Vooys. Jaargang 26

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Off the shelf! Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
War, sound, and the virtual
11. 94/96

In the feature Off the Shelf! renowned individuals from the Humanities are given the opportunity to convey their passionfor a particular work. In this edition Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, assistant professor of Literary Studies at Utrecht University, discusses the documentary crazy (1999) by Heddy Honigmann. The film deals with the haunting experiences of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers, privileging sound and music. Through its multimedial qualities crazy offers a special view of traumatic memory.

What I specifically admire in Heddy Honigmann's internationally acclaimed documentary crazy is the fact that it shows the aural (virtual) realities of combat situations. Most movies and especially documentaries focus on the visual aspect of war, while Crazy is - to my knowledge¹ - one of the first documentaries that focuses primarily on music, warfare, and memory. It centres on the significance of music (indeed its spiritual significance) for Dutch soldiers during and after long-term U.N. peacekeeping missions in Korea, Lebanon, Cambodia, Zaire, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. Their (former) ranks range from privates to a sergeant, a captain and a colonel. As they recount their often horrendous wartime experiences, we hear the music that soothed or reassured them at the time, that helped them to survive physically and psychologically, or is imagined as a most fitting soundtrack to their private memories that are also part of a shared, mass-mediated history.

Thus, colonel Patrick Cammaert frames his memories of Bosnia with the song ‘Crazy’ by Seal (1991), which also featured as a continuous soundtrack to the video-clip 1992: sarajevo: the year of living dangerously, a compilation of news footage from the Sarajevo siege edited at the Sarajevo Agency Pool in 1992. Likewise, private Paul Boomsma plays U2's military protest song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (1983) about the killing of Irish civil rights protesters in Derry, 1972, to commemorate the Bosnian fugitives he failed to protect in 1995. In this way, Boomsma knowingly or unknowingly mediates his private memory of the fall of Srebrenica through the commemorative gesture towards another violent event. (One could even suggest that the strong, military, march-like opening of the song, its foregrounded ‘masculinity’, rather than its anger alone, reveals something about the passiveness that Boomsma had assumed in Srebrenica - as if the music retroactively compensates for it.) Indeed, musically, the gesture extends even further back, as ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ echoes John Lennon's earlier song with the same title of 1972.

Composed of interviews, photographs, home movies, news footage, musical fragments, and letters and post cards read aloud, crazy offers a multimedial perspective on memory: it brings together different mnemonic devices (visual, verbal, musical, sonic), although it singles out sonic memory set against visual and verbal mediations.

1 An exception is Patrick King's 1998 documentary on the highland bagpipe as an instrument of war in two parts: instrument of war (2 parts), Westminster King Productions, 1998.

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During the film all these devices constitute a dynamic of what José van Dijck has called ‘personal cultural memory’: a mnemonic dimension that straddles (and problematizes) the borders between autobiographical and shared memory, the individual and the public. Personal cultural memory thus refers to ‘[p]ersonal collections of mediated contents’, which ‘can be regarded as cultural acts and products of remembering, in which individuals engage to make sense of their lives’. (Van Dijck 2004: 261) In this sense, personal memory always already participates in cultural or shared memory, in so far as - in a Foucauldian perspective of things - it feeds off shared modes and networks of mediation, as well as the discursive conventions enabling and sustaining the latter. This raises the issue of to what extent one's own memories are often vicarious.

This is an issue that crazy foregrounds by investigating how music mediates the past by way of the present: it shows the ‘work of memory’ on screen as triggered and indeed constituted by sonic mediations that pervade past-times deferred as they are instated within the hearings of the present. In a way comparable to Claude Lanzmann's shoa (1985), crazy revolves around the past by way of the present, even though its use of archive material might suggest otherwise. I would propose, however, that precisely this use of archive footage, photographs, postcards, and musical fragments in crazy enables us to witness the production of memory as a mediated compilation: the past is constantly juxtaposed to the present, as if the former were an effect of the latter. In turn, however, this juxtaposition also serves another end in the film: it is to visually and aurally capture a contrast between - as the film's ‘hidden ideology’ constantly suggests - innocence and innocence lost; between enthusiasm and bitterness as transition points in a process of growing up. As Ron de Vos, who served in Lebanon, puts it: ‘Slowly... our youthful innocence was being demolished’ and: ‘in our world nothing remained of the past, nothing at all.’ And then we hear ‘Always on My Mind’ (1972) by Elvis Presley as we see pictures of Ron in Lebanon, the music becoming a soundtrack to the visual material, as if it had triggered involuntary memories of an intruding presence.

This is, indeed, what makes the role of music so interesting in this film: the ways in which it projects presence - felt and bounded presence. Thus, Vincent Wolf, serving in Cambodia in 1992-93, notes at the beginning of the film how the tenor aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini's Turandot (1926) gave him ‘lots of support’ back then and how it still injects him back into the past, ‘no matter what’.² We witness him as a witness: we see his face in a long close-up as he listens to the world-famous recording of the ‘three tenors’ (this was two years after the world cup in Italy) and relives his painful memories, we see the way he looks, breathes, closes his eyes for a moment and sighs after the music stops, as if it has made him go through a passage; as if it had momentarily (and literally) ‘realized’ his memories in a space of experience.

Sound, as Steve Connor has put it, is all-pervasive in so far as it ‘can not only impregnate, irradiate, [but]...also... provide a haven or habitat: “safe” as the saying is “and sound”.’ Sound, Connor continues, is ‘voluminous’, which is why it easily allows us to imagine it as projecting a habitable space, or even as triggering the presence of a lost space. (Connor 2003) In this respect, it is significant that none of the soldiers has selected instrumental music - it is always vocal (an aria, a duet, ballads, protest songs). Thus it is not just the

2 This illustrates an intersection between private and shared memory: apart from having become a soccer anthem in 1990, ‘Nessun Dorma’ already featured in the war drama the killing fields (1983) about Cambodia.

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musical sound, but also the voice and the words that matter in the soothing and safeguarding ‘presentification’ music is here seen to enact: the temporal and spatial immediacy effectuated by sonic ‘surround’ is also informed by the sensation of being addressed. While the soldiers are being addressed by the music, they also distance themselves from the action of combat. crazy shows how sounds and music provide a temporary cover that provokes a detached form of perception. Music, too, is part of ‘no touch’ warfare, even though the occasional and provisional untouchable spaces it projects are often right in the middle of physical combat. In this light, the almost hypnotic effect of organized sounds in crazy opens up ways to critically rethink virtual reality as a sonorous space within the boundaries of the real.

References

Connor, S., ‘Ears Have Walls. On Hearing Art’. In: foArm 4 (2005): 48-57. <http://www.stevenconnor.com/earshavewalls/>, May 1, 2008.

Van Dijck, J., ‘Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of Cultural Analysis’. In: Continuum, 18-2 (2004): 261-277.

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