1160 Film Reviews

Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. Produced and directed

by Paul Mitchell and Angus Macqueen. 1995; color;
370 minutes (in five parts). A BBC/Discovery Channel
Co-production. Distributor: Discovery Channel.

Bosna! Produced by France 2 Cinema and Radio-TV

of Bosnia-Hercegovnia; directed by Bernard-Henri
Levi and Alain Ferrai; written by Bernard-Henri Levi
and Gilles Hertzog. 1994; color; 117 minutes. French
with English subtitles. Distributor: Zeitgeist, 247 Cen-
tre St., 2nd Floor, New York, N.Y. 10013.

Vukovar Poste Restante. Produced by Dank Muzdeka

Mandzuka and Steven North; directed by Boro Dras-
kovie; screenplay by Boro Draskovie and Maja Dras-
kovie. 1994; color; 96 minutes. Cyprus/Italy. Serbian/
Croatian with English subtitles. Distributor: Tara
Releasing, 124 Belvedere, No.5, San Rafael, Calif.
94901.

"0 ur generation didn't bother to distinguish between Serbs and Croats, Orthodox and
Catholics," says Anna, the heroine of Boro Draskovi6's Vukovar, on the eve of the
outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia. With despair, she adds, "Today, we're no longer blond
or brunette, fat or thin, witty or romantic. We're either Croats or Serbs." Had the film been set
in a Bosnian city such as Sarajevo instead of the eastern Slavonian city of Vukovar, one can
imagine the character adding-or subtracting-the label "Muslim" to the identity pot.
How was it that so many inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia, a state supposedly devoid of
conflicting ethnic or national identities, came so quickly to imagine themselves as members of
communities of fate, bound together in suffering and perhaps destined to annihilate "other"
communities? Historians will ask this question for years to come. The films reviewed here provide
some of the narrative building blocks to explain this disastrous development. While none of the
films provide sufficient explication, all provide graphic testimony of the horrors of the wars.
The six-hour, five-part (a sixth part covering the peace process is now in production)
documentary Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation provides remarkable coverage of pivotal moments in
the process leading to war and the war itself. (An accompanying book, Laura Silber and Allan
Little's Death of Yugoslavia, 1996, reinforces the film's argument.) The film's tight focus on
Yugoslavia's leaders, though unsatisfactory to those seeking the social roots of the war, is the
documentary's strength. The filmmakers present a clear thesis: blame for the origins and the
atrocities of the war must be placed squarely on the shoulders of these politicians. Although they
argue that there is plenty of blame to be spread between the various leaders, the filmmakers indict
the Serbian leadership under Slobodan Milosevi6 most forcefully as the primary creators of the
war's evils.
Death of a Nation begins by charting MiloseviC's rise to power. It provides stunning coverage
of his 1987 trip to Kosovo, the province in southern Serbia that borders Albania. While
approximately 90 percent of Kosovo's inhabitants are ethnic Albanians, the province is integral
to Serbian nationalist ideology. In MiloseviC's words, "Kosovo isn't just any part of Serbia. It's the
very heart of Serbia. All our history is in Kosovo." In Kosovo, Milosevi6 first opportunistically
embraced Serbian nationalism in order to propel his career. Speaking before an angry mob of
Kosovo Serb nationalists who had recently engaged in violent clashes with Kosovo's Albanian
police, Milosevi6 tells them, "No one should dare to beat you." This slogan, captured by television
cameras and broadcast on all state channels, became a rallying cry for Serbian nationalism.
Having established the political character and recounted the rise to power of the film's chief

