky recreates his experiences during the Los Angeles premiere: "In a way I should be proud, because it is about me and my family, and how we survived this terrible five years. But then I think it is not about me and my family. It's about a hundred thousand families, some of whom had it a lot worse than I did." (Pennigton) The opening credits inform us that In 1992 war broke out in Bosnia, formerly a region of Yugoslavia. Until that time Muslims, Croats and Serbs had lived together peacefully in the countrys capital, Sarajevo. The opening scene shows us peaceful life in the bustling city where everybody goes about their business. The camera pans through to the Latin Bridge and we follow a streetcar on its route, as well as some peaceful pictures of the people on the streets. The focus shifts to Slavko who, at the busy market takes a box of fruit from the seller and visits his wife working on the post office. None of those pictures seem oriental in anyway and the scenes despite the directors claims could be easily shot in any other Western city. The only scene which introduces us to the Balkans is the racketeer Sijan and his offsider as he is takes a bribe from the owner of a travel agency, where Vlado bought tickets to Barcelona. Here we are introduced to the place as being the Balkans with poor working state system and corruption. When the travel agency owner explains why he doesnt report it to the police: Yes and pay more than pay them. No institutions are present to enforce the law as Sijan steals Vlados car. This absence and distrust of police, which in a functioning State provide for the security of the inhabitants might serve as the indicator of breaking up of Yugoslavia bearing with it the side effect of disintegration of the existing institutions and could lead to war. Filmmakers later present us with the scenes from a war-torn city, with no working infrastructure or facilities such as electricity, telephone communications and water

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supplies. The only institutions providing security for the civilians were the paramilitary organizations organized by people with dubious reputations like Sijan. These paramilitary units are later recognized as part of the Bosnian Army. Although very subtle in the beginning, the film makers make sure viewers identify Slavko and Serbs as the antagonists of the film. While Vlado is portrayed as the family man, with steady job and his own private business, Slavko is on the other hand single and unemployed childlike person. We see Vlado in the first shots buying vegetables, saying hello to his wife and buying the tickets for the Olympics. Vlado is orderly looking man with short hair, he wears a brown jacket and orange sweater and we see him the first time on the market place taken with the eye level angle shot as the camera pans through the crowd. Vlado in those first shots is not the centre of the screen, but we are slowly focused on him as he addresses the vegetable seller and takes from him a crate of vegetables to take on the weekend holiday. Slavko is first introduced to us in the context of the firing range as the camera moves from one firing stand to the other until the camera cuts and we see a close up of two hands in the centre of the shallow focus holding a bullet and performing a trick. The next media shot centres on the little boys face and Slavko in a black coat with his dark long hair. Slavko was introduced earlier by Vlado, when he describes him to Natasha as a childlike man, who does not know what he is going to do in three hours ahead, never mind three months. This image of Slavko is strengthened when he finds himself another girl that should come with him to Barcelona, and expresses surprise, when Vlado reminds him that this new girl is already the sixth one. While Slavko has not decided the question of his female companion to visit the Olympic Games, his ideas on the war and the separation of Yugoslavia are quite clear. In the scene when the returning group is stopped by the Republika Srpska border
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control, he takes some money from his friend and negotiates crossing the border. He introduces himself to the officer as Slavko Stani, Serb from Banja Luka, and he plans to celebrate the news of separation and drinking the best cognac. While watching Radovan Karadi speaking about the peace, Slavko in his own house prepares bullets for the shooting. When the two friends meet again, in the mountain cottage outside Sarajevo, the closing ceremonial of the Olympic Games plays on the TV in the background, as a possible symbol marking the end of their friendship.. While Sarajevian civilians are living in the poverty and danger, Slavko lives in the comfort of the mountain cottage without feeling the lack of anything. That night Slavko tells Vlado that he found his place in the world: Vlado: How could you find happiness when you are shooting on your own people? Slavko (whispers): Ive got my happiness now. But to be just to Slavko, and to the scriptwriters of Shot Through the Heart , Slavko was not depicted as totally black character. He cares about his friend and his family and offers them in two instances escape from the town. Later, he does not kill Vlado even though he aims at him, when Vlado is trying to track the sniper, however, gradually Slavko gets brainwashed by his commander and explains his actions as being revenge for and defence of a repetition of the Ustae terror on the Serbian population. Serbs, apart from Slavko, are depicted in two ways. First of them is the case of Mio, a doctor living in Sarajevo, who has married Muslim woman. He does not commit war crimes, but he, unlike Vlado, wants to leave Sarajevo. While Vlado believes that once they leave Sarajevo, they lose everything and show the Serbs they have capitulated, Mio wants his family to be safe. And it is his daughter that gets killed
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by one of the snipers, the first day they were sent to their part of town. The other kind of Serb are the soldiers. They are usually depicted in uniforms with their gun without any trace of individuality, because they function only as a background for our main character and his commander within the Serbian Army. Slavkos Commander was a fanatic who ignores the fact that, the three ethnic groups once lived together in peace, On the other hand, he uses negative events of the past to incite and support hatred amongst his soldiers. The Commander also supports stealing of the valuable items, in the houses they are going to burn as well as mass rape of Bosnian women. His soldiers are depicted as soulless people, the flat characters who serve the purpose of tyrannizing the Sarajevo population. Real life characters and the hero of the story himself, were advisors during shooting of the film in Sarajevo and Hungary. One has to agree with Derek Elley from the Variety magazine, when he states that: Attwood's direction, which is realistic without becoming a docudrama, is always tightly focused and often gripping, recreating a totally convincing milieu on scungy locations in Hungary. Filmmakers were able to successfully reconstruct the war torn city and the suffering of its inhabitants. Moreover, the film gives a human touch to the conflicts witnessed in the news and attempts to analyse some of its causes. This would work even better if the conflict between the two main characters were more developed and the image of Slavko and the Serbs were given more complexity.

