Those Shocking Shaking Days

Auf den ersten Blick ist THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS von Selma Doborac (AT/BIH 2016, 88’) mehr ein Essay denn ein Film, mehr ein Lesen und Nachvollziehen von Gedankengängen denn von Bilderfolgen. Selma Doborac sucht die Gegend ehemaliger Konflikte auf und filmt vor Ort halb zerstörte oder verwitterte Häuser in unbewegten, stillen Einstellungen. Damit versucht sie aufzunehmen, was unfassbar ist – nicht nur ungreifbar aufgrund der Vergangenheit der Ereignisse, sondern auch rein rationell nicht zu fassen aufgrund der Ausmaße der Gräuel. Es würde nicht weit genug greifen, hier Bilder der Gewalt kritisch zu kommentieren. Gerade bezüglich (kriegerischer) Gewaltdarstellungen zeigt sich eine im Bild praktizierte Bildkritik problematisch, weil die dargestellte Gewalt trotz des kritischen Kommentars daran im Bild sichtbar bleibt und damit eine Form der Affirmation (1) erfährt. Marie-José Mondzain spricht daher nicht von einer Gewalt in Bildern, sondern von der "Gewalt des Bildes", welche "entfesselt [wird], sobald dieses die Identifikation des Undarstellbaren im Sichtbaren ermöglicht. Was darauf hinausläuft, zu sagen, daß das Bild sich nur in der Unähnlichkeit erhält […]" (2)

In Doborac’ Film wird die Gewalt also nicht gezeigt, sondern sie wird verhandelt und zwar in zumeist suggestiv wirkenden Fragestellungen: ob eine "kritische Betrachtung" mittels "Visualität zu bewerkstelligen" sei, beginnt sie mit weißer Schrift auf schwarzem Grund. Sie verbindet die Einstellung eines Hauses, an dem an manchen Stellen der Putz noch zu erkennen ist und in dessen Vordergrund eine hellere Stelle in der Wiese darauf hinweist oder darauf hinweisen könnte, dass hier eventuell einmal noch ein weiteres Haus stand, mit dem gräulichen Denkbild toter Körper in gleißender Sommersonne. Mit diesem "Clash" der Medien Schrift und Bild schafft sie im Endeffekt eine Bühne, auf der zugleich nichts und alles zu sehen ist. Wenn man den Gedanken des Schriftzuges folgt, schieben sich andere Bilder vor das innere Auge. Der Text evoziert förmlich die Bilder der Gewalt. Was dabei von der Erinnerung imaginiert beziehungsweise von der Imagination erinnert wird, sind nicht notwendiger Weise Szenen aus Nachrichtenclips zum Balkankonflikt. Dennoch vermag es der Text, Bilder zu hervorzurufen, die wir für den Moment dem Balkankonflikt zuordnen. Die ikonoklastische Kritik des Films scheint genau darauf abzuzielen: dass wir uns Bilder von Leichen in gleißender Sonne vorstellen können – und zwar nicht aufgrund eigener Erfahrung, sondern weil Gräuel-Bilder wie diese einfach im Vorabendprogramm gezeigt wurden und immer noch werden. Die Suggestivfrage, woran wir, also die Öffentlichkeit, die hier zusieht, denn denken, wenn wir an Sommer denken, lässt die Lebensrealität des Krieges viel mehr mit unserer eigenen, vom Krieg verschonten Lebensrealität auf eine Weise kollidieren, wie es die Nachrichten-Kurzclips unter dem Banner der Tatsachen-Vermittlung nicht vermocht hätten. Nämlich auf jene bild-kritische Weise, die kurz zum Stillstand auffordert und zu einer Reflexion dessen, was hier gezeigt wird.

"[D]urch das harmlose, unsensationalistische Bild Verweise zu erschließen", so beschreibt Selma Doborac ihre Methode im Film und fragt zugleich, ob diese "zum Scheitern verurteilt[]" sei. (3) Da sie die Frage als Schrift in das – scheinbar – "harmlose" Bild stellt und es so zum Schriftbild umdimensioniert, könnte hier ein Angriff auf die Bildlichkeit mithilfe der Schrift attestiert werden, die somit nicht nur einen Gutteil des Bildraums einnimmt, sondern deren sprachliche Komplexität – die Verschachtelung der Sätze über mehrere Ansichten hinaus – alle Aufmerksamkeit auf sich und so vom Bild wegzieht. Nicht nur wird man hier mit den Gedankengängen, die man nachzuvollziehen bemüht ist, konfrontiert, sondern dieses Bemühen des Folgens entwickelt ganz von selbst eine Negation des Bildes – und zwar sowohl auf formaler als auch auf inhaltlicher Ebene. Indem diese Negation in die bildliche Struktur integriert wird, gelangt etwas zur Lesbarkeit, das man mit Benjamin als einen "bestimmte[n] kritische[n] Punkt der Bewegung in ihrem Innern" (4) beschreiben könnte. In gewissem Sinn kann diese Bewegung auch verstanden werden als die inhärente Dialektik am Grund des Bildes, also das jeglicher Form vorauszusetzende Kontinuum der Unbestimmtheit. Die Kombination einer unbewegten Ruinenaufnahme mit einer bildkritischen Beschriftung produziert ein Bild, das seine eigene Geschichte rekapituliert und so seine Bedeutung als gegenwärtiges Geschichtsbild begründet.
(Lena Stölzl)


(1) Vgl.: Alloa, Emmanuel: Darstellen, was sich in der Darstellung allererst herstellt: Bildperformanz als Sichtbarmachung. In: Schwarte, Ludger (Hg.): Bild-Performanz. Die Kraft des Visuellen. München: Fink 2011, S. 33-60, v.a. S. 49ff.
(2) Mondzain, Marie-José: Können Bilder töten? Zürich – Berlin: diaphanes 2006, S. 21
(3) THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS, R.: Selma Doborac, AT/BIH 2016, 88’, 34’49’’-35’38’’
(4) Benjamin, Walter: Konvolut N. In: Gesammelte Schriften V, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991, S. 570-611, S. 577

(Auszug aus dem Vortrag "Ikonoklastische Bildstrategien", gehalten im Zuge der Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft am 30.09.2016 an der Freien Universität Berlin)

From the very beginning to the very end, this dense, essential and polemical essay meticulously deconstructs the visual and intellectual narrative and, furthermore, conceptualization of the cinema of war and its contradictions and complexity in the face of memory and individual trauma. Through a tremendously powerful form that conveys a deep reflection around ethical and esthetical questions about the use of images, the film challenges the interpretation of the past and the present, intelligently combining archival footage and contemporary sequence. The Award goes to THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS by Selma Doborac.

Members of the Jury: Richard Brouillette, Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez, Emília Tavares

Ein Film über Krieg, über die Frage nach dessen medialer Repräsentation, über Verantwortlichkeit und Schweigen. Über Schrecken, die sich unserem Verstand entziehen. Those Shocking Shaking Days ist eine beeindruckende und ungewöhnliche Antikriegsdoku. Gezielt überlastet sie die Betrachter/innen mit herausfordernden Fragen: Durch die Verweigerung von visueller Explizität drängt sie, das Bild textlich überfrachtend, zur kritischen Reflexion von Darstellungskonventionen und eigenen Bilderwartungen.
(MK, Diagonale, 2016)

A film about war, about the issue of its medial representation, about responsibility and remaining silent: About horror that withdraws from consciousness. Those Shocking Shaking Days is an impressive and unusual anti-war documentary. The film deliberately overwhelms its viewers with challenging questions: by refusing visual explicitness, its image overloaded with text, the film forces critical reflection of the conventions of representation and our own expectations of pictures. 
(MK, Diagonale, 2016)

The prize for the best sound design goes to what is perhaps the most intellectual and radical of this year’s documentary films. A minimalist film that works with silence across long stretches, thereby making tangible the power of sound as a narrative means. Sound design as an art of omission and deployment at the right moment. In soft tones, this is also a film about doubting the possibility of making a film about war. Members of the jury:Jenny Billeter (program director Solothurner Filmtage, Kino Xenix, CH), Rüdiger Suchsland (film critic, director, DE), Marten Persiel (filmmaker, DE)

Wir vergeben den Preis an einen Film, der die Frage aufwirft, wie und ob man Krieg filmisch darstellen kann und an inhaltliche wie formale Grenzen führt. Er provoziert einen Dialog zwischen Regisseurin und Publikum: intensiv, hochintellektuell und lange nachwirkend.

Mitglieder der Jury Wettbewerb – Local Artist:
Robert Hinterleitner, Katja Jäger, Jola Wieczorek 

This prize is awarded to a film that raises the question of how and whether war can be depicted in film and takes us to the limits of content and form. It provokes a dialogue between the director and the audience: intense and highly intelligent, it leaves a lasting impression.

