Speaking Positions

Anyone addressing issues of representation in the ethnic and political conflicts of the Balkans cannot but be aware of the precarious position from which he or she is speaking and writing. The very title of this symposium – No Man's Land, Everybody's Image – aptly reminds us of what is at stake. Images, especially media images of conflict, have a way of being appropriated. Possessing the image is to possess what it refers to. The primitive magic still seems to work in our high-tech world. Often enough, as competing claims for property, possession, and thus interpretation are being fought over, it is the human lives that have registered in these images that risk becoming no-man's land, terra incognita.

Perhaps not in the geographer's or ethnographer's sense: rather, an image implies someone who looks, and a look that responds to this look. No man's land might be when neither of these looks meet or engage, and when instead, another gaze is present. If we follow the logic of the images that we have of these wars in ex-Yugoslavia, much of what happened or rather, what we were given to see as happening, stood under the sign of a third gaze, for whose benefit, however this benefit is defined, the various competing narratives were being constructed, which accompanied the warring sides and factions. In this paper, I want to look at what sort of territory, what sort of “land” the speaking positions, the listening positions and the exchange of looks map out as this conflict's media-scape, and to ask what contribution the cinema has made to “re-claim” not only the images, but the looks that can give them a place, from which they can speak.

It is perhaps an observation not capable of being generalized, but when watching media reports of wars or disasters, I often fail to take in what I see, and instead have a heightened awareness of my surrounding, as if trying to assure myself of a “place,” before being able to place an otherwise unimaginable event. Living in Amsterdam, but not being from it, I witnessed the Bosnian war through a double displacement: although it was taking place in the heart of Europe and its proximity shocked me, its ferocity made it also very remote.