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8. Savior The films dealt so far offered more or less clear cut line between the protagonists and antagonists. The previous films were shot from the Muslim or Croat point of view, in Savior directed by Peter Antonijevi the Bosnian war is depicted from the point of view of a Western mercenary serving in the Army of Republic Srpska. Peter or Predrag Antonijevi was born in the Serbian town of Ni and between 1981 and 1991 directed several films and TV series in the former Yugoslavia. In 1991 he participated in demonstrations against the Serbian leader Slobodan Miloevi and spent two months in the solitary confinement. In 1992 he moved to Hollywood and was offered a job directing the movie Savior written by Robert Orr, who was a photographer assistant in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1993 and 1995. Oliver Stone and his production company were involved as co-producers. The film was shot in Montreal and Montenegro, which was part of Yugoslavia at that time. The main protagonist of the movie is Johsua Rose/Guy (Dennis Quaid) who looses his wife (Nastasija Kinski) and a child in front of American Embassy in Paris in a bomb attack, presumably committed by Islamist terrorists. After the funeral of his family, he storms into the next mosque slaughtering several worshippers inside. His friend Peter (Stellan Skarsgrd) follows him and saves his life when he shoots one of the surviving worshippers from the mosque who tries to kill him. In order to avoid arrest they both join the French Foreign Legion. Bored with his work for French legion, which does not fulfil him anymore, he is looking for "a real war for real cause" and becomes a mercenary in the service of Army of Republika Srpska. He is assigned to a sniper position, where he is to protect a bridge from the soldiers of Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Joshua, now Guy, successfully
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eliminates the soldiers and then shoots a ten year old boy who is chasing a goat without the slightest sense of emotion. A moment later, a small girl approaches Peter who offers her candy. The girl, however, comes close and throws a hand grenade into his post. Meanwhile Guy was asked by Goran (Sergej Trifunovi) his co-soldier to chase the rats on the Muslim side of town. Guy enters one Muslim house where he sees an old lady murmuring words he cannot understand and sees dead bodies beside the bed and a sleeping child in the wardrobe. Goran cuts off the old womans finger to steal her ring and leaves her to bleed to death. While leaving, they have to hide from a helicopter attack. Guy returns to the Muslim house and he finds both baby and the old lady have been killed by falling rubble. Later they take part in the prisoner exchange with the Bosnian Muslim forces. One of the prisoners is Bosnian Serb woman Vera (Nataa Minkovi), visibly in the late stage of pregnancy. Goran takes her in his car to her village, where he probably comes from, too. In the car Goran is abusive towards Vera for becoming pregnant with Bosnian Muslim Army Soldier., even though Guy points out that she has been probably raped. Just before that incident Goran brags in front of him how he had raped the Bosnian Muslim women they were returning as part of the prisoner exchange, claiming that Serbian women would rather die than be raped. When they reach a tunnel, Goran stops the car and starts to kick Vera as she is lying on the ground, which forces her into premature labour. The Serbian tormentor aims at the Mother with a loaded gun ready to shoot the new born baby, the very moment his head sees the light of the world. Guy threatens Goran to shoot him if he doesnt stop, but he ignores the threats and Guy shoots him. An American helps Vera to deliver her baby. When he shows her the baby she rejects it and attempts to kill herself with Guys gun before he manages to stop her.

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Once they arrive in Veras village, she is rejected by her family because of the shame felt by her father. Guy decides to take them both to the U.N. refugee camp in Bilea. As they travel, Vera continues to reject the baby as well as she refuses to communicate with Guy. Meanwhile Gorans body is found in the tunnel and Guy is suspected to have killed him. Veras father and her brother are urged by Gorans family to pursue Guy and Vera and kill Gorans murderer for the sake of family honour. They catch up with them in an old farm, where they stop to get the milk for baby. Vera tells her father that she tried to kill herself but she was not allowed to do so. Veras father offers his daughter gun so she could commit suicide now, but she refuses to do so, because she says she has a child now. When the father is about to shoot his daughter, Guy interferers and gets injured. Veras father wants to kill him, but Vera places herself in front of him and her father backs down and allows them to leave. The couple return to Veras village to find it devastated after supposed enemy attack. They watch from far away as Veras family and other villagers were rounded up lead away by Muslim fighters and later shot. Guy decides to head to Split, in Croatia, where the U.N and Red Cross headquarters for the Former Yugoslavia is. When they ran out of petrol, they stop at the cottage near the lake and accept the hospitality of an elderly couple, a Croatian man and his Serbian wife whose children died during the war. The couple give Vera and Guy new clothes and a boat to cross the lake to get closer to the town, where they wait for the bus to Split. When they reach the small port, Guy remains with the baby resting in the half sank boat, while Vera goes to the town to find a bus. However Vera is captured along with the other civilians by the Croatian Defence Council soldiers. The soldiers take their prisoners to the waterfront, where Guy and the baby are hiding. One of the soldiers proceeds to kill several of them with the sledgehammer, including Vera. Those who are still alive are consequently shot dead by
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the firing squad. Guy witnesses the slaughter, but does nothing, because he does not want to give himself and baby away. While trying to prevent the baby from crying, almost smothering her in the process, he draws Croats attention and their lives are put in danger. He makes his way on to a bus that goes to Split and leaves the baby on a seat of abandoned Red Cross vehicle. He leaves her with the name tag Vera and goes to the pier, where he throws his servicemans identity card and a gun into the water and collapses on a bench. A woman who was on the bus with him, saw him place the baby into the Red Cross car. She approaches him with the girl and asks him if the baby is his. Guy answers affirmatively and the lady promises to take them to hospital. Peter Antonijevi in an interview for Susan King from Los Angeles Times during the film premiere commented on the film and the war in the following way: Probably {the war} is the most devastating thing that happened in my life. I woke up one day and the world I knew and the country I knew and liked was gone and . . . things would be the same no more. I grew up in a family where we didn't make any difference between who is Serb and who is Muslim. Then one day, all of a sudden, there was a big division throughout the country, throughout families even, of who belongs to which ethnic group. Probably the most confusing fact for Americans is that {this war} is not some enemy coming from somewhere attacking you. It is your neighbour next door walking to your doorstep and slitting your throat. This point of view is reflected in the film, which does not offer a simple picture of two warring sides, one is good and the other evil. Peter M Nicols observed that Antonijevi keeps the identity of Serbians, Croatians and Muslims deliberately vague.
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In the film they are virtually interchangeable, with each group slaughtering the others so routinely it hardly seems to matter who is who. Dennis Quaid further explains it: We made an anti-war film. War does terrible things to people and to people's minds. What we are addressing really is people's hatreds, their prejudices, which we are all guilty of on one level or another, and how we are conditioned by those prejudices without really even knowing it sometimes. This man that I play, he is someone who is dead spiritually and emotionally at the beginning of the film because of what happened to him. He has this great hatred toward Muslims in particular. And this gives him an arc to come back from--this little Muslim baby becomes his Savior. You could say he is the baby's Savior, but the Muslim baby actually becomes his Savior. We never say {in the film} there is black and a white. We always look for good in people as well as a dark side. (King) Probably this non-simplistic point of view makes film critic Kevin Thomas think that the film is hard to follow for an American audience. The film follows the familiar pattern of man from the West transformed by his experience in the Balkans. This time filmmakers decided to depart from the besieged city of Sarajevo and visit the Bosnian countryside, shooting the film in the neighbouring Yugoslavian republic of Montenegro. Pictures of a mystical and sparsely inhabited region of Bosnian (Montenegrin) contrasts with the ravaged city of Sarajevo as well as with the war torn unspecified city in the Savior. This creates in the movie not only picturesque backdrop , but also a peculiar mind set where the film and its characters re-enforces the notion of the Balkans as a beautiful, but extremely dangerous place where, the past and its mythology is still present in the customs and thinking of people, a image found in earlier works on the region and its people.

