'Bosna!' Shouts War in French

Bosna! deserves its exclamation point. It is a disturbing documentary which unearths and presents images of the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Profound and terrifying, "Bosna!"s images speak louder, and more engagingly, than the voice of its narrator and partialcreator, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy.

The documentary assumes a mostly chronological account of the devastation which Serbian aggression has wrought upon the Bosnian nation. It is a piece of unabashed propaganda for the Bosnian side, leaving out entirely the Croats and neglecting to examine the motivations of individual Serbs, beyond the infamous leaders like Serbian President Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Serb militia in Bosnia.

Bosna!

directed by Bernard-Henri Levy and Alain Ferrari

at the Museum of Fine Arts

March 9 and 10, 5:45p.m.; March 11, 11:00a.m.

Levy and a group of French intellectuals shot the film between September 1993 and March 1994. The filmmakers secured the protection and cooperation of the Bosnian Army, which enabled them to shoot scenes in Bosnian trenches. What the Serbs lose in presentation, the Bosnians gain.

Between moments of moralizing and philosophizing, narrated by Levy, the film's footage (much of it archival) presents vivid glimpses of the war. The awful clarity of these moments--as when a man, off-camera, screams to his father who attempts, unsuccessfully, to dodge the bullets of an unseen sniper--demands a response from the viewer.

The hardened faces of Juka and Enzo, young Bosnian men who fight to defend their cities, compellingly convey the war's harsh and premature aging of Bosnia's youngest and strongest. One woman, an intellectual, steadfastly applies her make-up as a way of denying control to the war. "I will not be a victim," she says in a private moment. A Serbian soldier calmly describes murdering and raping civilians. His voice never falters and his eyes stare dully while a cigarette burns carelessly in his hand.

Levy and co-director Alain Ferrari included footage documenting the most gruesome, tragic and horrifying events of the war. Scenes from concentration camps, the morgue, the hospital, the aftermath of a massacre on the streets of Sarajevo, are, as Levy reminds, eerily reminiscent of scenes from WWII. Watching this footage is moving and affecting, but the impact is almost completely emotional. "Bosna!" fails to place the complex war in a political context outside of its clear agenda.

The film is at its worst when it delves into historical footage of Franco's Italy, the Spanish Civil War and Nazi Germany. Instead of letting the present day images speak for themselves, Levy constantly compares the events occuring in Bosnia to countless other European examples of facism, nationalism, and national-socialism.

His message is direct--in treating the war as a humanitarian "problem" instead of an international, political crisis, the United Nations (France and America Especially) is condoning slaughter of the same type suffered by the Jews under Hitler. He argues for increased international support for Bosnian resistance.

Levy makes this point well and repeatedly. Crisply-uniformed UN troops pass by Bosnians freezing in the mountains and air-drop relief food into an icy river. Some UN officers struggle with the cruelty of this position, but most are unable or unwilling to resist policy defined by distant leaders. Bosnian military leaders, many former intellectuals or white-collar workers, speak with guarded firmness about the fighting, appearing at worst as misplaced men, but mostly seeming deeply and quietly courageous.

One section of the film focusses on the filmmakers' attempts to maneuver France into more committed involvement in the war. Using what must be sizeable prestige, Levy conveys a message from Bosnian President Izetbegovic to French President Mitterand.

Mitterand eventually makes a visit to Sarajevo, temporarily bouying Bosnian spirits, but ultimately leaving them disappointed and less hopeful than before. An edited sequence of interviews with Mitterand and Izetbegovic plays up the dissimulation inherent in Western policy in Bosnia. But the politics are personal, limited to these two men and the context remains narrow.

Levy writes about "Bosna!" that the challenge was "to make a film on the war while the war was still going on...because the war is not over and because one cannot always wait for it to be over to tell it."

The faces of those who endure the war as it unfolds and the video footage of sniper-attacks, dated 1993, force the plight of the Bosnians very close to the heart. Despite its tendency to whitewash the tangle of politics and history, "Bosna!" is a rare, vivid collection of images which speak with strength to universal human compassion.