Members of the jury Competition – Local Artist: Robert Hinterleitner, Katja Jäger, Jola Wieczorek

Ist es möglich Krieg mit Mitteln des Kinos zu repräsentieren? Diese Frage bedingt tausende andere Fragen, genauso wie Krieg selbst tausende Masken birgt. Der Film konzertiert sich auf die Kriege der 1990-er Jahre des ehemaligen Jugoslawien: Ein europäischer Krieg, ein anachronistischer Krieg mit Massengräbern und Konzentrationslagern, der zwar technologisch hoch entwickelten Waffensystemen kontrastierend gegenüberstand dabei jedoch ein Krieg war, der enorme mediale Aufmerksamkeit erfuhr, und zwar durch unerträgliche Bilder, die alsbald sie per TV-Bildschirm ausgestrahlt waren zum Gemeinplatz verkamen. Schon wieder eine abgegriffene Analyse, mögen Sie denken. Gewiss nicht. Denn um die verklungene Bildermacht umzulagern und persönliche Verbindlichkeiten wiederherzustellen, um so jeden und jede an die eigene Verantwortung in einer Welt, in der das Böse nicht nur durch Kriminelle wirkt, zu erinnern, hat Selma Doborac in ihrem ersten Langfilm, in extremer Rigorosität, Fragen, auf vielfältig erdenkliche Weisen einen Film über Krieg zu machen, angeordnet. Bilder von Massengräbern werden durch weniger spektakuläres Videomaterial, das teils von Kämpfenden selbst aufgenommen wurde, abgelöst oder durch 16-mm-Aufnahmen von verlassenen Häusern, die durch die Natur überwuchert wurden, die sowohl auf ihre Vergangenheit hindeuten als ihre Gegenwart bedeuten. In einer Aufschlüsselung der Entstehung der Macharten von Kriegsbildern durch eine endlose Serie von Fragen, die zwangsläufig zu neuen Fragen führen, die sich als invasive Texttitel oder teils in Form in einer Erzählerstimme, die nach Nachrichtensprecher klingt, vollführen, zerlegt der Erzähler gleichsam Mechanismen der Perzeption, aber auch jene des Begriffsvermögens, der Erinnerung, sogar jene der einfachsten Kommunikation in deren Einzelbestandteile. Gerade darin und gerade deshalb wird die Grundfrage nach der Sprache des Kinos erhoben und der Film wird zu einer einzigartigen Erfahrung, die theoretisch ist und autobiografisch zugleich.

(FID Marseille, CG, 2016)

Is it possible to represent war with the tools of cinema? This question raises a thousand others, just like war itself wears a thousand masks. The film focuses on the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia: a European war, an anachronistic war with mass graves and concentration camps contrasting with the high tech weaponry of modern conflicts, and above all a war that received a great deal of media attention, with unbearable images becoming commonplace as soon as they were broadcast on TV screens.
Yet another hackneyed analysis, you might think. Certainly not. Because in order to restore the faded power of images and personal accounts, and to remind everyone of their responsibility in a world where evil isn’t only wrought by war criminals, Selma Doborac, in her first full-length feature film, has set out to question, with extreme rigour, all the possible ways to make a film about war. Mass grave images are replaced by less spectacular video footage filmed by fighters themselves, or by 16mm shots of abandoned houses reclaimed by nature, that belong to the present as well as to the past.By breaking down the making of war images through a series of questions endlessly leading on to new ones, in the form of invasive subtitles or voice-overs sounding like news reports, the narrator also takes to pieces the mechanisms of perception, comprehension, memorialisation, and even simply communication itself. In doing so, the very language of cinema is called into question and the film becomes a unique experience, at once theoretical and autobiographical.
(CG, FIDMarseille, 2016)

Peut-on, par les moyens du cinéma, figurer la guerre ? Cette question en ouvre mille autres, comme la guerre elle-même porte mille masques. La guerre ici, c’est celle des Balkans dans les années 1990 : une guerre Européenne, anachronique, dans laquelle les charniers et les camps de concentration contrastent avec l’arsenal high tech des conflits modernes, et surtout une guerre médiatisée dont les images insoutenables sont devenues banales dès que diffusées sur les écrans de télévision. Analyse rebattue ? Certes non : pour redonner aux images et aux témoignages leur puissance perdue, mais aussi à chacun ses responsabilités dans un monde où le mal n’est pas le seul fait des criminels de guerre, Selma Doborac, dans ce premier long-métrage, entreprend avec rigueur extrême de questionner toutes les manières possibles de faire un film sur la guerre.Aux images de charnier se substituent celles, moins spectaculaires, filmées en vidéo par les combattants eux-mêmes, ou des plans tournés en 16mm montrant des maisons abandonnées, rendues à la nature, appartenant aussi bien au présent qu’au passé. Décomposant la fabrication de l’image de guerre par une suite de questions qui s’enchâssent sans fin, sous forme de sous-titres envahissants ou d’une voix-off aux faux airs de bulletin d’information, le narrateur démonte du même coup les mécanismes de perception, de compréhension, de mémorialisation, et même tout simplement de communication : remettant en cause jusqu’au langage cinématographique et transformant le film en une expérience unique, à la fois théorique et autobiographique. (CG, FIDMarseille, 2016)

After a long deliberation we have decided to award a voice whose youth was as breathtakingly violent that on screen it was off, mute.
That voice has made a tour force which was to turn her film into a tool box as each question that is fired at you might be of extreme help considering the turmoil we are going through today.
How can we represent war? Can the tools of cinema achieve this daunting task? Is there a possible "fair" image of it that can be made? How can one live with the unbearable and how can one remember it of course as the film unfolds we understand that this is the life story of a young girl who was probably as tall as a stack of three apples when war started to affect her country.
This film is not an easy watch, it is literally a punch in the face, that allows its director but us as well with her, to stand up straight, to live up a little more, not to say to be much more armed.
The Beauregard Award is for THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS.
(Marine Hugonnier)

International Competition Jury composed of Eva SANGIORGI, Violeta BAVA, Marine HUGONNIER, Raphael NADJARI, Vlado SKAFAR.

Après une longue délibération nous avons choisi de récompenser une voix dont la jeunesse est aussi violente que dérangeante qu´à l´écran elle est off, c´est à dire muette.Cette voix a réussi un tour de force en faisant de son film une boite à outil car chaque question qu´il nous adresse peut nous aider à affronter les évènements d´aujourd´hui.Comment figurer la violence et la guerre ? Comment la retranscrire au moyen du cinéma ? Existe-t-il une image juste de celle ci ? Comment vivre l´insoutenable, et s´en souvenir aussi tout simplement car à mesure que le film avance on comprend qu´il s´agit du récit d´une vie, et plus particulièrement d´une jeune fille qui au moment des faits ne devait pas être plus haute que trois pommes. Ce film est sec, difficile, pour tout dire c´est un coup de poing, qui permet au narrateur, mais aussi à nous, de se tenir un peu plus droit, plus digne aussi et d´être très certainement mieux armé. Le Prix Beauregard est pour THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS.

(Marine Hugonnier)Jury présidé par Eva SANGIORGI, composé de Violeta BAVA, Marine HUGONNIER, Raphael NADJARI, Vlado SKAFAR.

A Special Mention for a first film is awarded to Selma Doborac’s Those Shocking Shaking Days for the way it forces us to think fundamentally about how war can be depicted, for its powerful aesthetic appeal, and because this topic is of greater relevance than ever today.
(Thomas Bauer)

Jury chaired by Claire Doyon, members of the jury: Katinka BOCK, Isabelle GODEFROY, Thomas BAUER, Richard BROUILLETTE.

Pour la façon dont le film nous projette dans une réflexion essentielle sur la possibilité de représenter la guerre, pour la puissance de sa proposition esthétique et parce que plus que jamais aujourd´hui cette question se pose, nous décernons une Mention Spéciale du premier film à THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS de Selma Doborac. (Thomas Bauer)

Jury présidé par Claire DOYON, composé de Katinka BOCK, Isabelle GODEFROY, Thomas BAUER, Richard BROUILLETTE.

Unser Hauptpreis geht an einen Film, der auf schonungslose, mutige, souveräne Art mit filmischen Konventionen bricht. Ein Film, der das Filmische mit radikalem Purismus zurückführt auf seine Elemente Bild, Ton, Text und Sprache. Und dabei nicht nur das Medium an sich hinterfragt, sondern auch, am Beispiel des Bosnienkriegs, die konventionelle mediale Darstellung von Krieg und Kriegsgräuel.
So entsteht ein völlig originäres und dabei nie selbstzweckhaftes Werk von beeindruckender Kraft und intellektueller Tiefe. Ein Film, wie man ihn noch nicht gesehen hat. Ein Film, den die, die ihn gesehen haben, nie mehr vergessen werden.
Wir, die Österreich-Jury, freuen uns sehr, den Preis für den Besten Österreichischen Dokumentarfilm an Those Shocking Shaking Days von Selma Doborac verleihen zu dürfen.
(Albert Meisl)

Jurymitglieder: Judith Benedikt, Albert Meisl, Thomas Reider

Our main award goes to a film that breaks with cinematic conventions in a merciless, courageous and sovereign way. By means of radical purism the film seeks to lead back the cinematic approach to its elements image, sound, text and language. And it not only questions its own medium but also by using the Bosnian War as an example, it questions the media representation of war and war atrocities.This is how a completely original piece of an impressive strength and intellectual depth is created, thereby denying any autotelic purpose. A film which has not yet been seen before. A film which, for those who have seen it, will never be forgotten. We, the Jury for the Austrian Competition, are extremely delighted to award the prize for the Best Austrian Documentary Film to Those Shocking Shaking Days by Selma Doborac.
(Albert Meisl; translation from German by Mariana Agria)

