Transnational celebrity activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Local responses to Angelina Jolie’s film In the Land of Blood and Honey

Abstract

This article focuses on the local understandings, responses and interpretations of celebrity activist Angelina Jolie and the film she directed in 2011 about the war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: In the land of Blood and Honey. We first provide a brief historical context of the production and promotion of the film. Next, we offer a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of celebrity activism. In the third part, we look at how Jolie’s film has been received and interpreted in the region itself, since Jolie’s stated goal was to ‘raise awareness about war rapes’. On the basis of in-depth interviews with Bosnian public intellectuals, we argue that the film’s story of war rapes and suffering did little to raise awareness about war rape victims generally and was interpreted primarily within two discursive frameworks: celebrity and ethno-nationalistic ones that tend to reinforce the status quo in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina and perpetuate misunderstandings about war crimes. Jolie’s activism, in other words, did not contribute to the reconciliation between different ethnicities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but has, on the contrary, further fostered polarization that continues to plague the region.

Keywords

Angelina Jolie Bosnia and Herzegovina celebrity activism cinema war rapes

Introduction

When Kofi Annan was appointed United Nations (UN) Secretary General in 1997, he became heavily engaged in recruiting Hollywood celebrities as Goodwill Ambassadors in order to promote the UN’s diplomatic agenda and to draw attention to development causes. Annan’s hope was that celebrities would possess the power to shape international public opinion in support of UN missions, to draw attention to its activities and to raise awareness about the suffering of others (Cooper, 2008a). Celebrity and global name recognition were Jolie’s primary qualifications for being appointed to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a celebrity diplomat in 2001. Jolie is both a Hollywood sex symbol and a mediated, globally famous figure. Throughout her career, Jolie’s image has been transformed from that of a Hollywood rebel to an international ‘credible celebrity ambassador’ (Wheeler, 2011: 14). She was reported to be personally committed to ‘saving the world’ and has been heavily involved in celebrity activism in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan, Ecuador and Bosnia (Repo and Yrjölä, 2011). Endorsing diverse international campaigns and causes, in 2011, she directed a film about war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), with the stated aim ‘to affect policy agendas and to make a film which would artistically critique the international community for not preventing the conflicts in BiH’ (‘Angelina Jolie zaplakala u Zetri’, 2012). Her film In the Land of Blood and Honey had its world premiere in Sarajevo at the end of December 2011, followed by 2012 openings in New York and Los Angeles. The movie can be situated within the emergence of celebrity activism more generally that West (2008) attributes to ‘recent changes in the structure and operation of the media’ that ‘have contributed to a celebrity culture that truly blurs the line between politics and entertainment’ (p. 3). These shifts include a media-savvy electorate for whom a reflexive awareness of political rhetoric has combined with their own awareness of their desire to be entertained by a news industry that simultaneously views celebrities as a way of cutting through the clutter of multi-channel, multi-media, 24-hour news environment. West notes some potential benefits of privileging of celebrity discourses: ‘Celebrities, unbound by political constraints, bring new perspectives which expand the range of ideas represented in our national dialogue’ (p. 6). At the same time, he notes that, a system based on ‘celebrityhood’ raises the risk that there will be more superficiality and less substance in our political process (pp. 6–8). In general, Hollywood does not have a high level of international credibility when it comes to presenting itself as a selfless advocate for others (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Chouliaraki, 2012); indeed, it is all too easy to dismiss the machinations of Hollywood figures as largely reducible to the need to sell: an image, a story, the next round of media products. So, from the start, Jolie’s project faces the challenge of overcoming the international image of Hollywood as one of America’s most powerful global marketing machines. Jolie’s movie does little to subvert the globally familiar Hollywood conventions. The story is built around relationship between the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak), painter Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) and a Bosnian Serb policeman named Danijel (Goran Kostic) in pre-war Sarajevo (thus, in the early 1990s). A bomb blast in the hall where Ajla and Danijel dance signals the end of their romance and the beginning of a war in which they will be on opposite sides. Within 4 months, Ajla becomes a prisoner of Bosnian Serb soldiers in a detention camp. Women there are repeatedly raped by the soldiers. Here, Ajla encounters Danijel again, as he has become a local commander of the Bosnian Serb forces. In order to save her, he takes her as a prisoner and a lover, removing her from the general population in the prison camp and allowing her to live in his room in the prison headquarters. Ajla escapes the rape camp but then intentionally goes back to Danijel. But in the end, she betrays Danijel, serving as a spy for her ethnic compatriots, and he kills her upon discovering her betrayal. The film shocks while featuring stark scenes of rape and executions. Its controversial and sensitive topic polarized its audience and some critics immediately applauded Jolie’s ‘brave attempt to deal with war rapes’ (Milek, 2012: 5).

Jolie got the idea for the film during her visit to BiH as a new UN Goodwill Ambassador in 2009, and in an interview early on, she stated, ‘I am a very compassionate person, and care for suffering of the others. BiH and the world need to know more about the war rapes’ (Milek, 2012: 5). She gave many interviews to the local media describing the political and personal transformations that occurred within her as the result of her visits to BiH. Statements such as ‘I was touched by human tragedy here’ (Milek, 2012: 6) and ‘I grew emotionally myself, while directing this film’ (Kolšek, 2012: 21) were common, expressing a therapeutic discourse of her own personal growth. This rhetoric tended to rely upon her personal celebrity to reframe the horrors of war into raw material for her self-transformation. As we will argue, despite Jolie’s personal growth and the international acclaim and awards for Jolie’s celebrity activities, within the region itself, her presence, her activities and her film have generated controversy, further dividing the BiH nation.