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Firstly, there is the notion, of family honour. Goran states during of prisoner exchange scene that a Serbian woman would rather kill herself than allowing herself to be raped by any Serb or Croat. When he sees Vera, who obviously comes from the same village or region as he does, he reminds Vera of her failure as a good Serbian woman. This notion and fear of condemnation by the neighbours leads Veras father to cast his daughter away. Public opinion and honour as forms of social control are evidently at work when villagers urge Gorans father and his son to avenge the murder of Goran. This notion of twisted chivalry and the patriarchal authority is visible even when he attempts to force Vera to commit suicide. The mountains form a kind of escape from the social norms and mores of the village. Antonijevi enforced this notion when he puts the escaping couple in jeep without roof closely resembling a scene in an American road movie. In any case, this freedom has a high price - the feeling of insecurity caused by not knowing if the next human encountered would be the enemy army marching with captured civilians or a friendly couple. The friendliness and hospitality shown to the couple are part of the social norm of the inhabitants of the Balkan countryside. It is described in the western literature as well as in the Savior. Even though Vera is rejected by her father, the elderly couple take good care of the travellers without any mention of their nationality or whereabouts. Savior is a complex anti-war film. The filmmakers tried to portray both the good and the bad that can be found in all people, regardless of nationality. In the first scene when Guy comes to Bosnia, we see a POV shot of a Muslim soldier in green beret and gun, almost invisible, behind the barricades and pointing at us - the viewer. The next Bosnian we see is a ten years old boy, who chases his goat at the same place as the soldiers. We learn about his existence from the same type of POV shots seen previously when Guy was killing soldiers. When the sniper kills the boy in the same manner he
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killed the soldiers, we are lead to sense of the dehumanizing effect of war. However the parallel scene where another ten year old approaches Serbian positions and throws a hand grenade also depicts the dehumanizing effect from an alternate point of view. Peter tells Guy that he does not want to respect the Captains orders, as he is not going to start shooting kids. Set of alternation close-ups of Guy with his eye on a gun sight and a young girl creates feeling that the whole incident is seen through Guys eyes. She slowly approaches Peter who offers her chewing gun. A dark girl without a smile and with her hand behind her throws the hand grenade into Peters post. The scene might work as an apology for Guys deed in killing the boy but could equally be seen to shed condemnation on the Bosnian Muslims who recruited children to commit a suicide attacks. On the other hand the nature of civilians who had to suffer the Serbian raids is not contested. The old Muslim woman in the close up is anxiously crumpling a big yellow plum murmuring words which do not make sense. Camera then cuts to low angle medium shot of guy holding a gun and later back on the long medium angle shot of woman lying on a bed still crumpling the plum. As the camera pans down to dead young couple we understand the reason of her distress. With the exception of the scarf on womans head, womans appearance has no other distinguishing features that indicate nationality. This is also true of the appearance of the young couple. Nor does the flat. The scarf was a symbol used to identify women at the prisoners exchange as Muslim. Muslim soldiers are known for their green berets and green scarves tied around their heads, as later find, are Mujahidin, the holy warriors for Islam. We encounter them twice. First time, in the first of Guys scenes in Bosnia, where he is eliminating one of them after another like a hero of a computer game. The next time when they take