Jury members: Judith Benedikt, Albert Meisl, Thomas Reider

Thematisiert und in Betracht gezogen werden das Scheitern, die Unsagbarkeit, nicht zuletzt auch die Überforderung. Die der Filmemacherin und die der Adressierten. Doch findet sich Selma Doborac in ihrem Essayfilm THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS damit nie ab. Lange und statisch ruhen die Bilder von verlassenen Häusern im quadratischen Format, ohne dass hier irgendetwas in Ruhe gelassen würde. Sprache überwuchert das Bild wie die Zweige, Sträucher und Gräser die ehemals bewohnten Gebäude. Die Text-Inserts zerfasern, zersetzen die uns dargebotenen, visuellen Informationen und schreiben sich ihrer Struktur ein wie die Pflanzen in die Fassade. Doch die in Form herausfordernder Fragen ausufernden Satzlandschaften überdecken dabei nicht, sondern legen frei: die Methode, die Komplexität, das Unbehagen, die Notwendigkeit. In dieser filmischen Annäherung an den Bosnienkrieg und an das Phänomen Krieg im Allgemeinen geht es unter anderem "um den Versuch eine verstümmelte Welt zu besingen", wie es Doborac in Anlehnung an ein Gedicht von Adam Zagajewski selbst einmal beschreibt. Es ist eine Annäherung, die um die Grenzen von Verbild- und Versprachlichung weiß und trotzdem nicht drum herumredet. Die das schiere Konstatieren, den reinen Beobachter-Status leid ist und die stattdessen in viele Wunden Finger legt. Ein selbstreflexives, scharfsinniges Philosophieren, "ein Film mit blauen Flecken" (Jean-Pierre Rehm). Dem Einzelschicksal verpflichtet. Dem Universellen verschrieben.

(Amos Borchert, Gegenkino Film Festival, 2017)

Thematized and considered are the act of failing, ineffability, also, and not least, the feeling of being overchallenged. As a filmmaker and as an addressed audience. However, Selma Doborac never reconciles herself in her essay film THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS. Long and static pictures of abandoned houses rest in square format without leaving anything too much at peace here. Language overgrows the picture like branches, bushes and grasses that once inhabited buildings. Textual inserts fray out, undermine the visual information presented and encode themselves into their structure like the plants into the houses´ facades. In doing so, however, these sprawling sentential formal landscapes of challenging questions do not overlay but lay open: a method, a complexity, a discomfort, a necessity. This cinematic approach to the Bosnian war and to war in general is among other things about "the attempt to sing the praises of a maimed world," like Doborac describes it once referring to a poem of Adam Zagajewski. It is an approach conscious of the confines of both visualization and verbalization, that still does not beat about the bush, being weary of merely stating things, of pure observer status, and which instead brings up many painful topics. A self-reflexive, sharp-witted philosophizing, "a film with bruises" (Jean-Pierre Rehm). Committed to individual fate. Dedicated to the universal. 

(Amos Borchert, Gegenkino Film Festival, 2017)

A radical and uncompromising film essay about the (im)possibility of representing the horrors of war. The filmmaker Selma Doborac takes as its starting point the war in Bosnia (1992–1995) and in a truly shocking way (but not in a way we would expect) confronts us both with our position of an observer and a consumer of images at the same time. A film about war, the perception of war and artistic expression as a weapon against indifference.

Radikalen in brezkompromisen filmski esej o (ne)zmožnosti upodabljanja vojnih grozot. Avtorica Selma Doborac vzame za izhodišče vojno v Bosni (1992–1995) in nas na resnično pretresljiv način (a spet ne na način, ki bi ga pričakovali) sooči z našo pozicijo opazovalca in hkrati porabnika podob. Film o vojni, o dojemanju vojne in o umetniškem izrazu kot orožju proti brezbrižnosti.

Over contemporary and archival images of the Bosnian conflict´s destruction, Doborac´s film unremittingly interrogates the relationship between image, text and politics, radically challenging the possibility of any document or depiction of war.

Sobre imagens actuais e de arquivo da destruição do conflito bósnio, o filme de Doborac interroga incessantemente a relação entre imagem, texto e política, desafiando de forma radical a possibilidade de qualquer documento ou representação da guerra.

Do início ao fim, este ensaio denso e polémico desconstrói meticulosamente a narrativa visual e intelectual e, além disso, a conceptualização do cinema de guerra e as suas contradições e complexidade perante a memória e o trauma individual. Através de uma forma tremendamente poderosa que transmite uma reflexão profunda sobre questões estéticas sobre o uso de imagens, o filme desafia a interpretação do passado e do presente, combinando imagens de arquivo e sequências contemporâneas de forma inteligente. O prémio é atribuído a THOSE SHOCKING SHAKING DAYS de Selma Doborac.

Júri: Richard Brouillette, Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez, Emília Tavares

“Would you agree that images of empty streets and houses, which had otherwise been bustling, suggest an unusual, otherwise uncommon absence of the person, the citizen?” This is one of Selma Doborac’s queries in Those Shocking Shaking Days (2016), an 88-minute film loaded with ethical challenges to the viewer. “How about if you were to first consider that where the image ends, reality begins, or at least continues in a similar way, and that the end and the beginning of the frame simply cannot show the breadth and extent, but can very well hint at it?” Through a sequence of uneasy, incisive questions, Doborac invites – or rather jolts – the viewer out of an indifferent slumber. In so doing, she raises issues that are essential to this dossier: Senses of Cinema’s first sustained inquiry into nonfiction cinema from the territories of former Yugoslavia. Aesthetics and representation (war trauma, positionality, and the ethics of looking), the dynamics of state and international production (from festivals to networked platforms and beyond), problems surrounding historicisation (the place of ‘post-Yugoslav’ film within histories of world cinema and of Eastern Europe in particular), as well as debates around truth, social memory, and alternative facts will all make an appearance in these articles. As Doborac makes clear and as these pieces insist, no one is altogether innocent when it comes to images from the disintegrated country. Audiences cannot retreat into a space of interiority, of safe witnessing and observation, just as filmmakers are far from uninvested, objective voices. Every spectator, as Frantz Fanon would have it, is surely either a coward or a traitor; not infrequently, they might even be both. [1]

Viewer involvement and complicity are issues that trouble contemporary documentary as such, yet they are especially acute in an area where understandings of friend and enemy mutate with the political wind. Doborac again: “what would you do if an old friend called to tell you that from the moment he hung up you would have exactly five minutes, just enough time to pack your family albums or whatever you could gather up in such a limited time, and subsequently disappear, because he intended to blow up your house, which he was scoping out from a hill across the way? Would you think of generosity or kindness because your friend was so obliging, for the sake of your old friendship, as to a) warn you and b) spare your life (along with your photographic memories) instead of blowing you up with your house, as he could do if he wanted?” The problem has elsewhere been articulated by Pavle Levi: “where widely disseminated ideologies of hatred (capable of massive extermination of civilians) are under scrutiny, there cannot be any unknowing bystanders, disinterested parties, and safe distances. Needless to say, this point is the exact opposite of that evasive truism according to which, simply, ‘everyone is guilty.’” [2] 

Three decades after the dismantling of Yugoslavia, a pressing question has resurfaced. At a time when new nationalisms are again on the horizon (or already firmly ensconced in power), what tactics do documentary cineastes employ in an effort to fight back? Against the equivocations of historical revisionism, how might nonfiction be energised in a struggle for justice, emancipation, and equality? With what formal means are artists and film workers tethering themselves to an aesthetic of truth? And why, most pointedly, are some of the most electrifying endeavours in this respect coming from the ex-socialist Balkans? Filmmakers such as Nika Autor, Selma Doborac, Ognjen Glavonić, Jelena Maksimović, and Želimir Žilnik have all intervened into this narrative in important ways; observational images, cinéma vérité, newsreel reporting, re-enactment, essayism, and (unscripted) fictionalisation are only a few forms and formats that post-1991 documentarists in the region are activating with force.  

It is the hypothesis of this dossier that the spaces of former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia) offer fertile ground for 21st-century cinema studies. In an area where ideological mystification has never relinquished its deadly grip, documentary images play a privileged role, tasked and entrusted as they are with offering adequate, just depictions of our world. Precisely due to their experiences with virulent ethnonationalism and an assortment of obfuscatory political techniques, ex-socialist filmmakers and artists have offered viewers of contemporary nonfiction much to think through. Fiction, fabulation, fabrication, as well as the interstices of fact, (post-)truth, and extrafilmic reality are precisely the thorny issues that today’s documentary landscape is engaged in; they are also issues that ex-Yugoslavia has been occupied with for years. To elaborate and try to understand documentary after Yugoslavia within an historical, transnational scope: that is one aim and objective of this dossier. 

The ways in which our dozen authors have opted to approach these subjects are intricate and diverse. In his explication of recent “political landscape films” (published here for the first time in English), Pavle Levi uses the tools of ideology critique and Serge Daney to propose nothing short of a new image politics after Yugoslavia. [3] Taking one such landscape film as his starting point, Nikola Matevski investigates Ognjen Glavnonić Depth Two (Dubina dva, 2016) in light of Godard, Duras, Straub-Huillet, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Malevich; in all these works, absence and elision serve as the throughline. Nikola Radić, for his part, tackles Centar (Ivan Marković, 2018) and Dom boraca (Home of the Resistance, 2018) through the lens of ruin and ruination – an architectural interest also shared by Dina Pokrajac. The modernist design of filmed ex-socialist structures, writes Pokrajac, “still communicates a past idea of the future, while the materials reveal their current state of suspended, indefinitely prolonged revolution.” As a state of abeyance, of fluid in-betweenness, is also how Brenda Hollweg and Marianna Christofides narrate their encounter with the Balkans, and it is how Zoran Samardžija identifies Serbia’s recent toggling between romanticised nostalgia (for the old times of Tito) and authoritarian illiberalism. 