A lot has been written about the growing positive role of celebrities to promote different causes (Cooper, 2008b; Corner, 2003; Driessens et al., 2012; Hawkins, 2011; Wheeler, 2011). Celebrity involvement is understood favourably especially by major agencies like the UN, World Economic Forum (WEF) as well as Western non-governmental organizations that embraced celebrities as promoters of their activities. However, criticism has emerged concerning celebrities’ lack of legitimacy and accountability in international politics (Dieter and Kumar, 2008; Kapoor, 2013; Littler, 2008; Moyo, 2009; Tsaliki et al., 2011; Yrjölä, 2012). But a large gulf exists between celebrities’ priorities and political, local expectations on the ground, and more empirical work is needed on the impact of celebrity activism in terms of local reactions to it. Street (2012) argues for more emphasis on audience perceptions of celebrity activism, going beyond the current focus on large-scale surveys or mere theoretization without empirical evidence. The dynamics between celebrity, political cause and audiences is complicated and demands more research into the way in which locals view and respond to celebrity activism and politics in order to explore the conditions and effects of this activity. After all, those who are likely to be most directly affected by such interventions are the locals themselves. Jolie identifies as one of her stated goals for the film the importance of raising awareness within the region of its own recent past – presumably in the spirit of helping to overcome entrenched antagonisms and the tragedies that follow from them. Thus, any assessment of the success of her project must in turn hinge at least in part on the way reaction has played out on the ground – in the region that is the target and subject of her movie. Moreover, this success needs to be considered in relation to other embedded goals of a commercial project such as Jolie’s. As Trope (2012) writes, ‘The line between altruism and self-promotion, between philanthropy and celebrity, between enlightenment and exoticism will always be debated and difficult to discern’ (p. 171). That is why it is important to explore how a celebrity impacts the cause identified by Jolie. How was Jolie and her film ‘read’ and interpreted within BiH? Does Jolie’s activism, ultimately, contribute to promoting possibilities for peace, reconciliation and democracy in BiH? Rather than applauding or condemning Jolie’s celebrity activism in BiH, we want to analyse tensions within the reactions of local audiences.

We first provide some brief historical context: BiH remains a paralysed country, unable to recover from a violent conflict that still defines its constitution, governance and social structures. A short framework for contextualizing and situating Jolie’s film within a broader political context and her own diverse repertoire of activities is provided. Next, we offer a theoretical framework for exploring celebrity activism. On the basis of in-depth interviews with Bosnian public intellectuals about Jolie’s celebrity activism and the film, we argue that the film’s story of war rapes and suffering gets turned into a spectacle without any moral and political content. We focus here on public intellectuals because they are the ones who make knowledge claims in the public sphere, gain some degree of social attention and participate in public life on the basis of this exchange. We view intellectuals in the region as playing an important role in framing public discourse and exerting public influence through their practice and works in the public sphere.

While we acknowledge that Jolie as a celebrity has the potential to create awareness about the war rapes, and even to raise necessary funds, and we pay special attention to the discursive complexity of the film, we argue that her work is ultimately a part of a politics of entertainment. The film’s ability to effect structural changes remains limited, since her celebrity persona has a tendency to eclipse the cause and to polarize public reaction. In that, the film helps to affirm simple narratives of ethno-national identities as victims and perpetrators.

The broader context

BiH experienced a fierce war from 1992 to 1995. Both sides, Serb and Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak), committed war crimes, which included ‘ethnic cleansing’, the establishment of concentration camps, the destruction of physical property and widespread massacres of civilian populations (250,000 deaths). A rough estimate is that between 20,000 and 50,000 rape victims exist (Salzman, 1998). The Dayton Peace Agreement brought an end to the Bosnian war on 14 December 1995. It divided BiH into two legally recognized entities: the Federation of BiH, in which mostly Bosniaks and Croats live, and the Republic Srpska, populated almost exclusively by Bosnian Serbs. The agreement intended to end the war, but accomplished this goal through territory divisions that ghettoized the citizens into enclaves of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, ultimately institutionalizing ethnic cleansing and allowing the ethno-nationalist politics that instigated the conflict to survive and thrive (Helms, 2013). BiH remains a paralysed country, unable to recover from violence that still defines its constitution, governance and social structures. The Republic Srpska, in particular, is still labouring under what amounts to the official policy of denying the truth about the war. The current challenges facing BiH – its weak state structure, and deeply flawed constitution, a weak economy and the recent disturbing intensification of ethno-nationalistic discourses – make the stake for achieving some kind of a consensus about its identity very high. However, so far, no constructive talks have been held regarding these issues, rival political parties do not seem to be able to achieve a consensus and the country is divided politically and socially. BiH is also one of the poorest countries in Europe: its unemployment rate in May 2012 was close to 44%, and the average monthly salary is 340 euros (Federalni zavod za zaposlovanje, 2012).

It is in this particular context that Angelina Jolie decided to make her controversial film In the Land of Blood and Honey. Internationally, the film immediately received considerable positive attention. The Producers Guild of America awarded Jolie the Stanley Kramer Award for ‘excellent directing’, and at the Festival Berlinale 2012, the film received the ‘Cinema for Peace Honorary Award for Opposing War and Genocide’. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (2012), who has become something of a pop-culture intellectual, wrote,

I know the places she evokes. I saw, in real life, the men and women who resemble Danijel and Aila, the Romeo and Juliet of this love story set against a backdrop of concentration camps and horror … a film … that is not just a film, but a just film, rendering justice to the dead and honor to the survivors. […] Consider this Bosnian society that beheld, there, its most painful secret. Here is, suddenly, a great actress, and a great lady as well, who has used her prestige so that, for the first time, they might be allowed to raise their downcast heads.

Such comments understandably provoked mix reaction – to say the least – in a region that did not imagine that it had to wait for the redemptive intervention of a Hollywood celebrity. Jolie had taken it upon herself to, as she put it, ‘help reduce stigmatization of victims of war rape for the first time in BiH’ (Milek, 2012: 5, emphasis added). She saw the movie as a springboard for further global action, as exemplified by the fact that together with her husband Brad Pitt and actress Zana Marjanovic (who starred in the movie), she visited US President Barack Obama in the White House to discuss possible interventions against war rapes around the world.

