The Face(s) of War



Chiris Keelty - Vietnam  (Photo by Suzanne Opton)



Perhaps the most important decision that citizens of a democratic polity are called upon to make concern whether or not to go to war.  The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of such citizens have no direct or immediate knowledge of war.  And so what we know comes from representations of one sort or another – news reports, novels, film, and, of course, photography.  Such representations are always once removed, and equally complicated by reports of those who have been to war that no representation—however real, however verisimilar—is ever fully adequate to the task of helping one to know what it is like to be “in harm’s war.”

War photography faces the challenge of representation as much or not more than verbal or fictional representations if only because it is saddled with the mistaken assumption that it is somehow wholly objective.  But of course we know that that is not the case.  Notwithstanding the fact that we can conclude that the thing photographed was actually there (and ignoring the opportunities made available by the dark room or photoshop),  photographers choose what to include in the frame and what to exclude.  What angle to shoot from.  What speed to shoot at.  What light to employ.  What to keep in focus and what to obscure.  And so on.  In short, the photographer’s craft is an art.  And at its best, it is an important and powerful public art that helps us to see and be seen as citizens.  And of course, the soldier or warrior is first and foremost a citizen.

Much of what we experience as war photography focuses attention on the manner in which war is fought.  And whether the photographs we see shows soldiers conducting military campaigns, interacting with local children in occupied territories, experiencing the boredom of war that punctuates the time between skirmishes, suffering from wounds or worse, or returning home to the hugs and relief of friends and families, the focus is always on what we might call “the conduct of war.” And because wars are typically fought in the name of collectivities the role of the individual is played down—not erased entirely, but nevertheless minimized, as such photographs tend to underscore the archetypal quality of the scenes displayed.  Individuals tend to stand in for something larger than themselves.  And yet for all of that, one of the genres of war photography continues to be the portrait. 



Soldier: Bruno - 355 Days in Iraq (Photo by Suzanne Opton)



The most common portraits of soldiers tend to be taken prior to battle and usually feature the soldier in full uniform.  This is of course a practice that is as old as the Civil War.  And whether taken by the military itself or by friends and family members, such portraits veil the identity of the individual beneath the uniform and mark the soldier first and foremost as a representative of the state.  In recent years a number of photographers have begun to challenge such work and in a way designed to remind us of the individuals doing the fighting.  Premiere amongst such work is the photography of Suzanne Opton.

In a series of projects beginning as early as 2003 Suzanne Opton has been photographing individual soldiers, emphasizing the artistic conventions of portraiture designed to help us engage and understand the individual qua individual.  And with stunning results. Taken “at home,” rather than on the war front, the soldiers she photographs are all out of uniform.  And thus there is a sense in which their status as “citizen” is accented, rather than their sense as warriors.  And yet they are unmistakably marked by their war experiences.  In one set of images, titled “Many Wars” she photographs veterans in treatment for combat trauma, but what marks the series is that they cut across every American war from World War II to the present.  Shrouded in cloth, and generally distinguished by age and the different wars in which they fought, they are nevertheless shown to be as one, even as they are portrayed as individuals—a paradox that underscores the in/visibility of war as it crosses generations (and more).

Suzanne Opton's Soldier Billboard Project

In one of her most recent works, titled “Soldiers” she photographs veterans returning from Iraq, by asking them to lie on the ground with their faces at rest, almost as if they were preparing to go to sleep.  The pose not only resists the typical conventions of portraiture (showing the individual sitting or standing up straight, shoulders back, emphasizing their strength and agency) but locates them in that liminal state between full and active consciousness and the dream world of sleep. In surely operates as a visual metaphor for the condition of such individuals.  There is also a gesture here to the “two thousand yard stare” that recurs as a convention of war photography, made all the more haunting by the fact that these individuals are out of uniform and thus that much closer to us as citizens on the homefront.   These photographs were part of a provocative and controversial “Billboard” campaign which, in their own way, demonstrate the sense in which the soldier has become more or less invisible in the contemporary landscape.

Whatever one makes of Opton’s work, it is clear that she is challenging us to think about the representation of war, and more, the implications for how we experience and engage such representations as we go about our daily lives.  She will be speaking on campus on Monday, October 10, 2010.  The title of her presentation is “Many Wars: The Difficulty of Home” and it will take place in Fine Arts 015 from 7:00-8:30 p.m.  The public is welcome (and encouraged) to attend.

John Louis Lucaites

Professor, Rhetoric and Public Culture

Department of Communication and Culture

IU College of Arts and Sciences

Professor Lucaites co-hosts the blog www.nocaptionneed.com, which regularly discusses the visualization of war in contemporary photojournalistic practice.