Form, as these articles incisively argue, is inextricable from politics; the aesthetic devices that filmmakers choose to employ (or to omit) have consequences in life outside cinema. Ana Vujanović makes this point explicit in her reflective analysis of Landscapes of Resistance (Pejzaži otpora, 2021), a film on which she worked with director Marta Popivoda. Taking a closer look at found footage, and the opus of videomaking duo Doplgenger in particular, Miljana Niković offers us a history of what she calls ‘filmed documents’ as seen in ex-Yugoslavia post-’91. Sanjin Pejković’s scope is similarly ambitious, tracing historical representations of the SFRY in a range of fiction features and documentary. Animation, meanwhile, is Anastasiia Gushchina’s central interest, discussing A Kosovo Fairytale (Anna-Sofia Nylund, Samantha Nell, Mark Middlewick, 2009) in view of indexicality and wartime trauma. Kumjana Novakova and Guillermo Carreras-Candi’s Disturbed Earth (2021) is the topic of Dijana Jelača’s paper, which thoughtfully engages issues of visibility, erasure, and culpability in a post-Srebrenica world. Finally, highlighting one of Slovenia’s most adventurous recent directors, Andrej Šprah dissects the essayistic art and craft of Matjaž Ivanišin – in what is this dossier’s second translation. 

These and numerous other concerns make an appearance in the webpages that follow. Many names – important artists, filmmakers, thinkers – and ideas stay unmentioned, leaving further work to be done in the future. Nonetheless, one hopes that the attentive reader will discern in these texts not just a useful supplement to existing scholarship, but also an argument (albeit a preliminary, tentative one) for the importance and inexhaustible grit of recent nonfiction from the ex-Yugoslav region. Whether this dossier comes to the reader as a first encounter – as a snapshot, a trailer, or indeed an imperfect primer on an understudied discourse – or as an added piece in an already intricate puzzle, the hope is that something of value will be identified by all. If one’s only impression after reading is that of excitement over a rich, conflicted, and ungeneralisable cinema, then our mission will have been accomplished. 

(Nace Zavrl, Editorial note, published in Senses of Cinema, Issue 103, Dossier: After Yugoslavia, October 2022)     

Endnotes:
[1] Fanon’s expression appears in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), trans. Constance Farrington, p. 199. As Fanon elaborates, “the collective struggle presupposes collective responsibility at the base and collegiate responsibility at the top. Yes, everybody will have to be compromised in the fight for the common good. No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers. We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emptiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.”
[2] Pavle Levi, Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), p. 123.
[3] Levi’s article – “Pejzaži u kadru, ljudi u odsustvu” – originally appeared online in Peščanik in 2021 and later turned into the basis for his short book Minijature: O politici filmske slike (Zagreb: Multimedijalni institut, 2021); here, we thank Levi for his translation and adaptation, and the previous publishers for being able to include this.   

[1]  

(…) 

From today’s perspective, I Burnt Legs seems like the first instance, the “primal scene,” of a specific tendency that in recent years emerged in the documentary cinema from the Yugoslav region: one characterized by investigations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the register of landscape imagery. This tendency includes such films as Depth Two (Dubina dva, Ognjen Glavonić, 2016), Those Shocking Shaking Days (Selma Doborac, 2016), Landscapes of War, Landscapes of Peace (Pejzaži rata, pejzaži mira, Aron Sekelj, 2017), and On the Water (Na vodi, Goran Dević, 2018). All made during the latter half of the 2010s, these films directly address different facets of socialist Yugoslavia’s violent break-up in the 1990s, some focusing on war crimes and mass atrocities in Croatia, others in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and still others in Kosovo. In addition to Vuletić’s I Burnt Legs, another important precursor to these political landscape films is Jasmila Žbanić’s Red Rubber Boots (Crvene gumene čizme), made in 2000. This is one of the earliest documentaries about the genocide and the post-genocide trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina; in approaching its subject, Žbanić’s short work also lays much emphasis on landscape locations, which it thoughtfully uses as a fundamental component of its mise-en-scène. [2] 

Regardless of the natural locations in question – forests, meadows, rivers, fields, parks, lakes, mountains, etc. – cinematic landscapes are always semiotised; they are experienced, understood, and analysed as inseparable from history. On the one hand, landscapes “caught” on film are inevitably “socialized,” marked, directly or indirectly, by some degree of human activity. On the other hand, however, every film image of a landscape is also a document of a particular way in which nature itself responds to human activity. 

Now, what is notable about the landscape films about war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that are in the focus of this essay is that they all exhibit a significant – pronounced, intense, even essential – visual absence. It is precisely this central absence that, in a unique way, makes Red Rubber Boots, Depth Two, Landscapes of War, Landscapes of Peace, On the Water, and Those Shocking Shaking Days not only political landscape films, but rather films of political landscapes. What is at stake here is not an absence of visual representation as such, but rather an absence directly inscribed into the field of representation. A peculiar lack manifests itself in the image, and it is foregrounded by Žbanić, Glavonić, Sekelj, Doborac, and Dević as the primary (or, at least, as an extremely important) formal and aesthetic principle. Moreover, particular forms of emptiness or absence function in these films not merely as traces of distinct authorial styles; they also bespeak a demand to the viewer to participate: to fill in these films’ gaps, to imagine what is lacking in their strategically emptied and, therefore, incomplete visual register. 

What is it, then, that is so glaringly missing from these films about war, mass atrocities, and genocide? What is that palpable lack that is almost total in Depth Two and Landscapes of War, Landscapes of Peace, and that so forcefully looms over Red Rubber Boots, Those Shocking Shaking Days, and the most memorable sequences of On the Water? 

What is missing are, of course, the people (as Gilles Deleuze famously put it). [4] People – yes, but… not only the living. The dead, too, are missing! There is a manifest absence of human bodies, all human bodies, in these films. Bodies engaged in various activities, behaviours, and gestures, whether mundane or extraordinary. But also, bodies murdered and thrown down the river (On the Water); stuffed into freezer trucks (Depth Two); or, buried in mass graves (Red Rubber Boots and Those Shocking Shaking Days) – mass graves that are already marked, as well as those that have yet to be discovered… In other words, what is at stake here is a drastically deficient cinematic portrayal of human existence, in life and in death: endless sequences of intentional non-depiction of people reveal locations that are not merely empty, but rather ominously empt-ied before the camera. These are the landscapes of vanishing – and already vanished – folk. Filmmaker Ivan Salatić, himself an accomplished practitioner of the “genre,” describes it as “speaking the language of wounded landscapes in cinema.” [5] One can even go a step further and designate the works discussed here as the cinema of cleansed (as in: ethnically cleansed) landscapes. [6] 

In the documentaries in question, then, a certain asceticism lies at the core of the image. The origin of this asceticism is ethical. A systemic and “unnatural absence” (as Selma Doborac calls it), a marked lack of people in the visual register, is here both a symptom and a negative expression of a poignant humanist attitude toward the war and its horrors. This is how landscapes remember war! For the filmmakers discussed here, asceticism on the plane of representation signifies a kind of shared “ethical imperative” about the relationship between the cinema and the crimes against humanity. One might say: the image will be infused and rife with absence, because these are the films grounded in the traumatic experiences of mass extermination, films about ethnic cleansing and genocide, but also (importantly!) about their ongoing, now decades-long, suppression and ideologically motivated denial in certain parts of the Yugoslav region. In Serge Daney’s memorable formulation: “The shot is a tomb.” “The content of the shot, stricto sensu, is what it hides: the bodies under the ground.” [7] 

However, this “ethical imperative” is only a starting point for the filmmakers in question. It is an extreme manifestation of what Daney designates “the cinematic axiom.” According to Daney, the primary, foundational cinematic relation is contained in the “rapport between the camera and reality.” The task of the camera is to “search in the world.” However, Daney immediately adds, the real is never exclusively “that which is directly and immediately given to be seen – and that is final.” [8] 

What Žbanić, Glavonić, Doborac, Sekelj, and Dević accomplish in their films is an effective amplification of Daney’s “axiom,” through insistence on the camera’s non-rapport with the human body, its marked absence from the screen. This absence of people at the heart of the image motivates a range of further directorial choices, which typically involve complex audio-visual relations. Sekelj (Landscapes of War, Landscapes of Peace), for instance, creates elaborate atmospheric montages deprived of spoken word, which convey heavy presence of weaponry, combat, violence, and death – but no humans – in the depicted landscapes. Glavonić (Depth Two), on the other hand, relies on extensive voice-over narration, laid over the carefully composed imagery of mostly desolate and ruinous locations, to present a disturbingly detailed account of the operations of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and their organized suppression by the Serbian authorities. Doborac (Those Shocking Shaking Days), in turn, works in a meta-cinematic key: her film frequently employs entirely silent shots of deserted Bosnian places, combined with textual captions at the bottom of the screen; the text oscillates between didactic and contemplative commentary about war and human suffering, but also about the extent of their representability by the cinematic apparatus. 