If Jolie’s hope was also ‘to open up discussion about war rapes and build bridges’ (Milek, 2012: 6), her film deeply polarized public opinion in BiH, even before its opening. The media coverage of the production and promotion of the film contributed to ethno-nationalistic discourses in the region (Babić, 2011; Kolšek, 2012; Milek, 2012). At first, Bosniak media protested against the potential humiliation of ‘our dead ones’, and the Bosnian ministry of culture prohibited Jolie to film in BiH. Cultural Minister Gavrilo Grahovac claimed he had taken the decision following complaints from the Association of Women Victims of War representing women victims of the mass rapes during the Bosnian war (the film was shot in Hungary). Bakira Hasecic, the President of the Bosnian Women Victims of War Association, has publicly criticized and denounced the plot of the film, for focusing on a rape victim ‘falling in love with her torturer’. Hasecic called Jolie ‘ignorant’ and demanded that she be stripped of her position as Goodwill Ambassador. In an open letter to Jolie, Hasecic (2012) wrote that

war victims in BiH are worried and restless with the news of your intent to promote, before the eyes of the world, your movie which we understand stands to falsify the historic truth about the crimes of mass gang rapes of Bosniak women. As far as we are concerned a love story could not have existed in a camp. Such an interpretation is causing us mental suffering. (in Horvat, 2012)

But once it became publicly known that the villain of the movie was a Serb soldier, the mainstream Bosniak media started to celebrate the film as ‘the real truth about BiH war’ (Babić, 2011; Kolšek, 2012). The leader of the Islamic community in BiH stated that the film proves that ‘genocide happened here – the genocide of Muslims’, and that ‘the film is the second best thing to the Dayton Agreement, since it shows the truth about our suffering’ (‘Reisu-l-ulema Mustafa ef. Cerić: Anđelin film je dokaz genocida!’, 2012). The most popular Bosniak newspaper Dnevni Avaz (The Daily News) declared Jolie its person of the year for 2011 in BiH. Jolie became an honorary citizen of Sarajevo for ‘widely contributing to the truth about BiH war’ and ‘promoting democracy and tolerance’ (‘Angelina Jolie počasna građanka kantona Sarajevo’, 2012). The spokesperson of the Association of Detention Camp Prisoners Sarajevo stated for the Dnevni Avaz newspaper that ‘the film truthfully shows the aggression visited upon BiH’ (‘Žrtve rata zadovolje sa filmom’, 2012). Jolie met with local presidents, diplomats and mayors, who were all welcoming her, trying to raise their own profile.

Bosnian Serbs, by contrast, dismissed the film as anti-Serbian propaganda (Babić, 2011). In the article ‘Angelina, go away!’, Milorad Dodik, the President of the Republic Srpska in BiH is cited as saying that ‘Angelina Jolie is not welcome in our country’. The media frenzy achieved its peak in the winter of 2011–2012, with the film’s opening. For example, the most popular newspaper in the Republic Srpska Kurir published an article titled ‘Angelina Jolie Calls for the Abolishment of the Republic Srpska (2012)’. Moreover, the representatives of the Association of former Detention Camp Prisoners from Republic Srpska claimed that ‘the film is a part of an extreme fundamentalist Islamic plot, whereby the Serbs are represented as barbarians and murderers, and the Muslims as victims only … and that is just a horrendous lie’. The famous Serbian film director Emir Kusturica called the film ‘pure anti-Serb propaganda … Jolie should focus instead on American atrocities around the world and those who suffer under American oppression’ (Babić, 2011: 212). Because the film does not even mention the role of Croatia and Croatian soldiers during BiH war, Croatian media ‘happily reported only details about spectacular private life of the sexy Angelina Jolie’ (Babić, 2011).

Theoretical frameworks: celebrity activism and politics

Turner’s (2004) argument that celebrity is discursively produced is a crucial starting point for the theoretical approach of this research, because he sees it as ‘a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects …’ (p. 9; see also Holmes and Redmond, 2006; Couldry and Markham, 2007). Research on the role of celebrity activism is growing, but remains highly diverse. On one hand, diplomacy scholars, such as Cooper (2008b), argue that celebrity diplomats have become enormously successful in mobilizing attention, channelling support and influencing international public policy. For Cooper (2008b), celebrity diplomats employ innovative practices and are a part of unofficial public diplomacy (p. 128). He in particular argues that celebrities, such as Bono and Bob Geldof, have access to influential circles of international politics that allow them to make productive interventions, for example, into world debt or humanitarian aid debates (Cooper, 2008b: 3–4). In this respect, Cooper’s arguments have a resonance with a growing literature in political communication that looks at if, how and why celebrities provide credibility for political agendas, and whether they can reinvigorate national and international politics alike (Corner, 2003; Cottle and Nolan, 2007; Wheeler, 2011).

On the other hand, critical scholars see the emergence of celebrity activism linked to the emergence of a post-democratic order in which politics gets transformed into a media spectacle that is only to be performed in front of an audience, while public opinion gets reshaped and manipulated (Moyo, 2009; Littler, 2008). According to these accounts, the celebrity holds a false promise of the power of the individual to influence social change and thereby reinforces a reductionist, individualist, post-political politics. Scholars point to celebrity activism’s impulse to reduce complex problems of development into forms of mediated entertainment. They claim that celebrity activism by Western celebrities such as ‘Bono and Bob Geldof’s “development buzz” oversimplifies development politics into sound bites and one-dimensional messages which disregard both the historically unsuccessful experiences of aid development as well as the multiple nuances that development holds’ (Yrjölä, 2012: 359). Moyo (2009) similarly suggests that the argument that the ‘pop culture of aid’, by forging ‘aid as part of the entertainment industry’ (pp. xviii–xix), has been central to bolstering the misconception that only with increasing Western aid (and the attendant intervention of various pop stars) is Africa’s persistent poverty really solvable. These authors also argue that there is a shift in celebrity development strategies that link consumption, trade and aid closely together. They show how celebrity activism comforts ‘the West’ through consumerism rather than providing a space to understand inequalities, suffering, pain and trauma of the others (Dieter and Kumar, 2008; Kapoor, 2013; Lisle, 2004, 2008; Moyo, 2009; Van den Bulck, 2009; Volcic, 2010). Van den Bulck (2009) looks at how White female celebrities in particular frame their humanitarianism and argues that celebrity serves as a vehicle for the promotion of Euro-American cultural and moral hegemony. Goodman and Barnes (2011) introduce the notion of the ‘celebrity-consumption-compassion complex’ that defines celebrity activism (p. 72), while showing how different celebrity activism campaigns (such as RED, Hope for Haiti) have contradictory outcomes: they stress consumption, and leave out broader discussions about inequality, social justice and the ways in which consumerism negatively impacts upon the intended recipients of aid. Specifically, Littler (2008) shows how support for ‘the afflicted’ can be a way for celebrities to raise their profile above the level of the crudely commercial, while constructing another dimension of personality – of compassion, caring and confession. She writes that ‘contemporary celebrities today use a variety of different routes and roles and emotions to confess that they do, really, truly and intimately care about global social injustice’ (Littler, 2008: 239).

