Archive Through Film and Filmic Archiving

The Silence of Reason (Šutnja razuma, 2023) is a forensic film essay by film researcher Kumjana Novakova that brings together a variety of forensic archival modalities (photographs, transcripts, audio and video recordings) from court proceedings regarding the war crimes of sexual violence in Foča. The methodological concept of the film is performative research, a “filmic re-archiving of forensic material“, which, without individual intervention and interpretation, remains outside the political and social space. The author draws on the concept of mythologizing the horrible as understood by Hannah Arendt. In this regard, the film speaks about wartime sexual abuse as directly as possible, through the raw data of the court archives, and forms a firm position that the horrific experiences of women are not unimaginable and mythological, but real. This kind of representation of archival material is established as a counterpoint to normalised violence and the related sociocultural beliefs.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!