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prisoners from Veras village. We see them from both Veras and Guys point of view. As they lead prisoners up on the hill, they point guns at them and swear. When camera focuses on the Muslim soldiers, it is the fanatic Mujahidin with green scarf. It is hard to say if the Muslims soldiers behave in the film in more humane way than their counterparts from other nations, because they were not depicted as the completely innocent people. We see the consequences of the massacre in the Serbian village, the smoke rising from the place where it used to be and the couple crossing the village near an Orthodox priest being hung on a rope. It is not stated where Bosnian Muslim soldiers want to take their prisoners, but we see that if a prisoner slows down or stops or tries to escape , his or her captors do not hesitate to enforce the authority with the help of weapons. Serbian prisoners in this scene are not only military personnel, but Orthodox priests and old people, male and female. One should add to this depiction the fact that Guy is drawn to Bosnia because of his hatred toward the Muslims, who as the film suggests but does not say explicitly, are to be blamed for the bomb attack which killed his family and the rape of Vera by a Muslim soldier, These facts definitely do not create an impression that the film is somehow sympathetic toward Muslims in general. Antonijevi does not spare either Croats from committing atrocities and crimes against humanity. On the one hand, there is an elderly Croat, a civilian, who helps the couple and the young woman from the bus. On the other hand, there is the one and only scene when we see the Croatian army. The surreal looking scene when Croatian Defence Army Forces massacre civilians begins when a Croatian army officer gets out of a red jeep; in a medium shot we see the outline of the army vehicle and the trees. The officer looks like embodiment of the member of perfect race in the Nazi Third Reich with blond hair, pale skin and blue eyes. The soldier first faces the camera and then walks around a car, he looks right and the boat comes into view, where Guy and the
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child hide. The camera then returns to the medium shot of the soldier, who receives a cosmetic box from someone sitting in the car. Then the camera zooms in shows the reflection of the soldiers emotionless expression in the side view mirror.. He takes out the shaving foam and as soon as he starts to shave, camera moves to the POV shot from Guys perspective, witnessing the Croatian soldiers and the civilians on the bus. In the following scenes, Croat soldiers and prisoners preparing for the slaughter. We are later shown the Croatian officer shaving himself and the camera jumps again to Guy and the baby. In the next shot the civilians are stood out in the shore of the lake and then camera emphasizes an extremely strong looking man with black scarf around his head and no expression on his face. Behind him stands another soldier with lighter uniform with the same kind of black scarf carrying a set of heavy sledgehammers. Shallow focus on the iron man in the foreground and the blurry motionless silhouettes of other Croatian soldiers contrasts with the following close up of young blond civilian with blue eyes and soft facial features. Strong man gestures him to come closer and, in the same kind of medium shot, takes the smaller sledge hammer and hits the young man on the head. Some of the defenceless civilians start to pray while those who are in line move farther away towards the water. Then the man with the huge sledge hammer is shown to passionately kill the civilians. After he kills Vera, who had started to sing a lullaby, the Croatian soldier finishes his shaving and soldiers in the line start to shooting indiscriminately killing every civilian who remains alive. The primary attention in this film is dedicated to Bosnian Serbs. The fact that Guy joins the Army of Republika Serpska determines that the audience will experience the war from the Serbian point of view. There is a positive depiction of Serbian people and, to certain extent, an explanation of the reasons for the atrocities. On the other hand we also participate in a critique of the Serbian official ideology and the regime of Slobodan
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Miloevi. While the previous filmmakers often reduced the Serbian element to cruel and bloodthirsty killing machines who gun down the citizens from the safety and comfort of their shelters, Antonijevi,, himself a Serb, gives them more complex characteristics. War brutality is committed only by Goran of who even the Serbs think is a maniac. The filmmakers suggest the explanation of why Guy kills the ten years old Muslim boy, when the young girl throws a hand grenade into the Serbian post and kills Peter. It could be said that Bosnian and Croat atrocities counterbalance or maybe excuse Serbian brutality. Veras brother does not insist on killing his sister, quite the opposite, he talks their father into not killing her. Like the Bosnian Muslim teenager in Behind Enemy Lines, Yugoslav is westernized, only this time it is a Bosnian Serb, Goran, who grows sideburns like Luke Perry in Beverly Hills 90210 TV show. At this point he tells Guy that Americans would not like a Serbian student in Beverly Hills, and he was wondering why Guy came to fight for them. He tells us and Guy that the west sees them as bad people while the Serbs are only fighting for their land that is all. These words, however, sounds quite ironic when we realize that in the previous scene, Goran brutally tortures helpless old woman while he was chasing the rats and looting for treasures. And while Serbian soldiers like Goran are brutal, the whole society lives inside the past and mythology, which more often than not does not reflect reality. One such case was the myth of Serb woman who would rather die than be raped by Muslim or Croats, unlike the other Muslim or Croat woman, whom Goran considered as whores. Breaking the unwritten rule dictated by the myth leads to dishonouring of the whole family. Being a good Serb incorporates another set of rules, like respecting your father or elderly of the village without objection. This kind of social control and patriarchal dominance works in two instances, first of all, when Vera leaves without a word when she is cast away from the family, and when Veras father is addressed by the elder of
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the village informing him about his daughter involvement in Gorans death and he decides to clear the family reputation and avenge the Serbian soldier. According to the filmmakers this medieval notion of honour and hatred extends to fanaticism legitimised by the Orthodox Church. During the prisoners exchange, Guy and Goran observe an Orthodox priest giving blessings to the old women. At the moment when Goran puts the tied Muslim girl in the car he asks the old priest to bless that saint relationship. And he makes the symbolic cross. Guy silently grinds out: He preaches and Goran does the dirty work. Serbs are usually portrayed as Soldiers, but unlike the Serb soldiers in other movies they are ordinary looking people you might meet in the street of any western city. There is nothing particular odd about them. It is true, that they are usually darker, with black hair, sometimes even curly, but this should not disqualify them from being treated as civilized people. They all wear khaki uniforms except the village elder whose outfit is black jacket and a green beret that enforces the notion of his authority. Serbian men are usually depicted as soldiers or priests, and Serbian women are usually older ladies, Veras mother and the old woman from the lake wore the headscarves too like the Muslim women, the only difference was that they lacked any ornaments. Younger women, are simply missing. Critics, who saw the Savior, were horrified by its brutality and noticed that the film did not take sides in the conflict, (Yates) or that all sides could be blamed for violence (Thomas; Nicols). Quaid emphasized in the interview with Suzanne King that they had Serbs and Muslims working on a film and that everyone in the crew was in some way affected by the war. They wanted to make an anti-war movie addressing people prejudices and hatreds. He explains: We never say {in the film} there is black and white. We always look for good in people as well as a dark side. We saw in our analysis that Antonijevi was quite able to achieve this. However the filmgoers
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did not appreciate it and according to Box Office Mojo, Savior was a commercial failure.