Most of these authors claim that the rise of the phenomenon of celebrity activism should be situated in a global, neocolonial, neoliberal culture of individualization. Within this framework, any kind of a problem, be it economic or social, gets framed in terms of discourses of personal growth, self-help and recovery (Kapoor, 2013; Peck, 2008; Sturken, 2007; Trope, 2012; Yrjölä, 2012). As Peck writes about Oprah Winfrey’s confessional and ‘uplifting’ programming and her celebrity activism in South Africa, celebrity activism gets positioned as a potential solution to all the world’s inequalities (Barron, 2009; Marshall, 1997; Peck, 2008; Rajagopal, 1999). Celebrity activism and therapeutic approaches come to serve as compensation for the retreat of the social safety net in the neoliberal era. Under the guise of helping ‘others’, celebrity activism actually recreates asymmetrical relationships between those who give (the West) and those who receive (the Rest). The calls to freedom, liberty and humanity continue to perform central and strategic roles in the ways the West has dominated and restructured the world in the past: the celebrity conceals the global system of injustice that actually reproduces the dependence of ‘the receivers’.

Boltanski (1999), in particular, analyses how the suffering of distant others becomes a commodity sold by the media and argues that media need to show people not only the passivity of suffering but also possibilities for action to confront and escape the suffering (p. 190). Jolie is well known for skilfully employing the therapeutics of personal suffering (Chouliaraki, 2012). She famously declared that her experience making the film had been life changing. While crying onstage in Sarajevo, she claimed, ‘The time I spent and the people I met in Bosnia have changed me for ever. I have grown up’ (British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2012). In that regard, her rhetoric is a part of a discourse deeply inflected by the neoliberal therapeutic ethos in which individual (celebrity) transformation is causally tied to social transformation, which becomes, in a sense, a resource for personal growth.

The making of Jolie’s film coincided with a sensitive period in the delicate and tangled process of post-war reconciliation in BiH, where most local scholars remain sceptical about the role of the international community in building peace, and the potential of celebrity activism, especially when Western (political and economic) interests are implicated. These scholars see celebrity activism as promoting the celebrities themselves by prioritizing the ‘authentic’ emotions of the celebrity (Littler, 2008; Simic, 2009). For example, Simic (2009) is sceptical about Mia Farrow’s visit to the Srebrenica-Potocari memorial complex:

seeing Farrow crying and kneeling in the cemetery with the ‘Mothers’ … She looked like an actress well prepared for her role: praying in a Muslim way and crying, embraced and surrounded by women whom she had never seen before. Farrow has also asked for forgiveness on behalf of the ‘betraying world’. While I understand the politics behind her visit and that she can attract attention to important issues, I was still concerned by her visit. What was she thinking while she was crying? How much did she know about the people of BiH? Whose consciousness she did want to raise?

Similarly, local pundits accuse Jolie of just playing another role, this time in international politics, instead of in Hollywood:

she plays an anti-hegemonic hero who acts against western powers by criticizing their politics in BiH. She is this self-sacrificing hard-working muse, who seeks the truth, and promotes peace. Her ‘unauthentic’ authenticity to appear ‘natural’, ‘caring’, and ‘credible’ hurts: she loves to be photographed with ‘authentic’ locals in order to appear even more ‘authentic’ herself. (Kolšek, 2012)

Her film was widely positioned by critics in the region as ‘commercializing and simplifying the war tragedy in BiH’ (Kolšek, 2012: 21), and Jolie’s intention to be balanced and neutral was roundly criticized – not so much because she was perceived to have some deep pro-Muslim bias (although some did claims this), but because it is in the nature of the commercialization represented by celebrity culture to simplify and de-historicize. In other words, her bias is not internal to the conflicts of the region, but represents the importation of the biases of commercialization and commodification to a regional tragedy.

Influential international film critics (Dargis, 2011; Hornaday, 2011; Pulver, 2012) described the film’s narrative as shallow and the characterizations as flat. They dismissed the film as a Hollywood spectacularization of historic tragedy, trivializing the suffering of the Bosnian people and promoting further divisions between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. Similarly, prominent local film critics focus on how the film stereotypes characters according to ethno-national stereotypes – and especially how in the end, the two main characters (in contrast to the standard ‘Romeo and Juliet’ narrative) chose their ethno-nationalist identities over their transgressive romance: Ajla chooses her (Bosniak) side by betraying Danijel in the midst of their tormented romance, and Danijel chooses his (Serbian) side by failing to reject the role carved out for him by his family and the war as a Serb nationalist. Horvat writes,

the film’s intention is to blur the standard dichotomy of perpetrator-victim by telling the story of a Muslim woman who falls in love with a Serbian officer, yet it does precisely the opposite […] What is missing in Jolie’s movie is exactly the tragic dimension of fatal love. The film thus not only misrepresents tragic love itself but also its potential to go one step further.

And Stefancic (2012: 67) claims that

the film obscured the events of and leading up to the wars in BiH. Only the ethno-national dimension is being emphasized in the film – that’s the problem – the only cause it can find for the conflict is ethnic hatred. There is no context about the war, who started it, why, and what was the role of the international community and Western interests here in the region … Jolie didn’t come here to understand. She came here to comfort herself, her rich sponsors, and the West itself, that they are doing something supposedly positive … But Angelina, it seems, is more narcissistic than anyone could have imagined.

