Elusive Figures: Children’s Trauma and Bosnian War Cinema

Abstract

This chapter explores the figure of the child in Bosnian post-conflict cinema. The author looks at how the child functions as an embodiment of trauma narratives that circulate as public memories of the Bosnian war (and, in particular, of the Sarajevo siege). The chapter focuses on the SaGA documentaries, as well as narrative films The Abandoned, The Perfect Circle, Children of Sarajevo and So Hot Was the Cannon in order to explore how war is positioned as an experience akin to childhood itself: precarious, unnerving and uncertain in its outcomes. The guiding question for the exploration of childhood war and post-war trauma is centred on the double destabilising of identity—through childhood, and through trauma. With that in mind, the chapter explores how the challenge of witnessing one’s own, as well as the traumas of others, is brought to its logical extreme when the subjects of war trauma are those whose coherent sense of ‘self’ is not yet fully formed to begin with. Such challenges to identity have another significant effect: approaching trauma narratives through childhood allows the films discussed here to invite a kind of spectatorial empathy that crosses the ethno-national boundaries (still) permeating post-war Bosnia. As a result of prevalent ethno-nationalism, the politicisation of trauma that lays ownership on who gets to claim victimhood remains one of the building blocks of local ethno-national identities. Because of this problematic political manipulation of traumatic memory, the chapter argues that films that position children as pre-ethnicised, or cross-ethnic victims of war carry the potential for what might be deemed a trans-ethnic traumatic memory—a cinematic archive of public memories that is imbued with traumas reminiscent of our primordial 'first death,' and therefore an ontological void that cannot be easily filled with stable meanings.