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9. Conclusion The Bosnian War occurring after World War 11 close to the centre of Europe was a war the Western world could most closely identify with. Unlike the Third World wars in Asia, Africa or Latin America, which might have caused more casualties and be more brutal, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina attracted the western worlds attention. From the beginning, Western media started to link the events occurring at the end of the twentieth century with the two Bosnian wars. Bosnia became once again the powder keg threatening European and World stability. The Yugoslavian conflicts were ascribed either as a symptom of the failing communist regimes in the Eastern Europe, or as the results of ethnic hatreds. It could simply have been a continuation of the tension between the democratic powers of the States that wanted to secede from the former Yugoslavia or the Serbian ambition to create a Greater Serbia. What do the four films analysed films Welcome to Sarajevo, Shot Through the Heart, Savior and Behind Enemy Lines have in common and how do they differ in their representation of the images of the Bosnian war and Balkan region? It must be said that there is no single unifying pattern present in all the films. Three of the films follow a common narrative pattern but the fourth does not. Firstly, three of the movies, Welcome to Sarajevo, Behind Enemy Lines and Savior are presented from the perspective of Westerner coming to Balkans, who under the influence of the extraordinary events is transformed. These stories usually follow a travelogue structure which has been the dominant genre describing the Balkan countries. (Iordanova (58) In Welcome to Sarajevo it is a British journalist, professional and veteran, for whom the conflict in Bosnia was not the first one. However witnessing the impact of the war on young children changes his perception of neutrality and he becomes involved in a war and decides to act. This film is also about the experience of
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many journalists serving in the war who begin to sympathize with one or the other warring sides. Taking care of a baby has a humanising effect on Guy in the film Saviour. The American mercenary serving in Army of Republika Srpska, changes from a hard hearted soldier capable of killing a small boy to the protector of Veras baby. In Behind Enemy Lines, it is Lt. Chris Burnett, a bored troublemaker who finds himself witnessing the massacre of innocent people which prompt him and his aging commander to act in the face of such injustice with a sense of responsibility and patriotism and the feeling to act out when seeing injustice and suffering of the powerless people despite the fact that they might break rules and risk the peace process and lives of many civilians only to save one man. The most important issue is the pride of being an American standing for justice against the entire world, no matter the personal consequences. Shot Through the Heart fails to fall into this category, because its narrative develops around the two local men from different warring sites without any westerners to change. Two of the movies, Welcome to Sarajevo and Shot Through the Heart, are set in Sarajevo, while Behind Enemy Lines and Savior are set in the Bosnian countryside. According to the filmmakers, who sites the action in the city of Sarajevo, their work is meant to be a homage to the city and its inhabitants, all of whom suffered during the four years of the siege of the city.. Sarajevo before the war is presented as bustling European city with no traces of the Oriental exoticism. It needs to be said that these two films focused on the Bosnian Muslims and their conflict with the Bosnian Serbs, there is nothing in the setting to accentuate the Islam or the Semi-Oriental side of the city. We see Mosques, but we do not hear Muslims calling for prayer. Pre-war life in Sarajevo is presented through images, which could be seen in any European city, Blocks of apartments, busy roads and people relaxing either in the ski resort during the winter or
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in the park. What make the viewer realize that the films are going to be set in Sarajevo is the shots of the monuments such as Latin Bridge or probably even stronger association of the Olympic Games, which was used in Welcome to Sarajevo. The rural settings, on the other hand, represent the opposite of the civilized European city- hostile, empty deserted spaces. Only the evil Serbian forces are positioned on the hills from where they shelled the city and its inhabitants. In Welcome to Sarajevo, it is the long haired wild looking Serbian Chetnik who stops the bus as they travel through the Bosnian country. In Shot through the Heart, Slavkos bestial character is fully revealed in the mountain cottage in the woods, outside of the city. The two remaining films, Behind Enemy Lines and Savior are set in rural Bosnia. John Moore in Behind Enemy Lines uses deserted, wild and hostile Bosnian (in fact Slovak) countryside to emphasize the dangers of the enemy territory. The dark, cold colours of the rural setting complement dark colours and absence of light in the shots of the Serbian headquarters. Brown, green colour and cold bluish tones prevail in Saviour as well. In this case the countryside is depicted as a dangerous place where not only the forces of nature, but predominantly soldiers from all warring sides might attack at any moment. Nevertheless the rural landscape is also a place of exile. This is where Vera goes after she is rejected by her family for transgressing the unwritten medieval like warrior code of racial purity. One could say that the use of the setting creates the contrast between the civilized modern, European city and the tribal, ancient, dangerous, mysterious and backward countryside. Thus, the war was understood in the Balkanist way as the interface of the Oriental and irrational and the highly modern, progressive and rational Western civilization. With the exception of Savior directed by the Serbian born director Predrag Antonijevi, the films showed clear cut distinction between the good side of Bosnian
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Muslims and the evil side of Bosnian Serbs. According to filmmakers, the Bosnian Croats, if they took part in this war, took part only during the opening credits. This characterization is closely linked to the settings where the two aspects of the narrative coincide. The films tend to depict one identity and one nationality for its characters. Only in Shot Through the Heart is the issue of multiple loyalties addressed. Here the character of doctor Mio, a Serb, has a Muslim wife Amela and Vlado, claims to be a Yugoslav. In this case both characters stand on the side of peace and civilization. Antonijevi in Savior reverses distinction of protagonists and antagonists. When he takes side of the Serbs, he is trying to apologize and explain some of the war crimes by showing the similar crimes committed by the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Equally, the mixed marriage family and the Old Croatian man verbally expresses the anti-war message. An analysis of the individual characters that represent the warring parties in the films could prove helpful in understanding the images of the Balkan region presented in the films. Bosnian Serbs are often presented as antagonists in all of the stories including the apologetic . One can agree with Tomislav Z. Longinovic, who found the images of Serbs in the media during the Yugoslavian Wars similar to the images of cruel gothic vampires. According to Longinovic: Written between quotes and with a lowercase initial letter, the noun defining the largest Balkan nation demotes the serbs from a proper name to the media incarnation of evil. (48) Maya Miskovic in her analysis of Behind Enemy Lines and Harrisons Flowers found that the Serbs were reduced to murderous, dark villains with strong foreign accents. (450) In the analysed films, they often did not speak English. With their long dark hair blowing in the wind, like Slavko in Shot through the Heart and Chetnik in Welcome to Sarajevo, they perfectly fit the blood-thirsty savage stereotype. In most of the films Serbs are reduced
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to flat characters, whose main purpose is to serve as antagonists, who kill innocent civilians. Maybe the only exception is Slavko Stani in Shot through the Heart. Slavko is a more rounded character, who fights an internal conflict between his belief in the official nationalist ideology, his conscience and his friendship with Vlado. While the history of this friendship is explained, the origin of Slavkos nationalism is not clear. Only a few clues are provided during the border control scene. This demonstration of nationalism is not complete, as it may be interpreted as a trick to pass the guards. Only in the scene where Slavko prepares bullets while watching Radovan Karadi speech does it become clearer where his loyalties lie. Even in Saviour, seemingly a pro Serbian movie, the Serbs are depicted as dark people with black hair, and in the case of Veras father and brother even curly. We see them as cruel warriors like Goran, heartless fathers or revenge seeking patriarch. Serbian women are reduced to the role of mothers and the characters adapt to or/and display this role. Another depiction of Serbs is through their implied presence, such as in Welcome to Sarajevo, where we encounter them most often as invisible snipers, killing and wounding civilians. The ethnicity of the nameless civilians is not explicit. They could be Croat or Muslim. In Welcome to Sarajevo, Shot Through the Heart and Behind Enemy Lines, they are just civilians. They are portrayed as civilized, semi-Europeanized people who fell victim to the war. In Saviour we see clear a distinction between the Croat and Muslim soldiers and civilians. In reality there is no physical difference between the three ethnic groups as well as no language difference. Antonijevi in order to differentiate them used the uniforms, scarves and hair colour evoking the notion of the past. Bosnian Muslim soldiers wearing green scarves were introduced as Mujahedeen, in a Holy War against the enemies of Islam. Croatian officer resembled the ideal Nazi type of man, blond with