Erceg’s (2011) writing focuses on the relationship between Western audiences, perpetrators and victims:

functioning in the way that yes, Angelina showed what horrific things we did to each other in BiH, but this also serves to confirm her own superiority, her own and Western moralism. Jolie is able to shock with the brutal story of war rapes, and strong scenes, but she only offers viewer the possibility of consuming Bosnian tragedy and disaster. She is not able to go beyond and offer hope, understanding, and deeper engagement with complexities on the ground.

These provocative local media critiques of Jolie’s celebrity activism and her film invite multiple responses and further questions. Moreover, there is a tendency to conflate criticism of the filmic narrative with that of celebrity activism itself. If Jolie made a bad movie, does that make her an ineffective activist or call into question her motives and impact? If she was a sincere activist does that mean she would necessarily make a good movie? The capacity to claim to speak politically as a celebrity is determined by a number of conditions and structures, as well as by the affective bond which is created by the relationship between the celebrity and the audiences. In the past, there have been some serious cinematic attempts by young Bosniak female film-directors to address the issue of rape during BiH war (such as Jasmina Zbanic’s Grbavica), but Jolie’s position as a transnational celebrity activist is different: she is portrayed as being able to bring awareness about the suffering of the poor and powerless to the rest of the world because of her high international visibility. Keeping these issues in mind, we propose here to focus on the narratives of public intellectuals in BiH. We set ourselves the task of considering how intellectuals from diverse ethno-national backgrounds interpret Jolie’s celebrity activities.

Reactions from the locals: ‘Hollywood comes to Bosnia’

Methodology

In order to carefully explore the response to Jolie’s film itself and to her celebrity activism more broadly, we interviewed Bosniak and Bosnian Serb intellectuals from February through May 2012.

The data included 48 problem-centred, in-depth interviews with Serb (23) and Bosniak (25) intellectuals (elites) aged 25–55 years, roughly half men (26) and half women (22). They were drawn from a universe composed of university teachers (12) (teaching/research assistant (4), assistant professors (4), associate professors (4)), high school teachers (12), journalists (8), non-governmental activists (4) and artists, including film and theatre directors (14).

The research was conducted in the main cities of the Federation of BiH and the Republic of Srpska. In-depth interviews and critical discourse analysis were used to gain insights into the informants’ perceptions that go beyond the official public response as reported in the media, and thus to offer more in-depth information on public perceptions than survey methods allow for. All the interviews were conducted in the respondents’ native languages by both researchers, and transcribed verbatim. In order to explore what kind of discourses the informants employed, we conducted critical discourse analysis as a textual analysis on four ‘levels’, including macro- and micro-analysis, macroproposition, representation of social actors and choice of keywords (Richardson, 2006; Van Dijk, 1980). We labelled our informants by first name, age and the city they come from.

Results

Overall, the critical discourse analysis revealed two dominant discursive responses to the movie and Jolie’s celebrity activism more generally.

Celebrity discourse

In interpreting Jolie’s film and her celebrity activism, more than a third of informants (18) focused on Jolie as a celebrity. At the centre of their discourse is not a focus upon awareness-raising identified by Jolie (the issue of war rapes), but rather a focus upon the celebrity persona of Jolie. Thus, in this discourse, the message about celebrity overcame the message of the cause. This discourse helped frame Jolie as a powerful, famous figure. Informants described themselves as individual consumers, and not as members of ethno-national communities, despite the fact that they formed either positive or negative attitudes towards Jolie that depended on their ethnic belonging. This discourse is de-politicized and consumeristic, since it either glorifies or disqualifies Hollywood celebrity and activism through consumerism. Although the informants’ purchasing power was often limited (most of them would openly express economic difficulties that they face), they still celebrated consumer products, glamour lifestyle and consumer values, which lie at the centre of consumerism (Baudrillard, [1970] (1998)). Informants are fascinated by the consumer lifestyle, emphasizing, for example, Jolie’s glamour, embracing her supposed luxury lifestyle, while they marginalize the existential problems that face them and war rape victims in BiH. The questions of social justice and reconciliation were removed and absent from this discourse. Participation in, or at least desire to somehow participate in, the glamorous life of celebrity and its attendant forms of consumption made it possible for them to escape their ‘everyday’ life. As one respondent reflecting on the consumerist response put it, ‘We project all our aspirations onto material products. Our politics, our history, our post-war wounds, we believe that all can be saved by consumption … by catching the train of spectacle and living a life of luxury consumption’ (Amir, 28 years, from Gorazde).

From the statements of 11 Bosniak informants, we identified the macroproposition in which Angelina Jolie is represented as a celebrity whose arrival to BiH made it possible for our informants to become the centre of the global media attention and to share vicariously the celebrity lifestyle: ‘Angelina Jolie is a celebrity, who made it possible for us to participate in global glamour lifestyle’. One typical statement comes from 51-year-old Bosniak Lejla from Sarajevo:

Jolie is a celebrity, that brought us the attention of international media, again. Sarajevo has been put on the global map because of her. But we were represented to the world through Angelina’s eyes, through her glamour. The media reported about Sarajevo in a positive way, while writing about fashion here, shopping malls, and clean streets. We were a part of this glamourous life, at least for a second. I went to the opening of the film – and wore a new dress and shoes. It was great to see Angelina. She talked to ordinary people at the reception!

Some informants glorified Angelina and several times named her ‘a hero’, or ‘an angel’, for example, ‘Jolie is our hero here in BiH, she is so famous, but she is doing charity, telling our tragedy’ (Enisa, 33 years, from Goražde). They attributed to her numerous positive characteristics, such as ‘knowledge’ and ‘courage’, for example, ‘Jolie has shown some courage to make this film’ (Emir, 32 years, from Žepča). She was described as a ‘real humanitarian’, who wants to help people in this region, for example, ‘Jolie has triggered controversy here in the region, but she is a real global celebrity, trying to help the region’ (Ena, 39 years, from Sarajevo). For example, 39-year-old Bosniak Jasmin from Sarajevo stated,

Angelina is an angel, who came to Sarajevo. She is a well-know superstar. And imagine, as a local journalist, I was able to have an interview with her. I am a nobody! I will never be able to make another interview with such a celebrity. I was a part of this spectacular event, and I liked it.