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 Film Reviews 1161

villain, Death of a Nation moves on to present the rise of the film's secondary villain, Croatia's
Franjo Tudjman, only briefly detouring to examine the essentially democratic nature of
contemporary developments in the northern republic of Slovenia. As the camera pans a mass rally
in Zagreb, Croatia, on Palm Sunday 1990, the narrator tells us that while Milosevic had been the
first Yugoslav leader to inflame his people, the Serb threat "provoked the people of neighboring
Croatia to respond." The crowd waves palms and carries placards emblazoned with Tudjman's
visage and the slogan, "Only we decide the fate of our own Croatia." Introducing Tudjman, a
speaker heralds: "On this day Christ triumphant came to Jerusalem. He was greeted as a Messiah.
Today our capital is the new Jerusalem. Franjo Tudjman has come to his people." With Milosevic
the opportunist and Tudjman the true believer in charge of Serbia and Croatia, the descent to
war, the film implies, was almost inevitable.
As the bullets and shells began to fly in Slovenia, then Croatia, and finally in Bosnia, Death
of a Nation leaves little doubt where the principal blame for the war's atrocities must rest:
Milosevic and his lieutenants, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan KaradZic, and Serbian General
Ratko Mladic. Tudjman and his cohorts, especially Gojko Susak, his minister of defense, are also
cited for provoking conflict and engendering a virulent mass nationalism that emboldened Croats,
albeit on a smaller scale, to conduct atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia as gruesome as those
committed by the Serbs. The role of the international community and its failure to intervene on
behalf of the innocent victims of the wars of the Yugoslav succession are also critically evaluated
in the film. Death of a Nation takes the story of the Yugoslav tragedy through the Serbian mass
executions of the refugees of Srebrenica in July 1995 and the Croatian assault on the
Serbian-inhabited territory of the "Krajina" in Croatia and the subsequent mass exodus of Serbs
from the region in August 1995. Unfortunately, the film covers these last two tragedies hastily,
obviously limited by production deadlines.
Boro DraskoviC's Vukovar complements Death of a Nation's top-down approach to the
Yugoslav nightmare. This fictional story views the conflict from the eyes of ordinary citizens. Set
in eastern Croatia, Vukovar is the love story of Anna, of "Croatian" descent, and Toma, of
"Serbian" descent. The film thus evokes Romeo and Juliet, but it diverges from Shakespeare in
important respects. Anna's and Toma's families and friends fully support their romance and
marriage. It is the wider and, in the filmmakers' perspective, nonsensical "Croatian" and
"Serbian" communities that conspire against them. Most important, the war in Yugoslavia
seemingly destroys their love.
Vukovar's essential anti-war and anti-nationalist message has not prevented it from
generating controversy. The Croatian government alleges that the film carries a pro-Serbian bias
and for this reason prevented it from being screened at the United Nations. While even an
outside observer can understand the basis for this interpretation because of the film's emphasis
on the descent to ethnic violence within a Croatian community, as opposed to Serbian attacks
from outside, Vukovar does not limit its criticism of nationalism to the Croats.
While Vukovar examines the impact of nationalism and the war on the everyday lives of the
citizens of this mixed city, it also evaluates the protagonists' lack of ethnic or national identities
and how the multinational environment of the pre-war era enabled them to transcend narrow
national identification. For Anna and Toma, a restricted Croatian and Serbian national identity
was unimaginable. Croatian and Serbian nationalism was an unjust interference to their giddy and
romantic love, their desire to live "normal" lives together, and their dreams. In this sense,
Vukovar is part of a larger genre of anti-war films, where protagonists characteristically ask
themselves and each other, why this conflict, this war? The "enemies" are not the enemies of the
protagonists but fictional constructs created by others. Vukovar highlights the powerlessness of
the protagonists to disclaim these senseless categorizations. As the war increasingly impinges on
Anna's and Toma's lives, they (especially Anna) become more and more confused about which
side, if any, is "just," confused about their own identities, and confused about each other.
There is no trace of such confusion in the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi's
propagandistic Bosna! For Levi, the war in Bosnia is a straightforward morality play pitting
absolute good against absolute evil. Bosna!-a film produced in part by the state television
network of Bosnia-Hercegovina-lacks any nuance. The war is a struggle between the evil forces

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1996

1162 Film Reviews

of fascism, led by Milosevic, Serbs allied with him, and to a lesser extent Tudjman's Croats, versus
the multinational and hence anti-fascist forces of the Bosnian government, led by AJija
Izetbegovic.
Bosna! is a sincere, heart-wrenching plea for Western intervention on behalf of the Bosnian
forces. It is supported with extremely graphic images of Serbian and Croatian atrocities. While
the film's strident posture is problematic, it is thought provoking. The film suggests that attempts
to portray the war in detached, even if critical, terms, as in Death of a Nation, provide unwitting
support for war criminals and fascists. Indeed, Bosna! attacks the "do-nothing" policies of the
West (filming was completed prior to Western intervention in 1995 leading to the Dayton peace
agreement) nearly as severely as the policies of the Serbian and Croatian aggressors.
The principled and desperate cry for support and Western intervention on behalf of Bosnia's
"anti-fascist" "Resistance fighters" unfortunately yields a film with multiple internal contradic-
tions. Most important, Levi argues that Bosnia, and Sarajevo in particular, was an environment
in which various ethnic identities coexisted so harmoniously that a unified identity transcended
ethnicity. He stresses that Western observers usually mislabeled the forces fighting on behalf of
the Bosnian government as "Muslim," when in fact they came from all three of Bosnia's ethnic
groups. Having made this point, however, the film fails to reconcile this multinational solidarity
with the barbarous behavior of Bosnia's own citizens. Graphic pictures presented in Bosna! testify
that Muslim men died in Bosnia at the hands of other "Bosnians" after being forced to show that
they were circumcised. Clearly, the multinational "harmony" that Levi sees in Bosnia, the
"Balkan Switzerland," to the extent that it existed, was fragile. Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat
"fascists" were just as much a part of the Bosnian landscape as the ethnically transcendent
"Bosnians" celebrated in Levi's film.
All three films, therefore, leave the viewer wondering about the social origins of the war and
the bestial atrocities ordinary Yugoslavs committed. While we need to illuminate the existence
and maintenance of multinational, transnational, and anti-national identities in the former
Yugoslavia, as Vukovar and Bosna! do, and while we cannot forget the pivotal role that national
leaders have played in arousing nationalism, as Death of a Nation reminds us, films and books on
the former Yugoslavia need to begin to explain the dark forces of the conflict in towns and
villages, not just in the halls of power.

Langdon T. Healy Indiana University, Bloomington

LATIN AMERICA

Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business. Produced

by David Meyer with Helena Solberg; written and
directed by Helena Solberg. 1994; black & white and
color; 90 minutes. Distributor: Noon Pictures, 611
Broadway, No. 742, New York, N.Y. 10012 (212)
254-4118.

n 1939, Carmen Miranda stepped onto American soil, albeit in platform shoes, to showcase
I Brazilian music in Lee Shubert's Broadway revue On the Streets of Paris. She left Brazil as
a cultural ambassador with the blessing of Brazilian President Getulio Vargas, but, for many
Americans, she became the "Brazilian bombshell" with the tutti-frutti hat and the funny accent,
trademarks that would catapult her to a movie career in Hollywood, highlighted by blockbuster

AMERI CAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1996