After reading Steven Galloway's "The Cellist of Sarajevo", several instances served as a stark reminder of the dehumanizing efforts of modern warfare, like the kind practiced by the Serbs on the Croats and Muslims in Sarajevo. In similar fashion to the Nazi's, the Serbs sought to and succeeded in making the inhabitants of Sarajevo bend to their will through the illegal act of terror. In the article by KJ Riordan, "Shelling, Sniping, and Starvation: The Law of Armed Conflict and the Lessons of the Siege of Sarajevo" she states that people use terror to, "…break the will of the enemy to fight or...cause the civilian population to lose confidence in a government that cannot protect them (165)." Forced to scurry through the streets like mice running from the looming threat of a hungry cat, the civilians that we meet in "The Cellist:" Dragan, Kenan, and to a lesser extent, Arrow, seem shocked to find themselves in such an unbelievably bad situation. They are even forced to treat each other like animals. We see an example of this when Dragan becomes Emina's guinea-pig for crossing the street and leaving their place of safety. Dragan did the same thing earlier to a couple trying to make their way across the city; waiting to see if a sniper was in the area, testing him out on the couple.
On the other hand, in Welcome to Sarajevo, the civilians go about their everyday business, at least at the beginning of the film. Women go to the hairdresser, people go to church. Humans, through our ability to overcome oppression and carry on with the customs that shape civilized society, are shown to be adapting, at the beginning of the film, far better then by the films ending, the situation in Sarajevo having gotten progressively more atrocious. There is definitely some dehumanizing going on on the part of the reporters in the film. They seem to exist in a separate world; able to come and go as they please, able to separate themselves, at least at first, from the carnage around them. One part in the film that struck me, as well as the characters, was when Risto and Henderson have to explain to the little girl in the hospital that her parents have been killed in a shell-attack. Not waiting for their sympathy and help, and perhaps unknowingly realizing the psychological distance between them, she gets up and walks away from the adults. The reporters, in their enthusiastic fervor in being out in the field, mindlessly film the suffering of the inhabitants of the city without offering any succor, only later realizing that the civilians are not merely fodder for their respective news networks, but people who are living under constant terror of snipers and shells.
Don't forget the mother of the Bride who is shot and killed on her way to her daughter's wedding. Do more with the Kenan and Arrow in your discussion of the novel. Also, What is the function of the cellist in the novel?
ReplyDeleteIt was completely dehumanizing, the way that the foreigners treated (or didn't treat?) the native people. I know that it wasn't a conscious decision, probably just a mindless separation between work and compassion. Mixing the two just seems like a bad idea at this point, in this war. These photographer and newscasters don't realize the gravity of the situation on a personal level. I believe that they saw it as so worldly, something that everyone should know about, but not something directly impacting them. It's like you said, it isn't until later on, after they see many people die and many people suffer that they can see the humanity in these people. That they can see the light in their eyes being snuffed out.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was watching Welcome to Sarajevo, the first thought I had about the reporters was that they treated the people of Sarajevo like animals, like they were filming some kind of National Geographic special on wildlife fighting in savannah or something. They watched people killing one another, but they never entered the picture. Filming pedestrians being killed by snipers had the same feel as a zebra being attacked by a lion—it was just natural that animals kill one another. The reporters were, like you said, living in a separate world from their subjects, exempt from the fighting and the hatred, exempt from the fear, as if they were safe in some kind of glass box while death and destruction was all around them. They heard bombs, but they knew the bombs were not meant for them; the attacks carried no power and had no meaning to the reporters. The media only put themselves in as much danger as they wanted to be in—at any moment they could pack up and leave. Sarajevo was not their city, their home. They did not have the same kind of emotional connection with the people and the places.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I thought it was interesting how once there was interaction between the reporters and the locals, everything changed. Once the reporters stepped out of their little glass box and realized that the war was not something that was just news, but a reality for the people around them, their attitudes seemed to change. The jokes stopped; I remember specifically the mood on the way to the first really graphic scene in front of the hospital, when the two reporters were contesting whose story was worse, noting that one story made the other seem like Jane Austen. Once Henderson saw the pools of blood and mangled bodies, he saw that the people weren’t just dead—many were still alive, mumbling, moaning, out of their minds with what has happened to them. The siege was not something that just came and went for these people. It was a reality that they had to live with, something that left scars. A dead person has no voice, no soul. They can’t tell reporters what happened to them, how they died or how they lived. Henderson and the other reporters though finally saw that war not only took lives, it ruined those of the living, like the little girl who had no parents and no future.
As the main character, Henderson had this realization early in the film. Other characters, however, seemed to have different understandings of and reactions to the war. For example, one scene I found interesting was how the producer reacted to Risto’s death. For most of the film, she doesn’t go out on the front line and see the destruction of the city for herself. She is aware of it, as she sees the reporters’ footage, but as a producer, she is safely tucked away in the media control room, watching the war from a distance. Innocent people can be shot or blown to pieces in the street, but when she sees Risto dead, she finally has an emotional reaction. For her, he was the first person to actually be killed—all the other people were just news.
It was rather hard to expect that these journalists were there to report the story and did not stop at all to help those they saw along the way. I was trying myself to understand as you said the women going to the hairdresser and the others going to church as if nothing was happening. At any moment they could have been shot to death. I guess as humans we tend to try and ignore as long as possible the reality of tradgetic acts. This is one of self defense reflexes, I guess in a way this could be a good thing. In the situation that these people were going through on an everyday basis, what do they have to lose to act normal?
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