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blue eyes alluding to the Ustae regime from the World War II9. In conclusion it is possible to say that all the analysed films presented Serbs as the savages, who embody darkness, wildness, mystery, but were also backward, cruel and violent Orientals. In contrast, the city dwellers from the other two nationalities symbolized the civilized, modern, and cultured West. It is questionable why Bosnia and the individual sides involved in the conflict were depicted the way they were. One explanation is suggested by Todorova, Miskovic or Goldsworthy about Balkanism and positioning of the Balakan people, especially the Serbs as the others within a scale of whiteness, because of their religious affiliation with Orthodoxy. Although there is no visible difference between the people from the West and from the Balkans, the Balkan people are viewed as the members of a white race of the lesser value. Zlatan Longinovi claims that Western media depicted the Serbian president Slobodan Miloevi as Hitler and Serbs as incarnation of vampires, while the other nations were lucky to escape Yugoslavia. (48 - 53) However they were only to a lesser account the realization of the Balkan paradigm. Miskovic contrasts European history of nationalism, conquest, colonialism, World Wars, Holocaust, religious and ethnic cleansing within the territories of the liberal democratic states as the aberration of an otherwise civilized and rational West while atrocities in the former Yugoslavia is explained either by the culture of wars or the spurious notion of the Balkan mentality. (Miskovic 446) Racial interpretation based on the skin colour is not applicable here, because there is only small difference between the white people from the Balkans, Western Europe or United States. The difference is in the origin and belonging to certain ethnic, religious group and the region itself.
Milica Bakic-Hayden in her article Nesting Orientalism: The Case of Former Yugoslavia depicts how the East-West dichotomy and the notion of Orientalism is present not only within the East-West but also in the Balkan itself. Great contribution of the article was setting different views that each warring side had about the other into the Orientalist discourse.
9

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Another possible interpretation of having the national or ethnic and religious stereotypes in the films lies in the genre theory and the economic nature of the film industry as such. When Sarah Berry-Flint speaks about genres she begins by mentioning the popular usage of the term among the public. She states that film genres are ways of grouping films by style and story. a genre film is one that can be easily categorized with reference to a culturally familiar rubric. Genres offer prospective consumers a way to choose between films and help indicate the kind of audience for whom a particular movie was made.(25) Steve Neale points out that within popular culture, genres always exceed a group of films or texts He emphasizes the importance of advertisements, publicity photos and studio stills, reviews and so on, preparing viewers expectations even before they see the film by promoting its generic image (Grant 8) According to Neale different genres entail various regimes of verisimilitude, the notion propriety and of what is appropriate and therefore probable (or probable and therefore appropriate) (158). Regimes of verisimilitude vary from genre to genre and as such entails norms, rules and laws. Tzvetan Todorov notes that there are two broad types of verisimilitude applicable to generic representations: generic plausibility and a broader social or cultural verisimilitude. Neither equates to any direct sense of reality or the truth (Neale 158). Certain genres appeal more directly and consistently to the cultural expectations. Gangster films, war films and police procedural thrillers often mark their appeal by drawing on and quoting authentic and discourse, artefacts and texts such as maps, newspaper headlines, memoirs, archival documents and so on (Neale 159). Yet expectation of this cultural plausibility is transgressed by the requirement of the generic codes and its variations, which involves reductions of reality to a certain degree. This reduction is manifested both in the form of generic convention, iconography, setting and character type casting. Thomas Schatz demonstrates this reduction of the complex

