波斯尼亚

It's hard to approach the good and bad in this film without being caught up a discussion of the message of BOSNA!, for this is a film that explicitly sets out to convert its audience to its side, to make people aware of the war and to try to influence them to pressure their governments to intervene. It's a film that's very aware of itself, of the process of its making and of the influence it might have: for example, Mitterand's visit to Bosnia is portrayed as an outcome of information given to the French President by the director, Bernard-Henri Levy. The film is full of very disturbing images: a mother and child fleeing from snipers in Sarajevo; bodies littering a street after a shell has landed on a bread queue, many of them with legs or faces blown off; starving prisoners staring at the camera through the barbed wire of a concentration camp. It's impossible not to be moved by the suffering of these people, and difficult not to feel anger at the inaction of the diplomats who do little but talk while people are fighting for their lives and homes. The film makes much of comparisons between Western indifference to Bosnia today and Western indifference to Czechoslovakia and the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. There is, suggests Levy, the same denial, the same explanations that it's all much too complex to get involved in. In 1945 people saw pictures of the concentration camps in Poland and said "never again", but now that the camps are back it seems that we would rather deny them, or suggest that there's fault on both sides, then determine to stop the atrocities. If there is anything I don't like about BOSNA!, it is the incessant wordiness of the voice-over. Perhaps Levy was so anxious to persuade that he didn't dare to let the audience come to their own conclusions. At times sounding like a Biblical prophet, at times hectoring us, at times reflecting on how the war affects our image of ourselves as Europeans, the narration never lets the eloquent pictures speak for themselves, pictures that have more than enough power to move and to persuade on their own.