Where Does the War Go When You Turn Off the News?
May 31, 2023 3:50 pm IDT
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May 31, 2023 3:50 pm IDT
What ever happened to the pregnant woman from the bombed Ukrainian maternity hospital in Mariupol? The whole world was watching as she lolled dangerously on a stretcher, hoisted by desperate men following a Russian bombardment in the early months of the war. You remember: the tenderness of her hand holding her belly, the bright strawberry-printed bedsheet, the jarring, unbearable remnants of warmth amid apocalyptic ruin.
The documentary 20 Days in Mariupol is here to tell you what happened. She died. Her baby died. If thats a spoiler, its not a surprise; we all know that tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians have died in the cruelest of ways since the war began.
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But what happens to that knowledge when we turn off the news? And no less troubling: What happens when the news turns us off?
Its natural to stop watching. The information stratosphere floods us with what feels like an accelerated pace of human horror that makes compassion fatigue seem quaint. Decent people are prone to rank despair over so much suffering, and those of us who live in conflict zones are emotionally exhausted already. Its not obvious that a film-length version of the nightly televised nightmare would be salutary.
20 Days in Mariupol, though, is a classic example that a documentary is the opposite of news, even if created by newsmakers. The Ukrainian director, Mstyslav Chernov, is a videojournalist for The Associated Press; he and his team, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko, were the only journalists left, nearly trapped, in Mariupol as the city fell under Russian siege at the start of the war in February 2022.
Open gallery view
Janna Goma, right, with her family settling in a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 6 2022.
Credit: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
From spectators to (spectral) participants
Normal headlines puncture our day with reminders of terrible things elsewhere. But 20 days of footage is a journey, in which viewers experience the stunning collapse of life under war along with the victims. Instead of soundbites emanating from the screen, the viewer enters the room, making fast friends with doctors, elderly women whose homes were destroyed, children whose chins wobble in basement shelters, a burly man hauling bodies into a trench who says Well, its difficult and that if he starts talking, hell cry.
The voice behind the camera Chernov says sparse things you too might have said, because there seems nothing else to say, and his camera becomes your eyes.
The voice behind the camera Chernov says sparse things you too might have said, because there seems nothing else to say, and his camera becomes your eyes. The documentary fills the gap where human empathy for thousands of unknown faces runs out.
At a literal level, the AP crews choice to follow a medical team means much of the footage will never be shown on the news, or not in full: dripping wounds, failed resuscitation attempts on gray-skinned babies, a man weeping over his dead, legless teenage son and, in one bright moment, a newborns first squeaking cries.
But the arc of the journey is more powerful than the gore. Intentionally or not, the film captures the psychological descent from regular life into a shocking new world where everything is unrecognizable, even our own personalities.
Open gallery view
"20 Days in Mariupol" director Mstyslav Chernov at the Sundance Film Festival last January.
Credit: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP
At the start of the bombardment, the camera captures a panic-stricken woman, wailing and wondering where to go. Chernov films but also tries to calm her, telling her to go home as they dont shoot at civilians. Russian forces promptly begin striking civilian neighborhoods. When he sees the woman later in a makeshift shelter with others, she recalls bitterly: You told me they will not shoot at civilians, as if a different answer could have changed the outcome.
Next, residents begin to flee and trust no one; some curse the journalists as they trundle off with their belongings. Chernov pleads with one woman to say what she feels, or at least her name. She hurls back, I have no name. Perhaps she is afraid of reprisals, but it feels like a metaphor: the war has invaded her life and consumed her identity.
In the space of days, buildings are crushed, the last fire station is bombed and people are reduced to living in a gym, a basement, a train station. Confronted with so much close-up footage of human bodies and their insides, it isnt hard to imagine what the film doesnt show: How much noise do dozens of toddlers and children make when mashed together on a sea of mattresses in a gym? What does the packed former fitness room smell like? What if someone needs the bathroom at night?
The claustrophobia is matched by motion; the camera is walking, moving, running, in and out of a surgery room, behind a gurney, ducking into a building to avoid an airstrike. Suffocation sets in as the city is cut off from water, electricity, heating, gas. Frantic residents begin looting shops.
Then communication lines fall. Like the people of Mariupol, the viewer now realizes that this strategic southeastern city could be snuffed out in silence. It is the great irony of this age that despite more access to more information than at any time in history, there has never been greater opportunity for disinformation. Or perhaps it is not ironic; the system is glutted with information, the runoff is ripe for abuse.
Open gallery view
Bodies are placed into a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol, March 2022.
Credit: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Viewers as truth warriors
The viewer is thrust into the AP teams mission to tell the world what is happening. Here, the film once again does what regular coverage cannot. The nightly news has become another political battleground: authoritarian states control their news, while news outlets in democratic countries reproduce political bias by choice. Moreover, as Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others her 2003 rumination on how people comprehend war from time immemorial each side barricades itself against facts inside a fortress of innocence, and accuses the enemy of fabricating its suffering.
Images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera, wrote Sontag. To photographic corroboration of the atrocities committed by ones own side, the standard response is that no such atrocity ever took place, those were bodies the other side had brought in trucks from the city morgue and placed about the street, or that, yes, it happened and it was the other side who did it, to themselves.
If Russias perversion of truth prompts outrage, ultimately it feels obsolete like reaching for a bayonet in the 21st-century information war.
Twenty years lat
Wednesday, May 31, 2023 at 12:50 pm