Listening to War (original) (raw)

War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) have tended to focus on the subjective and phenomenological experience of war from the perspective of soldiers, whose agency and placement within the very centre of the action drives the film’s narrative. By contrast, the two Iranian films I will discuss here, Bahram Beizai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bashu, gharibeye koochak, 1990) and Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand, 2004) record the experience of war from the perspectives of those whose lives have been radically and violently disrupted by it, but who have had no active role in shaping its outcome. Focusing on the experiences of children, both films use sound design to articulate a sense of their characters’ fragmented subjectivity and powerlessness through techniques such as point-of-audition, close-perspective miking, and non-synchronous sound and image. In both films, characters rarely speak about their trauma. Instead, embodied sounds and vocalisations are heard on the soundtrack at key points in the narrative to align the spectator with their perspective while at the same time emphasising their characters’ vulnerability at the centre of the larger, global ‘sensate regimes of war’ in which they have no voice or control (Butler 2012, 110). In this way, the films discussed have strong affinities with other ‘anti-war’ films such as Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, Jan Němec, 1964) and Come and See (Idi I smotri, Elem Klimov, 1985) that also feature children as their central protagonists. Through close, comparative analysis of the sound design in these films, I argue that sound can play a crucial restorative role by articulating a sense of characters’ agency and subjectivity so often denied to civilian victims of war both in official records and in their cinematic representation. As such I claim that the films offer a radical alternative to dominant conceptualisations of war as depicted in Hollywood cinema, challenging and broadening our understanding of the genre, as well as potentially deepening our understanding of the impact of war on the lives of civilians and refugees.