August 2024



DON'T SHOOT NOW
“1395 Days Without Red” by Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala

If I must die / You must live
to tell my story / to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth / and some strings
(make it white with a long tail)
[…]
if I must die / let it bring hope
let it be a tale.
–Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)

In a city under siege time (not space) is the enemy.

If I had only one sentence to describe my experience of Šejla Kamerić’s and Anri Sala’s collaborate film project 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED, this would be it: in a city under siege time (not space) is the enemy.

The city is Sarajevo, the “Jerusalem of the Balkans”, where, for several centuries, Muslims, Jews and Christians (in the language of ethnicity: Bosnians, Sephardic Jews and Serbs) lived and worked together peacefully. The time are the long 1395 days of the siege, which lasted from 5 May 1992 till 29 February 1996. The enemy are the snipers of the Serbian army hiding in the surrounding hills, mountains and on inner-city rooftops. An invisible enemy lying in wait, ready to shoot at anybody who steps into their sight line.

In 2010 artists Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala travelled to Sarajevo to shoot their project. Could they comprehend now what was perhaps incomprehensible then: in a city under siege time (not space) is the enemy. For Kamerić the trip was a return, she had lived through the horror of the siege. Sala, who is from Albania, was in Tirana during the siege.

The artists created, developed and shot their project together, but made two separate films edited from the same footage, each film reflecting the conceptual choices of its editor. Sala’s film is 43 minutes, Kamerić’s is 63 minutes long.

Days without Red? The absence of red refers to the fact that during those 1395 days to survive a trip across town unharmed required an effort to make oneself unnoticeable. What to wear, and, most importantly, what not to wear is all of sudden a matter of life or death. Bright colors, especially the color red, might attract too much of the wrong kind of attention. Survival depends on an appearance so dull that even a sniper will not pay attention. If it weren’t for the familiar face of Spanish actress Maribel Verdú and the commanding camera work of Sala and Kamerić, I too would be turned off by the depressing color scheme of muted blues, grays and browns.

Both films bring to mind the terror experienced by those who lived through the siege of Sarajevo – without showing it. Not one image of wounded or dead bodies, no bomb craters or demolished buildings are shown. Instead, we sense a kind of omnipresent dread as we follow the woman on her solitary journey across a Sarajevo that looks and sounds abstract, flat, cleansed …of what? No traffic, few bodies (people would be the wrong word here), each one withdrawn, looking drained, seemingly minding their own business, waiting at intersections, until they find the courage to cross yet another ‘sniper alley’. Each one going at their own pace. Those who are able-bodied run to the other side swiftly; those who are elderly must go slowly. In this moment of great fear, no matter at what speed they go, they make their way across with dignity.

What we do see and hear is as important as what we don’t see and hear (but many of us remember having seen and heard in the media): “the misery of daily life in a shattered city under constant mortar and sniper fire” (Susan Sontag). Flashbacks of the atrocities committed by the Serbian army punctuate my viewing of the films. I see and hear what isn’t ‘there’.

Kamerić and Sala move us through urban areas where people don’t do what people normally do in cities and in films: speak, listen to and observe one another. A filmic cityscape drained of sound (except for the clanking sound of footsteps on cobbled streets), where the musical score functions as a kind of time machine, giving both films their distinct tempo, temperament and temporality.

Often we hear one thing: sections from Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique”, and see another: the woman walking in the street, people waiting at a corner. And when I see what I hear: the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra rehearsing in a darkish, rundown building, the conductor, Ari Benjamin Meyers, makes it clear that what I hear is not what I should be hearing: "faster", "slower", "stop" …he admonishes the musicians.

The effect of this upset relation between the visual (space) and the aural (time), the lack of speech and eye contact, is an atmosphere of loneliness, of isolation. We all need and seek relationships, but for some of us there are moments, days, weeks, months, even years when we cannot afford to be attuned to those around us. What it looks and sounds like when isolation becomes a way of living together, is (among other things) what 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED is about.

During the siege of Sarajevo at least 14,000 people were killed by snipers and in mortar attacks. Those who survived will have to live with the alienating feeling of being hunted down by an invisible enemy who uses time as a weapon.