In each film, the result is a steady production of disquiet and non-acquiescence: a pointed audio-visual resistance to any form of simplistic and careless, ideologically suspect acceptance of stable representation of the post-war, post-genocidal reality, still beset with trauma. In other words, taking the traumatic absence of people as something akin to a new ontology of the cinematic image, these authors persist in making the viewer’s experience (both sensory and intellectual) of the depicted reality fundamentally disjunctive and unresolved. It is thus that the ethical charge at the root of these films is activated on the plane of image-politics. For what this disjunctive relation between the cinematic form and the contemporary landscape ultimately bespeaks is a specific kind of condemnation of violence, mass atrocities, and genocide in the Yugoslav region: one grounded in an unyielding refusal to naturalize their ideological causes and effects alike. [9] No normalization, no legitimisation, of ethno-essentialist and exclusivist post-Yugoslav identities, values, and norms seems possible in these films. Instead, they uphold the landscape of audio-visual representation and signification as an enduringly unstable and unresolved, socio-politically divided and divisive, ground. Landscapes are in these films “shot through with antagonism” (as Masao Matsuda would have it). [10] 

(…)  

Beyond the cinema of cleansed landscapes, further political questions await:
How to film people, again?
And, is there an emancipated future for the crowd shot? 

(Pavle Levi, published in Senses of Cinema, Issue 103, Dossier: After Yugoslavia, October 2022)  

Endnotes:
[1] This essay is a shortened and revised version of a text I originally wrote and published in the Serbo-Croatian language as “Pejzaži u kadru, ljudi u odsustvu,” Peščanik, 13 March 2021. Subsequently, this text became the foundation for a short book about image politics in the contemporary cinema from the Yugoslav region: Pavle Levi, Minijature: O politici filmske slike (Zagreb: Multimedijalni institut, 2021). I wish to thank Ognjen Glavonić, Petar Milat, and Nace Zavrl for their generous help during the various phases of preparing the essay.
[2] For a detailed analysis of Red Rubber Boots, see: Pavle Levi, “Cinema and Ethnic Cleansing,” Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 118-127.
[3] The international history of landscape cinema is not only long and rich, but also politically and ideologically diverse. Productive points of comparison and contrast may be sought between the films that are in the focus of this essay and certain works by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Alain Resnais, Masao Adachi, Marguerite Duras, Sky Hopinka, and The Otolith Group.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 216.
[5] Ivan Salatić, “Govoriti jezikom ranjenih pejzaža,” MAZ, November 2019. Salatić’s short documentary We Are the Sons of Your Rocks (2018) is set in Montenegro and revolves around unmarked graves from the Second World War.
[6] Absence of human bodies in these films is not absolute. When present, graphic images of wartime violence (Those Shocking Shaking Days), exhumations of mass graves (Red Rubber Boots), and post-war survivorship (On the Water, Red Rubber Boots) effectively reinforce the chilling effect of the preponderant empty landscapes.
[7] Serge Daney, “A Morals of Perception (About Dalla Nube alla Resistenza by Straub-Huillet),” originally published as “Une Morale de la Perception (De la nuée à la résistance de Straub-Huillet)” in La Rampe: Cahier critique 1970-1982 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard, 1996). Daney is here discussing the political landscape films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Gilles Deleuze draws on Daney when, in his own analysis of Straub and Huillet’s “stratigraphic landscapes,” he declares that “the earth stands for what is buried in it.” Cinema 2, p. 244. See also: Serge Daney, “A Tomb for the Eye (Straubian Pedagogy).”
[8] Dudley Andrew, “The Camera Searching in the World” in What Cinema Is!: Bazin’s Quest and its Charge (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 5.
[9] On this topic, see: “How to Think Genocide?” (“Kako misliti genocid?”), editorial in the newsletter Mathemes of Reassociation (Matemi reasocijacija), produced by The Monument Group (Belgrade, 2010).
[10] In the early 1970s, Masao Matsuda was a foremost proponent of the fūkeiron theory of political landscape cinema. For an in-depth discussion of Matsuda and the fūkeiron discourse in Japanese film, see: Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 115-148. See also Branislav Dimitrijević’s excellent analysis of Glavonić’s film Depth Two, which draws on fūkeiron discourse: “Landscape of Crime,” catalogue of the exhibition Landschaft, die sich erinnert / Remembering Landscape (Siegen: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2018). 

Graz – (...)
Wie nutzt man die Bilder vom Krieg? Um solche Fragen kreist Selma Doborac’ Film Those Shocking Shaking Days. Die Filmemacherin sucht den direkten Dialog mit dem Zuschauer, eine akribische Auseinandersetzung um die Darstellbarkeit von Gewalt und Terror in Kriegen. Schon damit, dass alle Gedankengänge im Fragemodus gehalten sind, auf Texttitel, die konstant gelesen werden müssen, wird hier passives Konsumieren durchkreuzt – nur an zwei Stellen wechselt Doborac in den Off-Kommentar. Ihr Referenzpunkt ist der Bosnienkrieg, der auf der Bildebene mit Rohbauten und zerstörten Häusern unauffällig bleibt – bis der Wechsel zu Archivaufnahmen von Kampfhandlungen so etwas wie eine plötzliche Sinnesschärfung betreibt. Die Fragestellung des Films ist so universell wie letztlich unbeantwortbar: Gibt es einen Weg zurück zu einem Bild, das die Aura des Menschlichen bewahren kann und das Denken nicht auslöscht? Nicht die Antworten zählen hier so sehr wie der Weg, der die Reflexion beflügelt.
(Dominik Kamalzadeh, Der Standard, 08.03.2016)

Graz - (...)
How can images of war be used? Selma Doborac’s film Those Shocking Shaking Days revolves around such questions. The filmmaker seeks a direct dialogue with viewers, a meticulous confrontation with the possibility of depicting the violence and terror of war. Passive consumption is already thwarted in that all thought processes are carried out in the form of questions, on text titles that demand steady reading – Doborac switches to off-screen commentary in only two cases. Her reference point is the Bosnian War, which remains inconspicuous at the pictorial level made up of building shells and destroyed houses – until the switch to archive recordings of combat operations, actuates something like a sudden sharpening of the senses. The film’s line of questioning is just as universal as it is ultimately unanswerable: is there a way back to the picture that is capable of preserving the aura of what is human, and does not erase thought? Important here, more so than answers, is the way, which spurs reflection.
(Dominik Kamalzadeh, Der Standard, March 8, 2016)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt

(...) Die Verweigerung blutiger Bilder
Eine solche emotionale Verbundenheit, wie sie Steiners Film (Anm.: Holz Erde Fleisch von Sigmund Steiner) freilegt, verweigert Selma Doborac dem Zuschauer. Das Einzelschicksal kommt hier als Bezugspunkt nicht in Frage. Für die kritische Betrachtung des Gesamtkonstrukts Krieg, in diesem Fall ist der Bosnienkrieg gemeint, zweifelt Doborac den persönlichen, direkt visuellen Zugang zu Kriegsgräueln an. Im 4:3 Format zeigt Those Shocking Shaking Days keine Brände und keine Toten, sondern verlassene, bereits von Wäldern überwucherte Häuser in statischen Einstellungen. Sie sind Zeugen des Krieges, die nicht sprechen, Mahnmale ohne Pathos, Beweise für die Verdrängung und den Tod der Menschen, die sie einst bewohnten. Die Hausruinen stehen als Bilder nicht für sich. Eine Wand von Text klammert sich an sie. Nicht in Form von beschreibenden oder kommentierenden Untertiteln, sondern als Fragen und Provokationen.
Welcher Freischärlerbewegung ich mich anschließen würde, fragt mich dieser Text. Einer, die Handgranaten benutzt, um Häuser zu „säubern“ oder einer, die es bevorzugt, das Haus in Brand zu setzen? Bevor ich über die Frage nachdenken kann, folgt die nächste Texttafel – die nächste Frage. Dann wird die Leinwand schwarz. Der Text rollt weiter, während Archivaufnahmen von Milizen im Krieg das Schwarz verdrängen. Sie bilden keinen narrativen Zusammenhang, ihr Ton ist abgehackt und unvollständig. Die Stimme des Erzählers, die einsetzt, als eine schwarze Leinwand diese Bilder ablöst, ertönt laut und nüchtern. Text und Sprache haben etwas Zwingendes. Nicht im Sinne des Hinsehens, sondern im Sinne des Reflektierens. Wo die Wirklichkeit nur noch in Form von repräsentativen Medien zu existieren scheint, wie Susan Sontag es einst ausdrückte, bemüht sich Selma Doborac um ein filmisches Gegenmodell, das zu einer Art der Teilnahme nötigt, die die unmittelbare emotionale Reaktion auf den Krieg mitsamt seiner Bilder ausklammert. Man muss diesen filmischen Ansatz nicht für den einzig richtigen halten, um Those Shocking Shaking Days mit einem Gefühl der Ohnmacht vor der kaum fassbaren Realität des Krieges zu verlassen. Eine Realität, die der Film auch ohne Trauma nachklingen lässt.
(Karsten Munt, Critic.de, 12.03.2016)

