Generation Loss
Notes and images for a talk at Poetics and Politics 4
Srđan Keča • UC Santa Cruz, May 16-19, 2019
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this conversation. My name is Srđan Keča, and the terrible thing about being part of the final session is that I have the impulse, but not the time, to somehow address everything that’s been said before in the symposium, and instead I’m here to talk about the 90s and VHS, and a war that ended more than two decades ago. But maybe what I’ll talk about offers a way to think about the genesis of this immense sea of subjectivity that we are part of today. What interests me most in my examination of videographic records of the Bosnian War, is the way image-making is intertwined with capital, often in ways that the image-makers aren’t necessarily aware of.
This will ultimately be a film, and probably some other things, like an exhibition or a book. Today I want to talk about one specific videotape shot during the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, but let me get to it by way of an extended introduction.
Let’s zoom in all the way and start from the material itself.
The way magnetic tape storage works is that there are particles, traditionally of iron oxide, held by a binder on a thin layer of plastic film, and the magnetization of these particles is what encodes the information carrying the picture and the sound. With time the binder deteriorates, and the particles start to fall off. Memory, by which I don’t mean storage, but the ability to forget, is built into any analog medium, and in the case of magnetic tape the scale is remarkably human-like: just 15-20 years before serious degradation occurs.
Generation loss is faster, and more severe. It’s the loss of quality between subsequent copies of data. With VHS, over 15-20 generations, or copies of copies, the image dissolves into nearly pure noise. “Sneg”, the word for snow, we used to call it in Yugoslavia. Snow happened when you didn’t point the antenna in the direction of the TV tower, or when you got a badly bruised copy of your favorite Jackie Chan movie from the local video store.
In the early 90s, my parents ran a video rental store inside our house, between the room where two of my grandparents lived and the other room which my parents shared with my brother and myself. They opened it after both of them had lost their jobs. Just as the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia was starting, the two socially owned factories they worked in folded. These two workers had left the factory and, perhaps naturally, got into the movie business. For the five years it lasted, the videostore was both the geographic and economic center of our home. It sat between my grandparents, who watched their world melt on television, and my parents who had correctly figured out that our neighbors would want to watch other, more distant pictures while that melting was happening: Suburban Commando, Basic Instinct, Total Recall.
The store closed and was converted into a room for my brother and I (then aged 12 and 8) shortly before the wars in Bosnia and Croatia had ended. By that time business had slowed to a trickle, and my father moved on to a series of other positions: selling smuggled tobacco in the market, then butchery, screen printing, plumbing, etcetera. By that time, in 1994, the collection had swelled to more than 2,000 titles and, needless to say, I watched all of them, some of them 50 times or more. My favorite was a wonderfully atmospheric anime titled Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, an early work by Kunihiko Yuyama. It’s a film centered around a piece of magnetic tape, and the final battle in the film is about memory. Yohko beats the bad guys simply by refusing to forget that something important was on the tape she recorded.
My father used a Hi8 camcorder that was on permanent loan from his brother, my uncle, and besides shooting weddings for hire, he recorded our birthday parties, teased neighbors, and sometimes just filmed around the house. Like one day when a friend — who, incidentally, also owned a video store — came to our house and was toying around with a used M80 Zolja (“wasp”), a one-shot anti-tank grenade fired in Vukovar some months earlier. In the recording, two kids — my brother and I — can be heard in the background, arguing over something while the TV is playing a Mickey Mouse film. War always finds a way in.
The person with the amateur camera is never mindlessly recording. They may not have the clarity of vision, or simply the ambition, of great auteurs, but they are making films. Perhaps by imitation, because they had watched hundreds upon hundreds of films that had conditioned, trained the mind to recognize, but not necessarily to be able to reproduce, the familiar image. Perhaps the beauty and the innocence of home movies that we often condescendingly speak of comes from the transparency of that tension between the conditioned and the resisting — a transparency that professionalism does away with. But at the moment when the amateur video maker is moved to feel something, which is always a moment of recognition, their body knows exactly where to go, what to do with the camera.
If the Gulf War gave us the rise of operative images, the wars in Bosnia and Croatia gave us the home video view of the war. Police, military, and paramilitary units, as is now the norm in Syria, often had a member in charge of filming activities. The videos were then watched together, distributed as souvenirs to members, and it wasn’t unusual for them to end up in video rental shops. On the civilian side, just as an example, one thousand hours of footage shot mostly by amateur video makers in Sarajevo during the three-year long siege is now housed in an archive there. The cheap medium meant longer takes and perhaps the first shots of what war felt like most of the time, the temps morts, dead time of war: boredom, a game of dominoes, some food perhaps; then, suddenly, death.