These informants have stressed how much they enjoyed the activities surrounding the promotion of the film and her visits, including, for example, conducting interviews with Jolie, helping to organize promotional activities around the film in BiH or attending the opening of the film, since these allowed them to have access to Jolie, and with that, they could ‘almost feel, smell and touch the glamour and luxury of Hollywood’ (Amer, 45 years, from Sarajevo). They felt that they were at the centre of international media attention and were admired by others, which gave them a sense of the taste of celebrity life. This feeling came as an escape from their ordinary life, focused on the struggle to survive in an economically ravaged and politically damaged society.

The analysis of social actors showed that despite the use of the words ‘we’ and ‘us’, the informants identified themselves primarily as the collective of individuals formed by a group of consumers who live in BiH. Consumerism is employed here as a way ‘out of this reality where we struggle for our survival. It’s great to see Angelina: she has it all. I don’t want to be defined according to ethno-national aspects only. I am human, who likes good clothes and beautiful things. Jolie is in a way my inspiration. What would I give to have her body, hair, and her clothes’ (28-year-old Bosniak Alma from Gorazde). For this group of informants, Jolie represents a visual signifier of the ‘glamorous, good life’ who reinforces the idea that consumerism and personal enrichment are viable modes of political subjectivity in post-war contexts. These informants used adjectives such as ‘sexy, famous, rich, beautiful …’. Most often, the connections were made between ‘celebrity’ and its synonyms, such as ‘famous’, ‘star’, ‘beautiful’, ‘seductive’, ‘glamorous’, ‘rich’ and ‘elegant’. These were followed by positive emotional attributes such as ‘compassion’ and ‘caring’. One typical statement was from Adnan, a 31-year-old Bosniak from Mostar:

She is the most famous and sexy woman in the world. Look at her lips only, they are perfect. Plus, she is really rich, too. But she is compassionate, too. I have seen it myself – when she spoke at the opening of the film. That was not a bluff, that was really sincere.

Jolie as a celebrity gets constructed by female informants in a particular way. They described her using ‘commodified’ feminine characteristics, stressing her ‘style’, ‘sex appeal’ and some sense of ‘internal beauty’. They employed words, including ‘elegant’, ‘beautiful dresses’, ‘sexy body’. According to 29-year-old Edina, a Bosniak from Sarajevo,

Angelina has a very elegant style. She just has many beautiful dresses and shoes. She knows how to carry herself. She is beautiful in front of the camera, and behind it. I feel flattered that she came here to Sarajevo.

Angelina here serves as a kind of a global branded celebrity that makes it possible for the informants to admire global glamour. Jolie’s celebrity activities, including her film, rarely provided a space for critical reflections about war rapes even among Bosniaks. Instead, her persona, as constructed by our informants, perpetuated simplistic, familiar, glamorous, imagery associated with consumer values.

On the basis of the analysis of seven statements from our informants with predominately Serbian ethnic backgrounds (five), we identified a macroproposition that negatively represented Jolie: ‘Angelina Jolie is a celebrity, who exploits conflicts in BiH for her own self-promotion’. To downplay the importance of war, the informants euphemistically used the word ‘conflict’ instead of ‘war’ to describe the events from 1992 to 1995, during which more than 250,000 people died (Verdery and Burawoy, 1999). This word usage shows that nationalistic ideology has not completely disappeared, but manifests itself even in discussions of celebrity. According to Petar, 32 years, from Banja Luka, ‘We don’t need a Hollywood celebrity to teach us about politics, to preach us about justice and democracy. The goal of her charity work in BiH falls flat as it becomes Jolie’s vanity project’. And in the words of a Bosnian Serb Bojana, 29 years, Banja Luka,

My own opinion about Jolie … is not a good one. She is a Hollywood celebrity, of course, but she is abusing our own conflicts in BiH from the 1990s for her own promotion and profit. The main problem of Jolie is that … I just can’t trust her words, her actions. She is selfish, she comes here, and she gets all the attention and money. But no one else has anything from her charade. We don’t get anything. She is the one who is rich and famous, and she can leave behind poverty and misery … We have to stay here, and live it. What do I have from her film and any of her activities? Angelina is a celebrity, who would do anything, to remain famous.

Partly, the negative construction of Jolie by Serb Bosnian informants can be explained by the fact that they didn’t have access to the promotional, glamorous events in Sarajevo (Sarajevo is the capital of the Federation of BiH, and Bosnian Serbs rarely visit it). Other celebrity activists, such as Bono and Sean Penn, were celebrated much more, but Jolie, mostly because of the film, gets widely critiqued. They see her as too young, too famous, too ignorant and unable to understand the situation in BiH, and as coming from ‘stupid Hollywood’. As Lara, 38 years, from Banja Luka claims, ‘Jolie is from a celebrity planet! She was too young when the conflict here started, and she lived all her life in Beverly Hills. She doesn’t know us, our world, and the pain we have been through’. They describe her with synonyms, such as ‘famous’ and ‘superstarish’, together with negative attributes such as ‘immature’, ‘selfish’ and ‘narcissistic’.

Most of the informants used emotionally charged words to describe her – while excessively using the word ‘fake’. According to Bosnian Serb Nikola, 29 years, from Prijedor, ‘Jolie is a celebrity, who has her own interests at heart first and fakes compassion and caring. She is not like Sean Penn who really cares’.

There are two statements that are worth further analysis here, coming from Bosniak informants. They both negatively represent Jolie’s celebrity activism as self-promotion, but stress Jolie’s exploitation of the cause. These two informants were the only ones who specifically talked about the problems of war rape victims in BiH – because they both have direct or indirect experiences and connections to the trauma. Himzo, 35 years, from Sarajevo, whose aunt was a war rape victim, claimed that Angelina Jolie is selfish and she does not believe in the project itself. Especially, he argues, because there were no direct benefits of her film for the victims themselves. His solution, however, still lies within the realm of celebrity discourse: Jolie would have had to create a specific foundation and financially support the war rape victims:

She hasn’t persuaded me that she truly believes in the cause and wants to help. She made a film, and promoted herself. What has she achieved with this project? Nothing. The victims remain to be exploited, with no rights, at the margins of society./…/Why hasn’t Jolie created a foundation, like Sean Penn?

