Cinema of Rupture: Urbicide, Eastern European Rubble Films, and the Documentary Impulse

Abstract

Currently in Ukraine, and previously in conflicts such as the Bosnian War (1992–96), local film collectives have expanded the mediation of wars to include the perspectives of those close to their subjects, foregrounding the participation of filmmakers in the wartime urban setting. In the 1990s, during the four‐year‐long siege of Bosnia’s capital, the collective Sarajevo Group of Artists (SAGA) produced sixty films of varying lengths, many of which included footage of destroyed buildings. Since 2014, several Ukrainian video projects and collectives, including Babylon’13, Freefilmers, War Against War, and Thickets (Khashchi), have made films documenting various aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although there is no evidence of direct influence, structural and contextual similarities make SAGA an important earlier model for Ukrainian collectives of local filmmakers determined to define the consequences and experiences of war from the perspective of those with personal stakes in the conflict. This essay comparatively examines the creative wartime documentaries of Bosnian and Ukrainian film collectives specifically to consider how filmmakers with close personal connections to conflicts produce documentary representations of wartime destruction