Image from Living Death Camps project by Forensic Architecture
Do we ever really see new images, or do we only recognize some past, deeply internalized image? When the ITN TV crew got to visit the Omarska camp in August 1992, the shots of starved Muslim men standing on the other side of a barbed wire fence “shocked the world”, as the papers like to say. The shock soon turned into complacency: yes, it looked an awful lot like Auschwitz, but really it was nothing like it, people got one meal a day and a beating once in a while. This new concentration camp, in other words, was disappointing.
There is no footage, no photographic evidence of the thousands of tortures and rapes, and hundreds of killings that occurred inside Omarska.
But only three years later, in July 1995, events around the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica were filmed by at least seven cameras. Shots from the seven videotapes have been used as archival footage in dozens of documentary films made about the massacre. Yet there is a way in which these images were never properly seen. The documentaries stripped the footage of its original intention and produced it as a neutral record, less interested in the authorship of these images then even the Hague Tribunal was. By the time the last of these tapes — the infamous Scorpion unit video, the “smoking gun” evidence of planned executions — surfaced in 2005, evidentiary authority of amateur video had come and gone. If the war in Bosnia started with a lack of images, in true apocalyptic fashion it ended with a surplus of them, largely stripped of meaning — a devaluation that has been pushed to a new level over the past seven years in Syria.
I want to go back and take a look at that moment of the apocalypse of home video.
Two of the cameras in Srebrenica belonged to men who joined the deadly line of those who tried to flee the enclave.
One was the camera of the Television of Republika Srpska, the self-proclaimed “Serbian” part of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
One was a camera permanently charged with filming General Ratko Mladic of the Army of Republika Srpska.
Another was a camera of a member of the UN peacekeeping Dutch Battalion stationed in Srebrenica.
One more was the camera of the Scorpion unit.
And then there is the tape recorded by Belgrade journalist Zoran Petrovic, the object of my study today.
At the start of this videotape is a shot of buses entering Srebrenica, organized by the Serbian forces to remove the Muslim people — women, children, and elderly — out of the enclave. The next shot is from inside a car. While Petrovic is given a ride into town by the Special Police Brigade, he films the Serbian army transporter in front of the car. When one of the officers points out the UN Dutch Battalion compound, saying they’ve “eliminated” it, Petrovic pans to get a shot of the former battery factory that housed it, and confirms the information with his voice.
The scene that follows consists of three shots of lines of people walking on the side of the road, bags in hands, to board the buses. In the first shot, someone asks Petrovic who he’s filming for, and he replies: “for the police”. In the third shot, the camera pans from a line of men and women to the armed vehicle with 8 Serbian soldiers sitting on top of it, and zooms onto several of them who are smoking cigars in celebration. A young Muslim man from the line jokingly asks one of the soldiers for a cigar, but Petrovic doesn’t seem to notice this peculiar detail, as he immediately cuts. The camerawork is shaky, excited. Petrovic is witnessing history, and he’s got exclusive access to it.
A few shots later, Petrovic is filming inside one of the buses. He asks the people on the bus — most of them women — how they’ve been treated, adding that he’s “not from around here but from Belgrade” and that he “doesn’t want to fabricate anything”. Most of the women oblige: Petrovic focuses on one 80 year old Muslim lady who praises Serbian leaders for the camera, then switches to a younger woman whom he asks, tendentiously, how many children she has.
Here we encounter the first mark of erasure I want to point out. There is a woman in this scene, standing in the middle of the bus, whom Petrovic’s camera cannot avoid. She never stops looking straight at him. He never stays long on her face, the camera in retreat as soon as it lands there, equally fascinated and frightened by her gaze. This gaze that clearly says: I know why you are here.
Around 8 minutes into the tape, there is a second act of erasure. Petrovic is filming a group of women who are in the back of a large truck, loading bags and carrying children in their arms. He pans to the name board of the factory behind them, Feros, the factory right next to the UN base. Right below the name board, though, is another line, in red paint and large letters: AKO ZATREBA SVI SMO ARMIJA. If needed, we are all an army, a famous WW2 communist slogan. There is the slightest of hesitations here, but Petrovic does not include the line in his shot.
A minute later, the first literal erasure occurs: a blacked out section of the tape. It’s so short you might miss it, and in digitized versions of the tape the VCR skipped it and created a false continuity. I’ll come back to it in a moment.
After this, Petrovic again joins the police for a tour of the hills around Srebrenica, where Serbian soldiers are rounding up Muslim men. In one famous shot a Muslim man, clearly under instructions from the Serbs (this is clear because they correct him at one point) calls his family who are hidden up in the forest to come down and join him and the other men: “Come down Nermin, you can come safely, I am with the Serbs.” He does this several times at the top of his lungs, then throws his hands down, looks into the camera, says “Thank you” and sits down. The first dozen times I saw this, I thought it was Petrovic, the cameraman, who says thank you to the man for his performance. To my brain that was the only direction that made sense. But no. This man, who is about to be murdered, performs the final role of his life, and under automatism built into him since kindergarten, takes a bow for the camera. This part of the shot is never included in any of the documentaries on the Srebrenica massacre. I’ve seen it a hundred times now, and it’s the only part that can still make me cry.