Also, Emina, 40 years, from Gorazde, who identified as a war rape victim, said that Jolie instrumentalized the cause for self-promotion. According to her, Jolie stole the memory of war rape victims, adjusted it for a film, in order to promote herself. She would prefer to

get the money or some kind of support. The past and my memory of rapes is my own pain. The film does nothing for me. I don’t mean it just in a financial sense. It’s about taking my story, my memory of the pain, and making it someone else’s. The film doesn’t heal, the film only shocks.

The striking aspect of the ‘celebrity discourse’ response to the movie is that, for the most part, it pre-empted actual engagement with the issue of war rape by both Bosniak and Bosnian Serb respondents (with the exception of two informants). That is, the discussion tended to focus on the issue of celebrity authenticity and exploitation: did Jolie really care, or was she just using Bosnia’s tragedy to further her own career. Although these are not necessarily mutually incompatible motivations, the response tended to break down along ethno-nationalist lines: Bosniaks tended to attribute sincerity to her and to appreciate the attention she brought to the region, whereas Bosnian Serbs dismissed her as phony and inauthentic, and therefore as someone who was cynically ‘using’ the region rather than attempting to heal it.

Ethno-nationalistic discourse

In their interpretation of Jolie’s celebrity activism and the film itself, the majority of informants (30) focused on the film. Their discourse, however, was framed by what we describe as an ethno-nationalistic interpretation of the film: the Bosniak informants interpreted the film as a careful representation of the truth, whereas the Bosnian Serb informants described it as anti-Serb propaganda about the BiH war. Informants were divided according to a sense of ethno-nationalistic belonging that framed their response in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. They perceived themselves exclusively as members of their ethnic groups and, relatedly, as the sole victims of the war. The negative image of the ‘other’ ethnic group was reinvented while discussing the film. In this respect, both dominant interpretations of the film situated themselves with respect to the question of whether the film was authentic and true (as the Bosniak informants argued) or propagandistic and misleading (according to the Bosnian Serb informants). Both interpretations included hyperbolic descriptions of the film as, either, on the one hand, a significant historical intervention in the name of truth and justice or, on the other, as sensationalistic lies. On the basis of the 13 statements from Bosniak informants, we identified the following macroproposition: ‘Jolie’s film represents the truth about BiH’s war, because Bosniaks are positioned as victims, and the Serbs as the main perpetrators for the war’. When describing the film’s story, they used words such as ‘a careful representation of truth’ and ‘the truth’, and synonyms such as ‘a fact’ and ‘a reality’. For example, Senada, a 26-year-old Bosniak from Sarajevo said, ‘I watched this film and can honestly say that it shows a complete truth about the brutal war. We are the victims. I cried and cried while watching’. The informants pointed to the fact the Jolie consulted Bosniak experts in writing the script – since they are the ones who ‘know’ the truth about the BiH war. A typical statement from Esad, 27 years, from Travnik was, ‘I see this film as representing the truth … it’s not a happy film, like other Hollywood films. Jolie succeeded in tackling a sensitive topic, but she consulted scholars and experts’. In this discourse, Jolie is not presented as a celebrity, but as an active, passionate and engaged woman and an accurate historian (albeit practising her craft in the guise of fiction). Words such as ‘engaged’, and synonyms such as ‘caring’, ‘brave’ and ‘compassionate’ were widely used. As Lejla, a 34-year-old Bosniak from Mostar said, ‘Jolie has showed that she is a good and engaged woman, who presented a real picture of the war’.

Bosniak informants negatively represented the Bosnian Serbs. According to them, Bosnian Serbs are not able to accept the truth about the war and to acknowledge the truth that Bosniaks are victims of the war. Because the Bosnian Serbs do not accept the truth about the war, they produce ‘anti-propaganda’ against the film. According to 35-year-old Senad from Sarajevo, ‘We are the victims of the war, and the film shows it. It’s just absurd what kind of anti-propaganda against the film is being promulgated by Bosnian Serbs’.

On the other hand, on the basis of the majority of Bosnian Serb informants (17) we identified the following alternative macroproposition: ‘The film of Angeline Jolie is anti-Serb propaganda about the BiH war, because Bosniaks are positioned as victims, and the Serbs as the main perpetrators for the war’. While describing the film, they used the word ‘anti-Serb propaganda’, and synonyms such as ‘lies’, ‘a construction’, ‘a manipulation’ and ‘a myth’. A typical statement comes from Goran, 28 years, from Banja Luka:

The film is soft anti-Serb propaganda. It is not just that it is only the Serbs who are represented as wild, evil, and crazy boys in this film. It’s also that the characters are so stereotypical. And most importantly, I feel that the film divides: there is no room for overcoming the ethnic hatred. The film fails to reconcile us.

Bozidar, 36 years, from Banja Luka said that in the film,

the Serbs are once again assigned the role of the main villain. You know, it is difficult for anyone here to face the truth about our own roles during the wars. We need to know, but it doesn’t help at all to have some Western celebrity selling her truths in the Hollywood marketplace. There were Muslims raping Serb women, too.

As evidence that Jolie is anti-Serbian, the Serb Bosnian informants claimed that Jolie was advised by US politicians:

Come on … Holbrooke [US Balkan Envoy from 1996–1999] was advising Jolie on Bosnian history and politics? This is one of the problems with this film. Holbrooke, similarly to Clinton and [Madeleine] Albright [former UN Ambassador and Secretary of State for the US], is the biggest Serb-hater. (Milan, 33 years, from Prijedor)

The analysis of these responses indicates that Jolie is presented as a public relations (PR) propagandist, who serves the interests of Bosniak and American politics. Words such as ‘PR expert’ or ‘manipulator’ were used, with synonyms such as ‘agitator’. As Milica, a 28-year-old Bosnian Serb from Banja Luka, puts it, ‘Angelina is an average American propagandist’. These informants also claimed that they (and Serbs in general) were the victims of Bosniak aggression and that the Bosnian Serbs were only defending themselves. The real villains were, according to them, the Bosniaks, who were sometimes called ‘Muslim terrorists’. One typical response came from Nataša, a 27-year-old Bosnian Serb from Banja Luka: ‘The film is a lie. My village was attacked by the Muslim terrorists, and we were defending ourselves. Who is going to make a film about us?’ The ethno-nationalist frame tended to separate the more militant nationalists from those who sought to avoid issues of nationalism and nationalist identification – that is, those who chose to frame their responses according to the Hollywood celebrity frame identified in the previous section. Thus, those who chose the ethno-nationalist frame in response to the movie also tended to do so in order to position the group with which they identified as the war’s ‘victims’ and to position the ‘other’ group as aggressor.

