Have you ever been eating eggs and suddenly realized, "Woah, this came out of a bird's vagina."
I had a similar realization during our discussion with Zala, "We are getting a history lesson from a first hand witness." Before you ask: yes, I weigh these as similarly shocking revelations.
AS a Critical Studies major, I am frequently subjected to experts whose knowledge is the result of a game of telephone - they learned their field from books written by experts who learned their field from books written by experts. There can be a certain inbreeding that makes some of the knowledge stale, dehumanized, theoretical and entirely intellectual.
Zala's account of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina didn't allow for any loose academic analysis or circular self-congratulatory intellectualism. She had answers for us, real answers, and I found myself asking questions to which I was personally curious. "How does somebody kill their teacher?" "Where were the police?" "Where did people go if they didn't want to participate in this war?" And, most importantly to me, "How could a developed country with a diverse population devolve into this kind of madness?"
If there's anything I've learned in this class and during this semester (I've been reading a lot of accounts from Poland 1944 and Afghanistan/Iraq in the early 21st century) it's the fragility of civilization. Women could vote in Afghanistan in 1950, and today the Taliban has outlawed education for women. Germany was a European superpower that devolved into a genocidal dystopia. And Bosnia and Herzegovina were functioning countries, speaking a shared (albeit artificially developed) national language. Zala talks about escaping the country on her father's media bus with the ease, confidence, and detachment of an scholar, but I sensed that these decades-old historic events hold emotional significance for her . That recalling them was an act of bravery and generosity. And, having lived in incredibly safe and solid America my entire life, I felt intensely grateful to have access to her story and her humanity.
Her interview provided me a much needed emotional attachment to the otherwise dry and slowly paced "For Those Who Can Tell No Tales". I don't blame the film for my impatience. Zala, opposite to me, felt that film rushed through the story with accelerated pacing. The film also follows a less kinetic issue than the raping of hundreds of women and the massacring of thousands of people - it documents the silent aftermath of these war crimes. But as a busy student, and a detached American one at that, the film's quiet artful mourning process felt like an overwrought visit to a museum for me. I was ready to leave an hour in, feeling satisfactorily informed on the existence of an unacknowledged atrocity.
Zala's lecture added a new layer to my appreciation of the film, however. "For Those Who Can Tell No Tales" was released at festival for a Bosnian audience. The film was by no means meant for my eyes. It's an icebreaker for a national awkwardness, a calling out of an elephant in the Bosnian room. And for that purpose, its exploration of the issue is perhaps under-wrought if anything. To capture the shock from the eyes of the tourist - the outsider - may seem at first to undermine the facilitation of a domestic conversation, but if anything it eases the political tension by preventing any finger pointing by the relevant parties. An Australian tourist simply acknowledges that the issue exists - her emotions about it are irrelevant to the potential consequences of the film - the national dialogue that follows it.
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