Now comes the second literal erasure, and this one is a lot longer. Over black, for a second you can hear a small child say “Is aunt Mira there?” Then there is a cut in the sound, and we can hear children’s voices in the background, while in the foreground Petrovic is on the phone to someone, and he boasts: “I can’t hide, you understand… Whenever I worked with them they saw that I was a star, wherever I went there was rapture, you know, I gave them inferiority complexes because they were all leading people from television, you know, stars in Paris etcetera, and they couldn’t do anything until I showed up.” And then we can hear a woman talk to the children in the background, who are arguing.
I want to quote here from Mike Hoolboom, who once put it so beautifully:
A picture is always centered, it appears before the eyes organized according to the hierarchical gestures of perspective. This is how the camera’s lenses are made, in order to centre the viewer. (…) It’s what the manufacturers had in mind after all, the first thing the camera shows is the one who looks. The camera says: I see. Not: this is what I see. This is the most common mistake made with the video camera. People who use them imagine that the world outside appears in a flash, an instant, but what occurs to the camera first of all, all the way back in the camera factory, is the person behind the lens. The subject is born in the camera factory, that’s why these multinational concerns make the big money. Three chips and a zoom lens that takes you all the way back to childhood. Frame after frame. Field after field.
This act of centering is also an act of erasure: to the filmmaker, the purpose of the camera is, more often than not, to forget the world. It is to reduce it to a frame that becomes a souvenir, totem, fetish, merchandize.
Petrovic erased parts of the tape he filmed in Srebrenica, likely a while later while sitting in his home in Belgrade, before selling the images to the BBC and many other broadcasters and producers. These parts were discovered on a copy of a copy of a copy of the edited version of Petrovic’s report, broadcast on the Belgrade TV station Studio B shortly after Petrovic’s return from Srebrenica. The images that Petrovic erased show captured civilians, and in one fleeting shot from a car, a glimpse of the bodies piled up in front of the Kravica warehouse. This tape, now in the Hague Tribunal archives, also contains traces of a personal history: whoever decided to record Petrovic’s report from TV had taped it over previously recorded shows from TV and movies. So there is a VHS copy of The Westerner with Gary Cooper in the Hague Tribunal archives.
There was actually an eight camera recording all of these events: a US spy satellite which, days later, caught up with events and detected areas of so called “disturbed earth”, meaning mass graves. In her 2003 book A Problem from Hell: America and the age of Genocide, Samantha Power, then a reporter and scholar and later US ambassador to the United Nations, writes about how the spy satellite could not have detected something it was not looking for, in this case large groups of men and boys rounded up for execution. The US, she writes, wrongly assumed that the Serbian army was a “rational actor”, and the risks of having them overrun the Muslim enclave were considered manageable. John Shattuck, U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights at the time, told Power in an interview for the book: “We had the Omarska model in our mind.” That is, the U.S. thought that Srebrenica would be just another torture and death camp. One has to wonder if by “the Omarska model” Shattuck really meant: there would be no images of the killings.
Toward the end of Petrovic’s tape, he and the special police force officers accompanying him visit a lumber mill just outside the town. The factory is devastated, and many of the workers are being executed elsewhere. Petrovic frames a shot of the bust of Tito, president of Yugoslavia until his death in 1980, bullets piercing it. In the edited version at this moment he cuts in a sarcastic bit of commentary “Long live Marshall Tito”. The group then move into the factory. There, Tomo Kovac, then minister of police of Republika Srpska, turns to the camera and says “After the war, all this should be given to people who have the capital, give it to them for free and say ‘Here you go, take it and make it work!’” Petrovic, having gotten the soundbite from the Minister, follows the group with the camera as they walk past him. At the moment when he is panning, however, the deputy commander can be heard saying melancholically: “And us who don’t have the capital, we’ll do the cleaning for them.” In this lucid moment, the minister and the deputy commander thus define the inevitable purpose of war and the crimes they are committing at that very moment, and even acknowledge that their own — and by extension, Petrović’s — roles in this march of history are minor ones.
This factory was sold to a Dutch businessman. Today, it produces wood pellets, most of which it exports to countries in the European Union. At the entrance, there is a list of rules for the workers, which starts with this: “Work, work, work. You are here to work and for no other reason. If you obey by this and other rules, you will have a job for the rest of your life.”