(...) The refusal of bloody images
Selma Doborac refuses viewers an emotional bond laid bare by film, such as Steiner’s (note: Holz Erde Fleisch by Siegmund Steiner). The fate of a single person does not even come into question here as reference point. For a critical view of war as an overall construct (the Bosnian War is meant in this case) Doborac mistrusts the personal, direct, visual approach to the horrors of war. Those Shocking Shaking Days, working in a 4:3 format, does not show any fires or corpses, but instead, static takes of abandoned houses already overgrown by nature. These are the silent witnesses to war, memorials without pathos, proof of the repression and death of the people who once lived in them. The ruins of houses do not stand alone as images. A wall of text is stuck to them. Not in the form of written or commenting subtitles, but instead, questions and provocations.
The text asks me: what guerilla liberation movement would I join? One that uses hand grenades to “cleanse” houses or one that prefers setting houses on fire? Before I am able to think about the question, the next text panel – the next question – arrives.
Then the screen goes dark. The text continues to roll while archive recordings of militia at war supplant the blackness. They form no narrative context; the sound is choppy and incomplete. The voice of the narrator, entering when a black screen replaces this image, resounds loud and prosaic. Text and language have something compelling about them. Not in the sense of looking, but rather, that of reflecting. Where reality seems to exist only in the form of representative media, as Susan Sontag once said, Selma Doborac strives for a cinematic model that counters this, which forces a type of participation, excludes an immediate emotional reaction to the war, including its images. Even if one does not consider this the only valid cinematic approach, one still leaves Those Shocking Shaking Days with a sense of powerlessness in the face of war’s barely comprehensible reality. Even without trauma, it is a reality that the film lets linger.
(Karsten Munt, Critic.de, March 12, 2016)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt

(...) Der erste Film „Those Shocking Shaking Days“ von Selma Doborac verlangt viel vom Zuschauer, belohnt aber am Ende mit einem intensiven, intelligenten Kinoerlebnis. Auf statischen Bildern von zerstörten Häusern in Bosnien sind Titel eingeblendet, viele Titel, ein langer konjunktivischer Fragen-Essay, direkt an den Zuschauer gerichtet, ihn ansprechend, im Stil einer wissenschaftlichen Arbeit. Es geht um Entscheidungen, die man treffen könnte, um Taten die man begehen könnte, aber mehr noch um die Semantik der Erinnerung, der Berichterstattung, des Kriegs. Wer sich auf diese langen Texte nicht einlässt ist schon am Anfang verloren. Später folgen gesprochene Texte auf schwarz, und alte VHS-Aufnahmen von Kriegshandlungen; sorgfältig die Gräuelbilder, die man kennt, auslassend, und immer weiter Fragen stellend, nicht wertend, eher analytisch, akribisch, neugierig und: ratlos. Und auch wenn es um den Bosnienkrieg geht, ist die Gültigkeit der Fragen und der Ratlosigkeit universell.
(Christine Dériaz, Artechock.de, 09.03.2016)

(...)
KOLIK.FILM: Mag sein. Können Sie einen Film mit explizitem politischem Engagement nennen?

Jean-Pierre Rehm: Natürlich. Ich betone jedoch noch einmal, man darf nicht glauben, dass die Richtigkeit eines Vertrags, und die Art und Weise, wie er eingehalten wird, von seinem Objekt abhängt. Um eine Antwort auf Ihre Frage zu geben, nenne ich einen österreichischen Film. Those Shocking Shaking Days von Selma Doborac, ein Film, der zum ersten Mal 2016 bei der Diagonale gezeigt wurde, der dann für das FID Festival ausgewählt worden ist, und übrigens zweimal prämiert wurde. Der Film ist gleichzeitig spannend und leidenschaftlich, streng und barock. Es ist ein „Meta“-Film. Er stellte sich die Frage zum Film und vor allem, so scheint es, zur Möglichkeit der filmischen Darstellung eines Bürgerkrieges wie dem Konflikt am Balkan. Eine Off-Stimme bzw. Untertitel geben eine Reihe von Kommentaren in Form von Fragen ab. Der Protagonist dieses filmischen Abenteuers ist also die Theorie. Doch im Verlauf des Films merkt man nach und nach, dass die Theorie, die für gewöhnlich der Garant der Vernunft, der Ausdruck des Maßvollen ist, einem gewissen Durcheinander, einem Exzess zum Opfer fällt: es geht zu schnell, die Fragen sind zu tiefschürfend, zu komplex, es gibt einfach zu viele Fragen, man kann nicht auf sie antworten und sie auch nicht im Gedächtnis behalten, es gibt zu viele Ideen, man verliert unweigerlich den Faden. Was ist los? Es ist einfach zu viel los. Ein Erguss von Theorie. Der Gedanke bricht sich Bahn, jedoch fließend, rinnend, wie bei einem Aderlass. Und langsam, plötzlich, stellt man fest: Der Aderlass hat nichts Abstraktes, und die Theorie äußerst sich deshalb in Form von Fragen, weil jemand, ein Körper, ein Subjekt, wie auch immer man es nennen möchte, die nervöse Quelle dieser Fragen ist. Und man stellt fest, dass es sich um eine Autobiographie handelt. Jemand (die Regisseurin? Ein Land? Ein Mosaik von Ländern?) wurde verletzt, und der Gedanke bestand in dieser sich schmerzhaft und ungehemmt außerhalb der Wunde ausbreitenden Blutung. Eine leidvolle (aber extrem schamhafte) Autobiographie, eine mangelhafte Reflexion (die jedoch erstaunliche analytische Kraft besitzt), ein Film mit blauen Flecken, (der jedoch über außergewöhnlichen Ehrgeiz und seltenen Mut verfügt; die deutlichsten blauen Flecken manifestieren sich jedoch in der Auswahl der Bilder bis hin zur schwarzen Leinwand), das alles miteinander ergibt, und der Titel lügt nicht: Those Shocking Shaking Days. Dieses Beispiel zeigt sehr gut, dass die Kategorien nicht mehr stimmen, ganz im Gegenteil, sie haben sich aufgelöst, und zwar zu Recht, denn letzten Endes handelt es sich darum, sich der Komplexität der Auswirkungen eines kriegerischen Konflikts bewusst zu werden.

KOLIK.FILM: Glauben Sie, ausgehend von diesem sehr aussagekräftigen Beispiel, dass die Ernsthaftigkeit der Fluch des Dokumentarfilms ist?

Jean-Pierre Rehm: Tatsächlich gibt es beim Dokumentarfilm eine christliche oder besser gesagt eine masochistische Tendenz. Das ist gewiss seine Crux. Der Film von Selma Doborac ist jedoch aufgrund seines Exzesses und seiner Strenge eine Ausnahme, die Verrücktheit ist nicht ernsthaft, sondern bedrohlich, das ist viel ergreifender! Und er erspart uns den Gedanken, dass es keine Vorsehung gibt. Roee Rosen hingegen zeigt uns in seinem Werk ein Universum und schlägt eine Tonart an, die Ernsthaftigkeit durch Satire ersetzen. Roee Rosen ist ein israelischer Künstler, der sich nicht als Regisseur begreift, sich jedoch unter anderem des Mediums Film bedient und dabei alle Register zieht: Werbung, Videoclip, Talkshow, Musikkomödie, Burleske usw. Sein letzter Film Dust Channel, der auf der nächsten Documenta in Kassel und in Athen gezeigt werden wird, und dessen Weltpremiere bei der FID Marseille stattfand, ist ein Geniestreich. In der Tradition der Surrealisten, mit einem Filmausschnitt von Farocki, geht es vor allem um einen Staubsauger, um den Dyson DC07, der berühmt ist für seine Effizienz und seine durchsichtige Hülle. Doch im Grunde geht es um das Flüchtlingslager Holot in der Wüste. Man lacht, man lacht laut, man lacht lauthals. Doch das Lachen bleibt einem im Halse stecken und erlaubt, ungehörige neue Erkenntnisse zu machen.

Textauszug; erschienen in KOLIK.FILM No. 26, 2016
(Aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Karin Fleischanderl)

For the director’s uncompromising approach through which we are facing the major questions that a brutal reality of war conditions is confronting us with the jury has decided to award the film Those Shocking Shaking Days by Selma Doborac with a Special Mention.

Jury members for the Regional Competition, Free Zone Film Festival:
Lejla Dedic, Vuk Petrovic, Jelena Maksimovic


Za beskompromisan rediteljski pristup kroz koji se suocavamo sa velikim pitanjima koje pred nas postavlja brutalna realnost ratnih okolnosti, ziri je odlucio da dodeli Specijalno Priznanje filmu Those Shocking Shaking Days Selme Doborac.