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reality into the set of binary opposition as it appears in western movies and its depiction of fight between the black hats versus white hats. (Grant 31) Yet these genre conventions are not stable and evolve with the change of the main discourses. Grant uses as an example the evolution of western, which despite describing the same period from roughly 1840 to 1900, looks at the time from different perspectives. Stagecoach (1939) is about the depression era as Little Big Man (1970) is about the Vietnam War. Later, when the wild untamed nature and the American west was not considered as the frontier, the genre with its mythology transformed and was absorbed to science fiction where the infinite universe plays the role of the frontier and modern technology is one of the tools to conquer it. (Grant 30 - 31) According to Barry Langford changing perceptions of particular wars and of war itself, arising from the cumulative shared cultural experience of different conflicts and their embedded politics, elicit unusually direct effects in the shifting: tenor, iconography and generic verisimilitudes of war films (107). In his book Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond he gives a short survey of how the of the treatment of the major conflicts in the twentieth century, the World War I, the World War II, the Korean War and the War in Vietnam, evolved. While the World War I and the Vietnam War films tend to emphasize the futility, brutality and suffering of war, in the universal and the particular, World War II movies tend to emphasize the positive values of valour, patriotism and purposeful sacrifice. Similarly different national experience of conflicts and victory or defeat guarantee a remarkable dissimilarity in generic conventions the wars are rendered in different national cinemas. War films also exercise their capacity to structure popular memory and hence rewrite history. War films finally are known for interest and sometimes involvement (or interference) it attracts from the national governments and its implication in propaganda efforts (Langford 107 - 108). Similarly Philippa Gates in
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her article describing development of the war//combat film genre in the last two decades of the 20th century talks about the shift from realistic war films, where war is described as a hell and Americans such as victims to highly patriotic films idealizing GIs and their desire to do the right thing. The previous victimisation is overcome by American superiority. Now through technology and satellite surveillance, the enemy experiences all the risk and damage, while the U.S. experience only minimum causalities. Subjective accounts of the war saves its creators from politics and the question why should Americans be or not be there. It does not matter whether the conflict is right or wrong, the men are fighting there for right reason . There are no political wars, but the moral one, and the hero who fights them is the idealistic youth. The new war movies are characteristic of the moral certitude and the sense of brotherhood of soldiers with the right man in command. Heroes often disobey their order in order to do the right thing, regardless of consequences. (Gates 297- 308). When one considers the nature of the film as part of the popular culture, one has to take into account the nature of American film, which according to Douglas Kellner, has been controlled since the beginning by the entertainment industry rather than the institution of education or an art form. Its main attempt was and still is to attract audiences to its product. Film studios were repeating and reproducing the most successful formulas and types of films. (205) he further sees the development of the film genre and their role in the acculturation of the movie-going masses as the films were on one hand selling the American dream of wealth, affluence and love and passion on one hand, while on the other hand they had also subversive and negative effect, when they made fun of authority figures like comedies of Charlie Chaplin, or promoted promiscuity as romantic films and melodramas. (205-206) To put it in other words: Since films must attract large audiences, they needed to
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resonate to audiences dreams, fears, and social concerns, and thus inevitably reflected social mores, conflicts, and ideologies. (Kellner 206) Kellner uttered these words in connection to the studio era of the Hollywood production, but when he describes the new condition that came into existence in the 1970s, he mentions changed mode of productions, which involves more varied system of financing, which allowed making of more diverse and socially critical films. New technology and new means of film distributions as well as fragmentation of audience helped the spread of greater variety of films and also rise of popularity for independent films in the 1980s. (Kellner 213 - 217) As Douglas Kellner further states: So to fully understand Hollywood film, one needs insight into the production system, its codes and formulas, and the complex interaction of film and society, with film articulating social discourses, embedded in social struggles, and saturated with social meanings (Kellner and Ryan 1988) Thus, analysing the connection between Hollywood film and US society requires a multidimensional film criticism that situates its object within the context of the social milieu within which it is produced and received. (213) In order to examine the production of the films about the Balkan War one would need material dealing with the production of these films in particular. One can obtain some information about film production from the articles published in the daily press, however this information usually only to serve the purpose to sell the film and one definitely needs more to uncover the mode of production which influenced the final form of films. We might ask the question if for example Saviour would treat the three Yugoslav nationalities differently, hadnt it received unending support and cooperation from the government of the Republic of Montenegro, at that time still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Closing credits of Welcome to Sarajevo also
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contain thanks to the Presidency of Canton Sarajevo as well as the IFOR units stationed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the same time, would have the plot of Behind Enemy Line be different had it not received assistance from the U.S. Ministry of Defence? We cannot tell for sure because we have no exact information on if and how the official institutions interfered with the creative process. Anyway, one has to admits the fact that the film is a commodity and in the ideal case should at least return the costs invested in its production, It is probably that such a venture is proceeded by a market research or at least the idea is pitched to a producer who things he or she knows the tastes of their audiences. And still, there are many factors influencing the possible success of movie. One in particular might affect the form of the above discussed movies describing the Bosnian War, and it is a familiarity. It suggests that a news story has a stronger impact if the target audience is already familiar with the topic or the actors. Familiarity as one of the production values exists also in the film industry often demonstrated on the example of film genres. One of the textbooks for future directors explains: We know that cinema thrives on repetition and symmetries. The familiar image structure provides symmetry in the form of a recurrent, stable picture that glues together scattered imagery, especially in scenes that are fragmented into many shots or involve many participants. . . . Normally, the familiar image is planted somewhere in the beginning of a scene, then recurs several times in the middle, with resolution at the end (Proferes 12). We can suppose that if movie-goers choose to see a movie set during the Bosnian War they come to the movie theatre with a expectation concerning the form of the movie as well as its topic. If the American and Western European public was bombarded with the news stories about ethnic cleansing, siege of Sarajevo, breadlines

