LET'S TALK ABOUT WAR
AND THE TELEVISION
VIDEO SIGNAL
Marina Grzinic
Video artist, Ljubljana
Nowdays I can write about video, about the video signal and the medium of television only in connection with the war, because I am living the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina via television and because I lived the ten-day war in Slovenia and through television. At that time, in June 1991, TV Slovenia was broadcasting 24 hours a day and I just had my TV set on, many hours on the day. Even when I managed to snatch an hour's sleep, the TV stayed on, and i would wake regularly on the hour to hear how the war was "progressing". I turned my TV set off only when I ran into the cellar with my infant son to hide from potential air raid on Ljubljana on the part of the Yugoslavia or more exactly Serbian, then still the "People's Army". When the war in Slovenia stopped, burners started spreading stories that all this bombing business had just been staged to impress the foreign press, and, through them, the rest of the world, hoping to move them to action as quickly as possible, since Europe, (it was said?), would never allow Ljubljana to be really bombed. That was what we kept repeating to ourselves (from Ljubljana to Vukovar to Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Mostar and so on), that Western Europe, European peace movement, civil associations and, last but not least millions of TV viewers and other media "squatters" would remain dumbfounded at the direct TV pictures. The images of the horrors happening not somewhere in the "far away East", but in the heart of Europe.
Edmond Couchot taught us that turning on the TV set actually means establishing a connection with the place of broadcasting and being literary (continually) present at the birth of the picture. The television picture materialised literary because of the short circuit between the place of transmission and the place of reception. Thus we can, with the aid of television, or more precisely the television video signal, establish a physical contact with the most traumatic events of out time. Due to technical electronical procedures, the TV viewer experiences events as though they are happening in the here and now, in front of his/her eyes, and perhaps thousands of miles away, in a different time and place, but relying on this almost physical contact between the viewer and television, the contact which will rouse the world, turned out to be in the case of the events first in Croatia and particularly now in Bosnia, an outstanding theoretical construct, and at the same time an erroneous empirical nexus. It may be true, as RenÈ Berger says that television has freed us from physically moving from one place to another and changed us into "squatters" of satellite and cable television, but has also saved us from much turmoil.
On the threshold of the third millennium information about war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina is, thanks to a certain short-circuit, not only simultaneously broadcast but also simultaneously tolerated these actions all over the world (et lest until the war is really over and this is no longer merely wishful thinking).
The majority of East and West European and world TV viewers know there is a war raging in Bosnia, and as long as this documented in the media we can suppose that they will not forget about Bosnia. Or maybe they will? Precisely because it is always exposed and thanks to television, so close and yet so far away at the same time! We are witnessing a paradox of television aesthetics. The aesthetic will offer us a co-ordinates of time and place as through interminable electronic scanning, and the world as an simultaneous recording the transmission, have at the same time, turned us away from remembering and establishing a balance between the past and the future in relation to the almost obsessive present of the television via video signal medium.
Even more, the conflict in the Balkans makers a mockery of the supposed impotence of the media. The old nation that a counter effect can be achieved by showing horrifying visual material is no longer true. Everyday TV reporting seems inconsistent with the logic of TV informative realistic effects, for it seems that the reports produce fiction, that the escalation of horrors (concentration camps, mass massacres, thousand of raped Moslem women) the catalogue for the exhibition "Art and Television" that film was the medium of illusion, television the medium of reality and video the medium of metamorphoses but with the war in Bosnia television has become the medium of fiction, which maybe like a medium of fiction can present in the best way the reality around. As one of the standards codes of television narrative, sensationalism drew the short straw in this war. Daily reports from the battle/ones are not sufficient coverage of the events in Bosnia. As it the media were tightened of offering a different slant on the events happening in Bosnia, under the noses entire Europe and America.
At least in my opinion, the most striking turn of the TV positioning on the war on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia, more precisely, the blood-thirsty Yugoslavian army under Serbian control kidnapped Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovi}, who war returning to Sarajevo after one of the innumerable international negotiating sessions. The only means of communication between the kidnapped president, Yugoslavian army and the rest of the Bosnian presidency in occupied and already half demolished Sarajevo, was by way of the than functional, though badly damaged., Sarajevo TV station. The talks and negotiations, the ultimatums and demands were carried out in their entirety and without censorship in front of the global TV auditorium, before the international public got involved in the affair and mediated Izetbegovic release. All those involved could only communicate via TV telephone frequencies, and this, while the TV station was broadcasting live. It was precisely at this point, that TV which was broadcasting the image of a competent news reader mediating between generals, the present and the precedence paradoxically was transformed into radio and because the medium of drama and information par excellence, dumbfounding TV audience that the Derek Jerrman in his last film Blue depicted the film picture, which he has been identified in the Pandemonium of images, as radio - the point zero of moving image.
In the end the media of video more exactly video works in relation of the war, don't forget that we are through the television video! signal establishing a contact with the crucial events of our time. The re-tracking of the camera along the electronic odges of the conference tables (don't forget that only through the moving picture we the silent and mass audience in the world, are percieving what is going on there) can be understood as an attempt to create emphaty where aphaty reigns, and to create anxiety and east of ecstasy. The video medium is developing into a specific "viewer" enabling us to read history, to see through the surface of the image, and maybe to "perceive"" the future. In more general sense the future of film and in the nineties of documentary imagery lies in the view from the video point (or more exactly computer digital's view point). The digitalized documentary shots of the war encrusted with scrupulously constructed fictional material produce mental and visual hybrids. Instead of simply identifying with a documentary about our present situation, the irrational and complex structures of electronic and digital processes offer us paradoxes and non-linear editing. The peace conferences to stop the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina today, seems to be constructed with equal skill but with no real effects.
Cf. Edmond Couchot. "La question du temps dans les technique electroniques et numÈriques de l'imagÈ," in 3e Semaine Internationale de VidÈo (Saint Gervais Geneve, 1989), p.p. 19-20
Cf. RenÈ Berger, "Entre magie et voyance", in 3e Semaine Internationale de VidÈo, p.p. 11-14
Cf. the texts by Melita Zajc about television estetic in the Slovenian weekly magazine Mladina (Ljubljana 1992/93)
Enre lee, "The Irreality if Dance", in Kathy Rae Huffrman&Dorine Mignot, ods. The Arts for Television (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles& Stedelik Museum Amsterdam, 1987), pp.62