I will give two versions of my viewing experience of 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED. One personal and descriptive, trying to recreate my experience at the time of the viewing; the other interpretive, moving back and forth between the films and different sections within them.


1.
The art of perfect timing: kill time before time kills you.
In this deadly trial of patience the roles are predetermined. There are those who have nothing else to do than to wait for 'the decisive moment', that perfect co-incidence when the sniper and his target are in sync. And there are those who must find ways to move about the city out of sync, out of step, out of breath, out of time – avoiding this decisive moment, side-stepping it, as it were.

As every infant knows, killing time is a losing game: breathing is our earliest way of knowing that we need more time. But there are adults who know how to use time in order to kill. The sniper is one of them.
This is what she knows: survival will depend upon making her own time.

They’re out there in the mountains, invisible, waiting for her to step into the visual traps they’ve set up. They see what I see. Like photographers, like spectators in a movie theatre (like psychoanalysts) they look forward to that decisive moment when she steps forward and reveals herself as vulnerable. They seem to have all the time in the world. Patiently, they let things and people take their course. You can’t kill an enemy who is absent or not within range. If they hold fast to this conviction, they will be conducting the siege along their lines.

For when she enters the trap, when her appearance coincides with their gaze (and mine), the distance between them gives way to a shared experience: her time becomes his time. Synchronicity. Shoot! Now! Isn’t this the intimacy a certain kind of photography has taught us to desire? The excitement and pleasure of the proper moment? Shot. Freeze frame. Never a reverse shot.

If time, not space, is the enemy, how to make time an accomplice, enlist it as a double agent?

Tempo, tempo …time is on my side, she reassures herself. If she didn’t have access to this music only she (and I) can hear: remembered music, imagined music, music that is being played in another part of the city, music that moves her, stops her, keeps her safe, not unlike the lullaby that used to put her to sleep when she was a child …if she didn’t entrust herself to the tempo and rhythm of this music, crossing the city would be an impossible task.

They’re waiting, certain that they have all the time in the world. But there’s an orchestra playing in her mind, the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, rehearsing parts of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the so called “Pathetique”. Yes, for now, time is on her side. But how much longer can she keep up going out of sync with everybody else around her? How much longer can she keep the music playing in her ears? What if the orchestra stops rehearsing?

Her alarm bells…, they should be ringing, they should be ringing! The smashed window of an abandoned store front, shattered glass on the sidewalk, the sharp sound of shards crushing under her soles.
Kristallnacht all over again? Night of shattered glass.
How have I been here before, she wonders, as she hears a mirror break.
A quick look over her shoulder: has anyone been watching? She keeps moving. What else is there to do?

Next stop: people queuing at an intersection, every single one of them quietly turned inward, gathering strength (from where?), preparing to cross the alley where they know the snipers can see them, shoot them. No one looks at anyone. No glances exchanged. No words spoken. Everyone for themselves, alone in their fear. As if making eye contact or offering a smile would identify them as human beings, targets to be shot at.

Nose on the ground, like a sniffer dog at an airport terminal searching for forbidden items, the camera zooms in on the feet of those waiting at the street corner. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, they step into action: boots, shoes, legs perform what looks like a bizarre impromptu curbside ballet – step by step by step. Pairs of shoes form a line, move as one body, sideways, then backwards. No faces; just shoes and feet. A dance around the pit? A longing to imagine oneself in someone else’s shoes? A spontaneous expression of kindness, of the pleasures of fellow feeling? Or rather, a pernicious attempt to enforce synchronicity orchestrated by the filmmakers on behalf of the snipers? In a city (and in minds) under siege everything seems possible. And kindness is a risk too often not worth taking.

Slowly she proceeds to the front of the line. Her face and shoulders shown in profile. Her steps captured in a long tracking shot (as if she was pushed forward by some invisible force). Now she stops (is stopped) beside an older woman. Side by side, shoulder to shoulder they stand. Motionless. Looking ahead. In silence. Not a gesture of recognition. If they are aware of one another, they don’t show it.

Does she know they’re being tracked? Tilting her head slightly, moving forward one more step, highly concentrated as if following directions from an invisible director whispering into her ear, her profile now blocks my view of the other woman’s face. As she wipes her out visually, I feel the kindness contained in this effacement. I think I understand now: sideways is how they take care of one another. In a city under siege kindness must be shown obliquely - or not at all. Is this is a good moment to run?