Ashes and Diamonds

Since Ashes and Diamonds is such an iconic film, one which every Pole or fan of Polish culture has seen, I asked friends in both categories to share reminiscences of the first time they saw Popiół i diament (as it’s titled in Poland – for some reason, only one “diamond” in Polish!).

It was “my first unadulterated experience of the Polish spirit,” one recalled. “I was deeply moved by its passion and by the emotional uses of light (or actually shadow) and space.” Wrote another: “Ashes and Diamonds had an almost mystical feel for me – and yet it was also full of unambiguous action. I knew only that the lead actor was supposedly ‘the Polish James Dean’, and Zbigniew Cybulski was everything Dean was, and more. Most of all, I remember that strange feeling when I realized the film’s message: for Poles in 1945 the war was over yet it wasn’t over at all.” Another, recalling his first viewing some 40 years ago, puts Ashes and Diamonds in the company of the greats of European cinema: “Up until my mid-teenage years I had only been exposed to Hollywood films, so seeing Bergman, Wajda, Polanski, and Ophuls in college was a liberating experience. … The quality of the print was not good, but somehow that enhanced the essential grittiness of  the film.  The fact that the story did not end well impressed me.  This was not the first non-Hollywood film for me.”

Well, no worries about the print: we’ll be seeing an excellent print on Sunday. And we’ll also have an expert introduction. Mikołaj Kunicki of the University of Notre Dame is researching the filmmakers of Communist Poland. I asked him about his first reaction to the film, and he had this to say:

“I do not remember when I saw Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds for the first time -- I have seen it and taught on it so many times, but what I do recall is that this movie was always discussed and present in the Polish intelligentsia households. Times have changed, so has the state of film culture. But more than fifty years after its completion, the film continues to amaze viewers, including American college students with little exposure to Polish history and culture. This universally acclaimed reception of an otherwise ‘Polonocentric’ film demonstrates its universal legacy. The plot is still riveting, but above all, what makes this film so fascinating and wonderful to watch are Wajda's iconography with the masterful use of national symbols and metaphors, Jerzy Wójcik's outstanding camera work, and, last but not least, the truly mesmerizing performance of Zbigniew Cybulski.”

All true. See for yourself Sunday at 6:30. And please note that Professor Kunicki will be giving a talk the next day, in the Walnut Room in the IMU, entitled “Men for All Seasons? Polish Artists and the Problem of Collaboration during WWII and after.” Both Wajda and the novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski, on whose book this film was based, have been accused of collaboration with the Communists. Kunicki will examine the phenomenon of collaboration in the Polish artistic community under Nazi and Soviet occupations, its different treatment by the resistance movement and the postwar government, and the very applicability of the concept of collaboration for evaluating actions taken by Polish artists.

Padraic Kenney

Director, Polish Studies Center, Indiana University

Ashes and Diamonds is one of two films sponsored by IU Polish Studies Themester, and IU Cinema. It is being show Sunday, September 25 at 6:30 p.m. at IU Cinema.

Leo Tolstoy’s War AND Peace



Sara Stefani's well-worn copy of War and Peace.


Tolstoy obviously didn’t use all caps for the conjunction in the title of his great masterpiece. Although I have read and taught War and Peace several times, I find that I am looking at it somewhat differently this semester. Perhaps not really “differently” – I have always taught my students to see the connections between the “war” scenes and the “peace” scenes – but I think that the Themester goals have made this issue of the connections between war and peace come into clearer, sharper focus. I am currently teaching a course on War and Peace as well as conducting an on-line discussion group of the book, both as part of IU’s Themester program. Since one of the goals of this fall’s Themester is to question the relationship between war and peace, and whether it is even legitimate to separate the two, I find myself coming back to this issue in relation to Tolstoy’s novel. I do think Tolstoy wants us to question whether we can truly separate war from peace. With the Themester goals in mind, however, I am starting to realize how much it is in our human nature and human psychology to do just that – to ignore Tolstoy’s conjunction, to separate war from peace and assign them to different realms of experience.

Tolstoy’s novel opens with a set of “peace” scenes in Part One of Book One and is followed in Part Two by a set of “war” scenes. In my first on-line chat session with the discussion group, one participant made the comment that Part One is all domestic, as if Tolstoy is trying to give his readers a peek into everyone’s “normal” lives before the war drops like a cannonball into their midst. But the war is a palpable presence even from the first lines of the book. Tolstoy doesn’t start us off with a piece of description (“It was a dark and stormy night”), but with the speech of a society hostess who welcomes a guest to her party by proclaiming, “If you won’t say this means war [with Napoleon] … I shall disown you.” War and peace are intertwined from the beginning. Another participant asked the question, “At the time Russia was fighting battles all over the place – so did war become a part of ‘normal’?”