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massacres, internment camps, systematic rape of women and other atrocities committed predominantly by Serbs, it is natural that these pictures might find its way in the consequent films about the war, especially if these films were made in a short time after the end of a conflict, where these familiar images were still vividly present in the collective memory. As Angelina Jolie in her movie In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) demonstrates, they still are. Last but not least, when drawing a conclusion from depiction of the Bosnian War in Behind Enemy Lines, Welcome to Sarajevo, Savior and Shot Through The Heart mention should be made the fact that whatever has been written might be perceived differently by the audience. Stuart Hall with his article Encoding-Decoding drew attention on the audience and its reception of the media message. Media receivers are not the powerless mass, who could be injected with the media utterances and behave accordingly. First of all, it is them, who decide what media products they want to consume, where and in what way. Second of all, their reception and reaction to the media products is influenced by various factors. It is certain that Welcome to Sarajevo was seen differently by a former war correspondent Roy Gutman, and ordinary movie goer, who experienced the conflict only through mass media. It is probable that American audience see the films differently than audience in Slovakia or people from the Former Yugoslavia, because culture also plays an important role in the way we receive and decode visual images (Monaco 152) Therefore the finding we presented in this work are valid only into certain extent and might serve as the base for the large scale audience research which might show completely different results.

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von Oppen, Karoline. Reporting from Bosnia: reconceptualising the notion of a 'journalism of attachment'. Journal of Contemporary European Studies. 17. 1 (2009) 21-33. Print. Warshow, Robert. Movie Chronicle: The Western. Focus on the Western. Jack Nachbar ed. Engleswood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1973 45-56 Welcome to Sarajevo. Dir. Michael Winterbotton. Prod. Miramax Films, Channel Four Films, Dragon Pictures. Miramax Films. 1997. Film West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Part 1). Atlantic Monthly.Jan 1941: 110-131. The Atlantic. Web. 10 Feb. 2012 Wilmington, Michael. "War games; 'Behind Enemy Lines' is full of high-tech trickery like a flashy TV commercial;" Chicago Tribune 30 Nov. 2001: 1. NewsBank Archives. Web. 1 Feb. 2012. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe : the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford : Stanford UP, 1994. Print Yates, Robert. The Week In Reviews: New film: Savior: Quaid Pro Quo. The Observer 21 June 1998.. 009 Proquest. Web 3 Feb 2012.

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Resum (esky) Prce se zabv zobrazenm vlky v Bosn a Herzegovin ve vybranch americkch a britskch filmech. Analyzoval jsem filmy: John Moore a jeho Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Michael Winterbotton a Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), David Atwood a Shot Through the Heart (1998) a film Predraga Antonijevie Savior (1998). Ve filmech se objevovalo stereotypn zobrazovn regionu a jeho obyvatel, kter meme nalzt v americk a britsk literatue, filmu a masovch medich u od dob osvcenstv. Balkn byl ve vech filmech pedstavovn jako most mezi civilizac Orientu a Zpadem. Na jedn stran nem kouzlo Orientu, na druh mu vak chyb civilizovanost Zpadu. Filmy vnovan bosensk vlce zobrazuj Sarajevo jako bval run a kosmopolitn msto, zatm co venkov je prezentovan jako krsn, mystick, ale nebezpen. Bosent Srbov jsou zobrazeni jako inherentn nacionalistit, krvezniv lid, ijc v minulosti. Druh dv etnika vtinou splvaj do jednoho celku, kter se chov i vypad jako lid ijc v Zpadnch zemch, kte byli okolnostmi donuceni chopit se zbran. Prvn st diplomov prce pedkld strun pehled pin, prbhu, a vsledk vlky v Bosn a Herzegovin a pehled toho, jak se vyvjel cel obraz regionu v americk a britsk literatue, filmu a masovch medich. Druh st je u konkrtn analzou film. Prce je zakonen zvrem, kter se zabva analzou vsledk prce azkoum mon piny.

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Resume (English) This thesis deals with depiction of the Bosnian War in American and British film, in particular Behind Enemy Lines (2001 dir John Moore), Welcome to Sarajevo (1997 dir Michael Winterbotton), Shot through the Heart (1998 dir David Atwood) and Savior (1998 dir. Predrag Antonijevi). In these films, we found the stereotypical depiction of the whole Balkan region and its inhabitants, that was present in American and British Literature since the enlightenment era. The Balkans was presented in most of the films as the bridge connecting the Orient and the Western civilization. However, Balkans on one hand does not possess the magic and exoticism of the Orient, on the other hand it fails to be as developed as the West. Sarajevo is presented as once a bustling and cosmopolitan city, now destroyed by the war. The Bosnian countryside is shown as a beautiful, mysterious, but dangerous place to be. Bosnian Serbs are depicted as inherently nationalistic, bloodthirsty people living in the past. Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims are blended into the one entity, which behaves and looks like people living in the Western countries and were forced to take arms. First part of my thesis presents brief overview of the causes, course and the outcomes of the Bosnian War. Then we look at the evolution of the image of the whole region in the American and British literature, film and mass media. Second part, is the analysis of the particular

films as well as the summary of the common features found in them as well as reflection on the common features. The thesis ends with conclusion, where i summarize the finding

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