This paper addresses the representation of violence in the film In the Land of Blood and Honey, which was directed by Angelina Jolie (2011). Internationally hailed, awarded but also hugely criticized, the film purports to be about rape camps where Muslim women were held and assaulted by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian war. However, the film merges the story of rape camps with a story about a (sexual) relationship between an incarcerated Muslim woman and a Serb camp commander. Our (...) paper analyzes the cinematic tools used to tell these two stories, focusing on what is referred to as borrowing, and suggests that Jolie borrowed liberally to tell her story. The article focuses on three types of borrowing, cinematic, literary and experiential, and looks at three visual cinematic tropes obtained from Holocaust movies, Cold War movies, and ex-Yugoslav cinematic productions. It is concluded that the film recycles an already largely discarded narrative of “a history of ethnic hatred” as prime cause of war in the former Yugoslavia. The film’s director thus misses an opportunity to challenge the ethnicization of the region – something many local film directors have already successfully achieved. (shrink)

This article analyses the British TV drama Warriors, investigating military masculinities and their cinematic attachments to specific nationhoods. The author’s main argument is that Warriors engages in a negotiation of ontological differences through production of military masculinities, situated within specific time–space coordinates. The story of the war is told using the classical war movie genre, underpinned by a tripartite gendered discourse that links feminization, victimhood and peace, on the one side, with two kinds of military masculinities, on the other side: (...) first, the heroic-moral-military masculinity of the protector and defender and second, the vicious-ethnic-military masculinity of the ‘local’ men. As the drama’s characters stand for the specific symbolic geographies and histories, we see different ontological worlds appearing. Among them Bosnia – represented through viciousness of local masculinities and victimhood of local femininities – becomes a specific, isolated place, the ‘symbolic continent’ of the Balkans, whose singular, violent geography is separated from Europe and the West, through Orientalist and Balkanist discourses. Furthermore, it is a place with a past but no future, wherein moral geographies of peacekeeping military masculinities translate into ontologies of Self and Other. (shrink)