No Man's Land · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man lies on his back in a shallow trench, very still, watching the sky. He cannot move. Beneath him is a bounding mine, the kind that springs to chest height and detonates the instant the weight on it lifts. His name is Cera, and for most of No Man's Land he does nothing, because doing anything will kill him. That enforced stillness is not a detail of the plot. It is the film's whole argument, and once you see it you see the rest.

Start with what the war movie usually promises. A soldier perceives a threat and acts to remove it; the situation changes; the story advances. Deleuze called this the action-image, the sensory-motor circuit at full power, and he traced its long dominance through American cinema. Tanović keeps the first half of that circuit and amputates the second. Cera perceives his predicament with total clarity. So do Čiki and Nino, the Bosniak and the Bosnian Serb trapped in the trench above him. None of their perceiving connects to any act that would help. Every move near Cera is lethal; every intervention from outside tightens the trap instead of springing it. This is precisely what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image: the point at which characters can read their situation perfectly and still have no response adequate to it. He found it first in the rubble of postwar Italy, in neorealism, and it is no accident that this film about another European war returns to that exact deadlock.

When action drains out, what is left is looking. Deleuze's term is the opsign, the pure optical situation, and its inhabitant is the seer (voyant) — a figure who can only watch and endure where once he would have acted. Cinema usually buries the seer inside metaphor. Tanović makes him literal. Cera, supine on the mine, conscious of his own coming death, is a man reduced to a pair of eyes and a fuse. He watches the sky, the soldiers, the UN, and finally the camera. His stillness is also a gest in Deleuze's sense, a bodily attitude that exposes a whole social relation: the body of the war's victim, held in place so that everyone else can perform around it.

And they do perform, because the trench sits at the bottom of a bowl. The cinematography by Walther van den Ende is built on verticals — the trapped men below, the armies, the blue helmets, and the press ringed on the high ground, all looking down. This is the second thing the film does with the death of action: it converts a man who cannot move into a spectacle for those who will not. The lineage here is exact. Ace in the Hole invented the trapped victim as media circus, the immobilized body around which reporters and officials converge to perform concern, and Tanović reuses the device to indict both the television camera and the UN. Katrin Cartlidge's journalist wants the story; Simon Callow's officer wants to be seen managing it. The mine guarantees that none of their attention becomes help.

The ground itself has gone strange. No man's land is an any-space-whatever — a stretch of churned earth that has stopped functioning as a setting for action and become a pure in-between, belonging to no army, supporting no resolution. Tanović films it in flat daylight realism, inheriting the unsparing front-line clarity of Paths of Glory, where the soldier is destroyed not by the enemy but by the command above him. There is no expressionist shadow to hide in. The void is fully lit.

Then there is the talk. The film's most quoted scene is the circular fight between Čiki and Nino over who started the war, a question settled not by evidence but by whoever is holding the gun — Nino made to "confess" at rifle-point, the confession reversed when the rifle changes hands. Deleuze would call this a small engine of the powers of the false: truth here is not discovered, it is manufactured by force, and the film stages it as such without arbitrating. The image becomes a discourse-image, posing a problem it openly cannot resolve. Language fails the same way the trench does. Bosnian, French, and English slide past each other; the gaps between tongues map the gaps between interests, and the patient dead time of waiting for a rescue that never quite arrives is where the film lives.

It descends from a clear line — Grand Illusion's cross-line enemies bound by confinement, Lifeboat and Hell in the Pacific compressing a war into one cramped space, The Exterminating Angel supplying the absurdist machine of a situation no one can explain or leave. What Tanović added was the refusal of exit as a moral position. In 2001 this film took the Academy's foreign-language Oscar from Amélie, a fable in which every wish is granted. The film that won is the one in which nothing can be fixed and the camera, in its final movement, simply rises and pulls back, leaving Cera alive on the mine, unmovable, still watching.

Watch it again for the arrows. Notice each time someone perceives the situation, and then notice whether their action ever reaches it. The horror of the film is in that broken hinge — the distance between seeing clearly and being able to do a single thing about it.