In many ways, this question applies as much to our modern experience as to 18th- and 19th-century Russia. Tolstoy himself was a soldier, and he took part in one of the bloodiest battles of the Crimean War in the 1850s. One of his goals in War and Peace as well as in his earlier “Sevastopol Stories” is to de-romanticize war. His narrator (especially in the “Sevastopol Stories”) lets the reader know quite explicitly that the reality of war does not conform to the idealized image you have of it from books. But in this day and age when we rely less on books for our archetypes than on television, movies, and the Internet, our experience of war may be more immediate, but is it any less romanticized?

One of the participants in the discussion group raised the following point about the male characters in War and Peace: “How much do these men really know about actually being in war? They seem almost to regard it as a game.” Another participant responded with, “Don’t all young men heading into war try to somewhat regard it as a game? How else could you manage to do it?” And another stated, “Men never learn from history. They keep getting pulled in to war even when they know it will not be the glorious experience they envision.” Such comments illustrate the continued relevance of Tolstoy’s novel for us today, teetering as they do on the brink of chronology – are we discussing Tolstoy, or our contemporary experience? 

There are scenes in War and Peace where war and peace converge. The war is no longer just a subject for drawing room conversations. Characters face execution at the hands of a firing squad or are forced to evacuate and abandon their homes – the war literally shows up on their doorstep. But in addition to the intrusion of actual, physical war into the characters’ lives, their personal relationships often seem to be based on the tactics of war. Many seemingly “peaceful” events are fought as if on a battlefield. Marriages are not arranged based on love and companionship, but by one side ambushing another. Romantic and familial relationships are often antagonistic and occasionally violent, and characters ruin (or attempt to ruin) each other using subterfuges that are as strategic as any battle plan. Tolstoy’s novel should make us question our relationships with those around us. Why do we so often treat other people as if they were the enemy and we were at war with them?

Even though War and Peace was written in another time (the 1860s) and another place (Russia), and deals with an enemy who no longer threatens us (Napoleon), it still holds relevance for us today. After all, how much have we really changed since the 1860s? It is a mistake to ignore Tolstoy’s conjunction. We have to see the connections between war and peace. How can we possibly change the former if we don’t change the latter? How can we get rid of war if we can’t get peace right?

Sara Stefani
Assistant Professor, Slavic Languages & Literatures
IU College of Arts and Sciences

9/11: 10 Years Later

Ten years on from the collapse of the World Trade Center, there’s no shortage of reflection to be found. The blogosphere, the mass media, and the world community are reflecting not only upon the event itself, but even more so upon the political, social, economic, and cultural consequences that emerged in its wake. I struggle with how to think about these impossibly complicated circumstances in retrospect. Many of my thoughts, however, have been framed and influenced by the Themester panel on “Seeing America Through Foreign Eyes,” and especially by the comments given by Professor Micol Seigel of American Studies and African American & African Diaspora Studies.

If only to try to understand the scope of the event’s ramifications, we can try to make a short list of what we have seen. The instantiation of the “War on Terror.” The beginning of the war in Afghanistan. The passing of the USA PATRIOT Act. The anti-war protests of countless citizens. The hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the execution of Saddam Hussein. The horrors of torture in Abu Ghraib, and the scandals of “enhanced interrogation” at Guantánamo.  The national debates over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” The mass release of damning diplomatic cables through Wikileaks. The killing of Osama Bin Laden. The military exit from Iraq.

Onward, onward. The list is familiar. Everyone is reflecting upon this date, at this time, every blog and newspaper and ceremony in memoriam of this tragedy. But the list is hardly complete. Even if it were, even if this were all we had to analyze and understand, what does one say about it all, in retrospect? Hindsight is hardly 20/20. Our past as muddled as the present was then, and as hazy as the future is now. A decade of history is infinitely full of unanswered questions, unsolved riddles, and unquenched spirits.

Perhaps the future is hazy because the picture of our world in this list is such a narrow one. In the drama that plays out when I reflect upon 9/11, center stage is taken by those events and figures that seem to fit best with the narrative of the “War on Terror.” International players who somehow became involved in the “War on Terror” become central, either as “friends”—as in the case of Israel—or as “foes”—as in the case of Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea. But so much more  has happened in the last decade, so much more that merits reflection and does not fit neatly into this narrative. Where can we place the genocide in Darfur and the independence of South Sudan? Where can we place the ongoing tensions between Serbs and Kosovars? Is it possible to talk about homogenization of cultivars, of Brazilian deforestation, of climate change, when we reflect upon the decade since 9/11? Is it possible to talk about mass incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation, and a widening gap between rich and poor? Is it possible to talk about HIV/AIDS, malaria, cholera, or typhoid? Is it possible to talk about Wikipedia, Twitter, iPhones, and all of the other new technological advances that are extending our minds, day by day?