Clanovi zirija Regionalna Konkurencija, Free Zone Film Festival:
Lejla Dedic, Vuk Petrovic, Jelena Maksimovic

Am Anfang war der Stummfilm, oder: Das Gefühl, dass im Kino zumindest der Ton ausgefallen ist. Ja, Selma Doborac wurde für ihren jüngsten Film Those Shocking Shaking Days bei der Diagonale 2016 für das „beste Sounddesign“ ausgezeichnet. Da liest es sich schon auf dem Cover der Blu-ray, die sie dem Stadtkino zur Sichtung übergeben hatte, fast wie ein Witz, wenn da steht: „ACHTUNG: TON STARTET BEI 18’ 33’’“
18 ½ Minuten zuerst mal also totale Stille. Man sieht: Kaputte Einfamilienhäuser und Rohbauten in verwildertem Niemandsland. Und man liest, darüber eingeblendet, Fragen wie: „Ist die kritische Betrachtung eines Krieges zum Beispiel durch Poetizität oder durch Virtualität zu bewerkstelligen, oder wäre es ratsam, eindeutige Begriffe und Bilder zu Gunsten der kritischen Betrachtung eines Krieges tendenziell auszulassen?“ Oder: „Wäre es möglich, einen Missbrauch der Sprache wieder gut zu machen?“
Those Shocking Shaking Days – das ist ab Sekunde eins ein Film, der aufs Ganze geht. Der sich im Versuch nach Neuorientierung – es geht um nichts weniger als um eine Sprache für Kriegsgräuel – selbst zerlegt. Und der gleichzeitig den Betrachter einer Form von Orientierungslosigkeit aussetzt, in der dieser selbst Fragen nach seiner eigenen Haltung gegenüber gefilmten, verfilmten, gestellten, angeblich authentischen Kriegsberichten und –bildern zu stellen hätte.
Eine Versuchsanordung also, ein Essay-Film im besten Wortsinn, mit, wie es bei Versuchen nun einmal so ist, offenem Ausgang. Nach 18 ½ Minuten zum Beispiel: Schwenks über schwer nachvollziehbare Schusswechsel in irgendwelchen Hügeln, oder: Bildausfall, die Stimme des Nachrichtenmoderators Paul Kraker, der die Suada der vorher „lesbaren“ Textinserts aufnimmt (können wir uns – ohne unterstützende Bilder – nun besser konzentrieren? Eher nicht). Dann wiederum hektische Videoverfolgungsbilder irgendwelcher Männer, die durch entvölkerte Landschaften hasten und die Frage, was es bringen würde, in B-Pictures Krieg nachzustellen – „weil Material“ wie dieses „keine Erinnerung darstellt, auch wenn es ihr nahekommt“.
Es geht um den Bosnienkrieg, soviel erfährt man mit immer beklemmenderer Wucht. Es geht also um einen Krieg, der Tag für Tag in bewegten Medienbildern weltweit übertragen wurde, ohne dass irgendjemand wirklich eingeschritten wäre, einfach weil die Bilder, authentisch oder gestellt oder gefunden oder gemacht, immer weiter liefen, quasi fortwährend Neupositionierung verlangten, die wiederum vom Handeln abhielt. Es passierte ja gerade was.
Insofern ist Those Shocking Shaking Days nicht zuletzt ein Film über eine Lähmung durch Bewegung, über die Frage, ob es nicht vielleicht klüger sei, sich zuerst einmal am gesprochenen, geschriebenen Wort hochzuhanteln, anstatt zwischen eigentümlich ungeordneten Infogemengelagen zunehmend erschöpft nach so etwas wie einer Erzählung zu suchen. Es ist in aller Konzentriertheit ein nervöser Film, der auch angesichts „vergleichsweise harmloser Bilder“ das Grauen (nicht zuletzt vor der eigenen Gräuel-Bereitschaft) nicht abschütteln will. Und er ist, in aller Allgemeingültigkeit (vergleichbar könnte man derzeit ja auch über Flüchtlingsbilder argumentieren) verblüffend konkret im Umgang mit einem spezifischen zeithistorischen Sujet, mit spezifischen Orten und Landschaften.
Der vor zwei Jahren verstorbene deutsche Filmemacher Harun Farocki meinte einmal in einem Interview: „Krieg und Kriegsberichterstattung rücken immer näher zusammen.“ Auch in seinen Lectures im Stadtkino, die er mit seiner Filmklasse an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste wiederholt angeboten hat, rekurrierte er immer wieder auf dieses Thema, das er in Arbeiten wie Etwas wird sichtbar beständig umkreiste.
Selma Doborac war eine seiner Studentinnen in Wien. Auch in den Stadtkino-Lectures erwies sie sich immer wieder vehement motiviert zu einem Dialog mit Film und Video, sachlich, impulsiv. Es schließt sich also geradezu ein Kreis, wenn sie nun Those Shocking Shaking Days im Stadtkino präsentiert – in unserer neuen Monatsreihe österreichischer Filme, die sehenswert und diskussionswürdig zugleich, außerhalb gängiger Verleih- und Festivalstrukturen ihr Publikum finden wollen.
„Schon wieder ein Film über den Krieg?“ Schon wieder. Höchste Empfehlung!

Am 1. Juni 2016 um 19 Uhr 30 im Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus.
(Claus Philipp, Stadtkino Zeitung No. 540, Mai 2016)

At the beginning was the silent film, or, at least a sense that the sound had gone off in the cinema. Yes, for her most recent film, Those Shocking Shaking Days, Selma Doborac was awarded “best sound design” at the Diagonale 2016. It almost seems like a joke when one reads on the cover of the Blu-ray, which she handed over to the Stadtkino for viewing: “ATTENTION: SOUND STARTS AT 18:33.”
First of all, eighteen and a half minutes of total silence. One sees destroyed single-family homes and building shells in a wild no-man’s-land. And one reads, displayed above, questions such as: “Can a critical reflection of a war be achieved for example by means of poeticity or visuality, or would it be advisable in such an undertaking to tendentiously forego unambiguous words and images in favour of a more critical reflection of a war?” or: “Would this enable redressing a misuse of language?”
Those Shocking Shaking Days – from the very first moment, a film that goes all out. A film that dismantles itself in the attempt at reorientation – it is about nothing less than a language for the horrors of war. And it is a film that simultaneously subjects viewers to a form of disorientation, in which they have to ask themselves about their own position toward what has been filmed, made into a film, staged; toward supposedly authentic war reports and pictures.
It is an experiment, that is, an essay film in the best literal sense, with, as is the case with experiments, an open outcome. For example, after eighteen and a half minutes: a pan over a difficult to understand exchange of shots in some hills, or: the picture fails, the sounds of the news anchor Paul Kraker, who resumes the tirade of the previously “legible” text inserts (can we concentrate better now – without the supporting images? Not really?). Then, once again, hectic video chase scenes of random men who rush through depopulated landscapes and the question of what it would do to recreate war in B-pictures – “because material” like this “does not represent memory, even if it comes close to it.”
It is about the Bosnian War, one finds this out with an increasingly oppressive impact. Thus, it is about a war that was broadcast throughout the world day after day in emotional media images, not that anyone would have truly intervened, simply because the images, authentic or staged or found or made, kept on running, demanding repositioning quasi continually, which in turn, prevented action. Something was happening right then.
Insofar, Those Shocking Shaking Days is, no least, a film about a paralysis through movement, about the question of whether it might not be wiser to work one’s way up first through the spoken, written word, rather than search with growing exhaustion between idiosyncratically unsorted batches of information layers for something resembling a narrative. With its extreme focus, it is a nervous film, which in light of “relatively harmless images,” does not aim to shake off the horror (no least, before one’s own readiness for atrocity). And with all of its universal validity (comparably, one could currently also argue about images of refugees), it is astonishingly concrete in dealing with a specific subject in contemporary history, with specific sites and landscapes.
The German filmmaker Harun Farocki, who passed away two years ago, once said in an interview: “War and war reporting are moving ever closer together.” He constantly circled this theme in works such as Etwas wird sichtbar, and referred back to it again in his lectures in the Stadtkino, which he offered on a regular basis with his film classes at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Selma Doborac was one of his students in Vienna. Also in the Stadtkino lectures, she was constantly vehemently motivated to engage in dialogue with film and video, matter-of-fact, impulsive. A circle nearly comes to a close now as she presents Those Shocking Shaking Days at Stadtkino – as part of our new monthly series of Austrian films worthy of seeing and discussing, which aim to find their audience beyond the common rental and festival structures.
“Again, another film about war?” Again. And with the highest recommendation!

On June 1, 2016 at 7:30 p.m. in Stadtkino in Künstlerhaus.
(Claus Philipp, Stadtkino Zeitung No. 540, May 2016)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt

In your film, you embrace both the Bosnian War of the 1990s and the question of its representation today. What made you choose such a project?
On the one hand, it is explicitly about the Bosnian War, about this “European” catastrophe, but also about the fact that in almost all acts of war, in the public awareness of them, and further, in historiography, recurring parameters are actually reproduced; the Bosnian War thus represents itself as a massive conflict, but also stands for other potential conflicts; I think that the theme also has, beyond that, a general validity; I experienced the Bosnian War personally, as a child, so I feel that I am in a position to speak about it, but only because I have researched it to that effect, and precisely weighed out what can be said about war; Since it appears as a component of my persona, my approach is probably a bit more open than that of people who don’t have direct knowledge of such destructive principles; but also because the brazenness and excessive hatred of groups of people within society and among themselves are increasingly “cultivated,” and because I feel the need to counter that with something, as a matter of principle.

Texts and images are totally intertwined. How did you work with those two elements?
It is a method of uncovering how text and, mainly, language evokes first of all content and later also real circumstances; the texts are set inside the images; the images are de facto and apart from very few exceptions, are harmless; even though the content of the texts and images seem to coincide, in part, the two can be viewed either separately or as belonging together, that is a method to thematize this phenomenon of validity of truth and content through the intentions of images; the method and way of working is a tool and reveals underlying implications, such as that images generate content, even when this content is not available or not so precisely, or is even worse than what was previously known.