Discussion and conclusion

Much of the literature on celebrity activism is generally narrowed down to broad categories of criticism and/or celebration of celebrity involvement. Many scholars focus on the production side of celebrity activism (Street, 2012), on the mass media’s coverage of it (Lisle, 2008) or on the impact of celebrity fundraising events (Driessens et al., 2012). But the convergence of the realms of news and entertainment in the world of 24-hour-commercial news and the proliferation of commercial forms of infotainment online and off provide ample opportunities for considering the role played by celebrity activism and the forms of spectacularization and over-simplification that accompany it. However, despite the attention received by the phenomenon of celebrity activism, its consequences ‘on the ground’ are rarely explored in any detail. The unique contribution of this article is to consider a high-profile example of celebrity activism by focusing upon the response it received in the region. We attempted to explore the specific question of how Jolie and her film were ‘read’ and interpreted within BiH – and furthermore, to address whether Jolie’s activism, ultimately, contributed to promoting possibilities for peace, reconciliation and democracy in BiH.

Our research has showed how crucial it is to analyse the impact of celebrity activism in terms of local recipients’ reactions to it. Babić (2011) has argued that popular response to political debates in the region tends to polarize along ethno-nationalistic lines. This claim was borne out by the ethno-nationalistic frame we discovered in our interviews, but not explicitly by those who adopted the Hollywood celebrity frame. However, it is clear, that even the seemingly ‘apolitical’ response to Jolie that avoided the question of the war by focusing on a fascination with her celebrity persona tended to split along ethno-nationalist lines. That is, Bosniaks spoke of her celebrity in positive, celebratory terms, whereas Bosnian Serbs tended to be highly critical and dismissive. Within the celebrity discourse frame, our respondents focused on Jolie as a celebrity, and they stressed consumption and the prioritization of an individualistic sense of consumer identity. We suggest that the film’s ability to effect structural changes remains limited, since her celebrity persona eclipsed the cause it was enlisted to serve. Jolie made the movie not simply to draw attention to the issue of war rape but to contribute to the post-war process of remembering and healing in the region (Babić, 2011; Kolšek, 2012; Milek, 2012). On this count, our argument here is that the project cannot be described as a success. Jolie may have experienced personal growth and a number of other benefits of various kinds from the project, but the same cannot be said of those whose history served as the raw material for the film that helped her ‘grow up’. In both of the discursive frames we identified, other meanings and interpretations drowned out Jolie’s stated message of healing and reconciliation. Only 2 of 48 informants (due to their own personal histories) put the cause itself at the centre of their response.

The danger posed by celebrity activism is that because it depoliticizes the political issues, it tends to reinforce both a top–down politics and the entrenchment of the status quo. Although the two discursive frames we identified in our informants’ responses seem opposed to one another, insofar as one focuses on the authenticity of a celebrity persona and the other on the truth of the war, they both direct attention away from the structural conditions that reinforce an ongoing sense of division in the region alongside the forms of poverty and inequality that exacerbate this division. The celebrity frame hails the subject position of the apolitical consumer who sets aside questions of the war in order to indulge in the escapist fantasies of consumerism. The celebrity frame succeeded in displacing political concerns into the register of consumption: those who supported Jolie did so in terms of celebrating her glamorous lifestyle and celebrity identity, whereas those who felt antagonized by her apparent identification with the Bosniak population condemned her by disparaging and dismissing her as a trivial, inauthentic, Hollywood insider. In this sense, this celebrity discourse is integral to the neoliberal global order: it helps cover the latter’s grimy foundations, acting as a safeguard so that capitalism can prosper (Kapoor, 2013).

Our second research question was whether Jolie’s activism, ultimately, contributes to promoting possibilities for peace, reconciliation and democracy in BiH. Our findings suggest that Jolie’s activism did little to promote peace and reconciliation. The film’s ability to provide resources for peace, reconciliation and the promotion of civility and democratic life remains limited, thanks both to the formal constraints that dictated its content and to the context of its production and reception. Most damagingly, the film contributed to the forms of polarization that continue to wrack the region. Most of the informants recognized the characteristics of the of film’s two protagonists as representative of their own respective ethno-national group. The majority of Bosnian Serb informants identified with the Bosnian Serb character, who is represented as a villain, and they interpreted the film as an attack on Bosnian Serbs. On the other hand, Bosniak informants emphasized ‘their’ collective identity as victims in the war. Some of them identified with the main Bosniak character, a victim, and transferred her characteristics onto the national collective level – the Bosniak ethnic group. We do not necessarily attribute the failure of Jolie to achieve her stated objectives for the film in the region to a failure of goodwill, competence or talent on her part. Jolie was operating within the larger logics of the Hollywood marketplace and the perceptions that shape its perception in the region. Despite all their apparent freedom and cultural power, even Hollywood celebrities find their hands tied by their own commitments and the dictates of the commercial cultural in which they operate.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Zala Volcic would like to thank Graeme Turner for his support while researching and writing this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Biographical notes

Zala Volcic is a Senior Lecturer and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. In addition to work on her current manuscript which deals with the role of the media in the (commercial) construction of national identities, other recent projects include writings on media commercialization, dark tourism, and social movements. She has written extensively on the role of the media in the Balkans.

Karmen Erjavec is a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she teaches Journalistic Discourse, Media and Minorities and Media Education. Her main research interests include critical discourse analysis, media and minorities/nationalism/racism/, and media education.

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