Why is our narrative of reflection upon the last decade so monolithic? Perhaps our public memory of 9/11, as citizens of the United States, is framed by patriotism, and by her darker face, nationalism. Our memory draws upon that grand old mythico-history we as citizens both espouse and critique. Manifest destiny. The American dream. That shining light on the hill, that exceptional land of the free, that refuge for the tired, poor, huddled masses. We know the images. We know Lady Liberty, that noble eagle, the stars and stripes forever. And we know what it feels like when, sometimes, those images fail to make meaning for us.

This has been an eventful decade, and in reflecting upon it, we must do justice also to the great changes and momentous occasions that did not make the front page, or did not make the paper. The continual transformation of the world as it marches through time occurs in all of its places and facets—as our species continues to find more and more ways to alter the ecology of our planet, even the most remote peoples must face a dynamic world with courage and creativity. The decisions, voluntary or involuntary, to cope with those changes should not escape our eyes, should be attended to by our history.

Ronak Shah

Ronak Shah is a senior double majoring in cognitive science and conflict resolution. He is serving as an intern for the Themester program this fall and organizing an undergraduage workshop on conflict resolution.

"Seeing America Through Foreign Eyes" was a Themester 2011 symposium held as part  part of Indiana University's multi-event program "Remembering 9/11," which continues through Friday.

Musical Battles

Ubiquitous in times of war and peace, music was used by poor and rich, simple and powerful people to distract themselves from the horrors and exertions of war, but also to beg God for protection, celebrate military achievements, and enjoy times of peace.

The most literal connection between music and war is probably found several art-music "battle pieces" that symbolically capture the soundscape of the battlefield. One of the earliest examples, La Battaglia, composed by Heinrich Isaac (1450-1517), is filled with the ingredients that must have suggested the  last moments of preparation for a war action to the late 15th-century Florentine citizens for whom it was composed. The effects range from the the emphatic and repeated calls and shouts that evoke the chaos of the moment to the brass calls used in the wartime locations to send signals to different contingents of an army and to escort military leaders with a sounding symbol of their rank. The beginning of the piece is a perfect example of musical (and textual) chaos: "To the battle, quick, to the battle, to the battle, quick, everyone get armed with his cuiras and mail, with his cuiras and mail!"

Another famous piece, La Guerre by Clement Jannequin, first published in 1528, attempts a more systematic representation and enlarges the catalogue of battle sounds. Understandably the sub-genre remained fairly circumscribed but did not really died out, as evident in compositions by Matthias Hermann Werrecore, Andrea Gabrieli, and Adriano Banchieri. Certain crucial gestures are still found in the later Combattimento by Claudio Monteverdi from his Ottavo Libro dei Madrigali (1538), famous for the stile concitato, or in Biber's Battalia of 1673, which transposes some of Monteverdi's effects into a purely instrumental realm. Battle pieces, however, are really pieces about war and peace, the former being a terrible reality but also a powerful metaphor. Thus for instance war was used by poets and musicians to describe the condition of the lover, who has to endure all kinds of discomforts and labors to achieve victory or meet with defeat, continuing the ancient trope militat omnis amans (Ovid, Amores, 1.9). (Monteverdi indeed captures musically the remarkable coexistence of real and metaphoric war cleverly devised by Torquato Tasso in the original text.)

Besides imitated trumpet calls and the sounding equivalent of the fog of war, Isaac's Alla battaglia contains long lists of military officers' names. This may seem odd -- why would listeners want to hear name after name declined in a polyphonic piece? -- but really sheds light on the centrality of music to the rituals surrounding war. Isaac's piece was composed as part of a Florentine carnival celebration, but clearly the text was meant to carry a celebratory tone as well. The celebration of victories helped increase the political and military status, and aristocrat and high-ranking citizens participating to warfare were only too happy to be named in a piece. Music rituals surrounding war were of course not limited to celebratory song or to the wind bands mentioned. They included religious celebrations before and after the battle, often accompanied by music -- the Te Deum was a favorite thanksgiving piece, but many motets and Masses were composed as sounding monuments to saintly intercession and divine protection.

Giovanni Zanovello
Assistant Professor, Musicology
School of Music

The Bloomington Early Music Festival is September 7-11. See website for ticketing information and schedule. Admission is free to IU and Ivy Tech students, and youth under 18.