And the text is superimposed onto the images. Is that a way of being suspicious of the images? Their emotional aspect?
Yes, exactly, because pictures imply a lack of ambiguity and also mediate feelings, but the feelings should be suppressed, in order to be able to think freely; also the narrator comments on the images and their selection, is quite occupied with posing all questions about the images differently; the narrator fluctuates in position and type with each question, tries to take on manifold perspectives in order to clarify or provide cause for thought to that extent, that there cannot be only one standpoint in this unambiguous relationship to pictures’ ability to represent; in doing so, comments quasi on the narrator’s own exhibition and selection of images, as it were; through the variation of the questions with regard to the selection of images as an experiment, I aim to create kaleidoscopes and continually step away from established, supposed (image-)regimes and development of images, and their alleged enlightenment, in order to expose further thoughts and opinions.

This text, often personal, is formulated as questions, seemingly addressed to the viewer as well as you. Why?
An omniscient narrator should not be at the foreground implying enlightenment and knowing of the truth, but instead, the thoughts and further, opinions about what is participated in, what is seen here should be made by viewers themselves, at their own discretion; it is about signalizing through formal appearance, that is, through a permanently present position of questioning that a moment of doubt and caution with regard to the general validity of history and narrative must always be kept in mind; the questions are, however, quasi suggestive, also to intentionally point to certain chains of thought and try to introduce these into thinking and further also include them in interpretation but without the claim of reducing all validity to a single denominator; It is about facets of complexity that, I think, can be well illustrated in the form of questions; thus, a moment of factuality and earnestness always remains, as it would not be serious to simply claim; making a claim in the form of a question is already somewhat more real.

No interviews, some archives, and an insistence on landscapes. Why these choices?
(...) Harun Farocki once said that while filming a dam, he realized that the responsible coordinator of that work, the dam in which he was filming had brought him to a site where at least two or three documentary film teams had set up their cameras before him: now he was placed on the same site to film precisely there because this place had offered the best possibilities for recording the dam; he then noted that even though three others before him had made the same picture precisely there and precisely from the same spot, the meaning of his image and film would be a different one; that says a lot about an attitude toward the documentary aspect and about the ability and willingness of the “documentarian” to think through again what is already developed and supposedly finished, and mainly: to make it again, anew.

You use some images made during the war that seem home-video-like, which are, at times, very tough. Where do they come from? Can you explain your choices?
I do a great deal of research for a film and open a broad scope for my own thinking in order to be able to later minimize and concentrate on what is essential; I create a very well-founded foundation in order to be absolutely certain of what I am speaking about; and several things provide help in that: media, philosophy, literature etc.
In the course of the research for my last film It was a day just like any other in spring or summer., I came across material from a “colleague” who can be identified as a “private chronicler with personal interest in the documentary”; I contacted and visited him in order to obtain authentic war material, to open my realm of thought, and to get closer to the object of the work at the time. But then I first actually used that material for this film; I viewed and digitized 180 hours of this very obstinate and private VHS material (which also included horrific and drastic images) and decided to use as much as would be necessary to depict the “banality of evil” and the lack of excitement and senselessness of such massive acts of war; the images are intentionally very harmless (smoke in the distance, meadows and fields with the occasional sound of shots or noises, inspection of family homes that have been destroyed, restless and unambitious pans across landscapes…), which I chose here to direct attention to what it means to instrumentalize images and also the fact that one can never entirely depict the extent of destructive power; that images fail, even more than language perhaps; and it was interesting that these were not “official” pictures, they weren’t made under contract, but instead, by a private person who attempted to document the events with a camera, not exclusively for others, for an audience, but instead, primarily to explain to himself, to try to understand what was happening at the moment; it is almost surreal and that is profound with regard to the claim of documenting or thinking about documentation; it is always about a reformulation of the character of the documentary or “genuine”.

Journal FIDMarseille, 15.07.2016
Selma Doborac interviewed by Nicolas Feodoroff

(...)
KOLIK.FILM: Could be. But can you give an example of a film with explicit political issues?

Jean-Pierre Rehm: Of course. But you should not believe, I insist, that the validity of a contract and the way it is honoured depend on its object. And to answer your question, we could in fact take an Austrian film. The film in question is Those Shocking Shaking Days by Selma Doborac. It was discovered last year at the Diagonale in Graz and was selected for the FID Festival and, by the way, won two different awards. The film is both passionate and impassioned, austere and baroque at the same time. It’s a “meta-film”. It would seem above all to be about cinema, and more precisely the possibility for cinematic representation of a civil war like the Balkan conflict. A series of theoretical remarks in the form of questions are stated by a voice-over or in subtitles. Theory is thus the protagonist in this cinematic adventure. But as the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that theory, which is usually the guarantor of reason and moderation, is caught up here in a state of agitation or excess. It happens very quickly; the questions are profound, complex, and there are simply too many to respond or even remember, too many propositions to be sure of not losing the thread. What is happening? There is an overflow, an effusion of theory. Thoughts emerge, but flowing, gushing, like a bloodletting. And slowly then suddenly the viewer realises that this bleeding is not at all abstract and that the theory was stated in the form of questions because someone, a body, a subject, whatever you want to call it, was the worried originator of these questions. And that the film is therefore an autobiography. Someone (the director? a country? a mosaic of countries?) has been injured, and the thoughts are this haemorrhage spreading without restraint, painfully, outside the wound. A bruised autobiography (but extremely modest), grazed thoughts (but with a confounding analytic solidity), a contused film (but of astonishing ambition and rare courage; moreover, the most evident bruises appear in the choice of images, even a blank screen); everything tightly enmeshed, that’s what the film has to offer, and the title, Those Shocking Shaking Days, doesn’t lie. As you can see, this example shows that categories don’t hold. On the contrary, it is they that are being shaken, quite legitimately, because in the last analysis it is about trying to give an account of the complexity of the effects of a conflict.

KOLIK.FILM: In view of this example, which is indeed quite eloquent, do you think that seriousness is the curse of the documentary?

Jean-Pierre Rehm: There is certainly a Christian or perhaps pained slant inherent in documentaries. This is no doubt the cross they have to bear, even if Selma Doborac’s film avoids this completely, I believe, through its excessiveness and rigour: the madness is not serious but threatening, which is even more powerful! But we should not think that there is no inevitability. If you look at Roee Rosen’s work, there is a universe and a tonality that replace seriousness with satire. Rosen is an Israeli artist who doesn’t see himself as a film maker, but an artist who uses the medium of film among others, exploiting all of its registers: publicity, clip, talk show, musical comedy, burlesque, etc. His most recent film, The Dust Channel, which will be shown at the next documenta in Kassel and in Athens and had its world premiere at the FID in Marseille, is a great achievement of its type. In a Surrealist-like tradition, despite the place given to an excerpt by Farocki, the film is mainly about a vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC07, famous for its efficiency and transparent housing – but only to better highlight the treatment of political refugees in the Holot retention centre in the middle of the desert. There is laughter, candid but also mirthless laughter. But laughter here is the acid that enables original and illuminating connections to be made.


Published in KOLIK.FILM No. 26, 2016
(Translated from French by Nick Somers)

Der Preis für das beste Sounddesign geht an den vielleicht intellektuellsten und radikalsten der diesjährigen Dokumentarfilme. Ein minimalistischer Film, der über lange Strecken mit Stille arbeitet und so die Kraft von Ton als narratives Mittel fühlbar macht. Sounddesign als Kunst des Weglassens und des Einsetzens im richtigen Moment. In leisen Tönen ist dies auch ein Film über den Zweifel an der Möglichkeit, einen Film über Krieg zu machen.

Mitglieder der Jury:
Jenny Billeter (Programmer Solothurner Filmtage, Kino Xenix, CH), Rüdiger Suchsland (Filmkritiker, Regisseur, DE), Marten Persiel (Filmemacher, DE)

Experimental filmmaker Selma Doborac presents a radical and uncompromising essay on the impossibility of depicting the atrocities of war through insightful subtitles and meditative footage of abandoned structures that belong to the present as well as to the past.
This thought-provoking, radically unconventional documentary looks back at the Bosnian war of the 1990s, one of the most heavily televised in Europe, and uses it as the jumping-off point for bigger philosophical questions. Through onscreen text and calming images of abandoned houses, Those Shocking Shaking Days skips past the typical use of emotionally manipulative footage of war atrocities and strives for a sort of intellectual comprehension. For example, there is no narrator or music to tell you how to feel - not initially. Instead, the movie asks you to consider things such as how overuse of the typical images in war documentaries may deaden their impact. Writer/director Selma Doborac asks a lot of questions, and certainly makes you think. Then, just as you may reach the point of growing tired of her cinematic strategy, she changes it up. Throughout the film, her self-aware and self-questioning text adds a certain lightness to such a dark subject matter. Watching the movie is like being part of a deconstructed TED Talk. Those Shocking Shaking Days is much about war documentaries as it is about war. Be prepared to engage with this film, because it´s not one where you can just sit back and passively take it all in.

(SIFF Cinema, Seattle International Film Festival)