Forced into survival mode, she backtracks, retraces her steps until she reaches a point in time when the other’s needs and vulnerabilities move out of focus. Coaxed into unkindness, she must bear the guilt and the loneliness of her disengagement.

Before she knows it, she’s on the other side, unharmed. All of a sudden love seems a possibility. A tete à tete with the orchestra’s bassoonist? Why not? His playing stirs her. Both soothing and enlivening. An unexpected moment of bliss. It doesn’t matter that they can’t see one another. (I can.) He is inside rehearsing, she is out in the streets. The camera cuts back and forth, creating a feeling of belonging through separation. This is by no means a sentimental or romantic moment. This is about one person making time for another, and the love contained in the making of that time. As she starts humming, life returns, sunlight caresses her face. Perhaps not all has been lost.

Here is where Sala’s film is more gratifying. If you were waiting for a moment of connectedness, this is it. Kamerić goes further. She will not, cannot spare us the disappointment and frustration. Her rendering of this intimate encounter in time is filled with sadness: the music subdued, almost inaudible. Now that we feel it, it’s gone. Much time, too much time has been lost. The duet with the bassoonist may bring relief but the time he makes for both of them cannot, will not make up for those hours, days, months, years spent alone in isolation. Mourning, Kamerić knows, is time consuming, it eats-up time; and it denies us what we normally take for granted when we make time: identifying a beginning, and knowing when to stop. In mourning we cannot know that it’s over till it’s over. And so Kamerić’s version comes with a caveat: if you think this is over, then you’re wrong.

There’s one more crossing ahead of her.
Tempo, tempo! She’s making good progress …and then the unexpected happens. Her eyes meet his: a weary, longing, nervous gaze. Feral. He crouches before her, out of breath. She stands, trying to control her breathing. For a split second her time is his time. They take each other’s breath away. They know there’s danger in this sudden intimacy. What if it happens again, with the wrong person? He is coming from where she must go. He made it through the wide and open intersection. A danger area if there ever was one. They don’t speak. They both know that in order to stay safe they must disengage; already they have taken up too much of each other’s time. And time is the one thing they cannot afford to waste. She feels his exhaustion and he feels her fear. One last glance and he leaves her standing at the intersection. That’s when she knows she can do it. Fear is a way towards the future. Tempo, tempo. This is not a time to analyze. As she makes it to the other side, unharmed, out of breath, momentarily relieved, her favorite theme from the “Pathetique” fills her mind. Softly, she hums it to herself. Her breath and the music are now one. Tchaikovsky saved her life. If she had an iPod, would she use it?


2.
At first glance, the two films look identical: a young woman smartly clad in steel blue turtleneck, wool overcoat, black jeans, comfortable boots and fashionable leather rucksack crosses a lifeless and melancholic urban landscape: the city of Sarajevo. Her face earnest, and determined, her black hair tied into a knot. We don’t know where she’s headed or where she’s coming from. A solitary figure. What we do know: she’s terrified, and not showing it. This is not our typical flaneuse strolling the streets of Sarajevo in search of an urban experience, this is dangerous business: don’t, don’t go with the flow! she seems to be telling herself. As she stops at crossings and intersections, we watch her join pedestrians forming small clusters (group would be the wrong word here). Just like her, they’re trying to determine the ‘right’ moment to cross what since the beginning of the siege has become ‘Sniper Alley’. Not a word, not a look of recognition; no greetings, no hugs. No one follows anybody’s lead. What moves her? How does she stay on track?

At second glance, each film has its own rhythm and tempo. Reflections and refractions of each other, subtle differences in timing and tempo create two emotionally different journeys across an identical cityscape.

Sala’s film is driven by fear: fast paced, forward looking, suspenseful. Kamerić’s version moves according to the quieter and more hesitant rhythm of mourning and melancholia slow paced, reflective, both backward and forward looking. This being a more time consuming mode her film is 20 minutes longer than Sala’s. The difference in duration, it seems to me, is a statement about the impossibility of choosing between mania and depression as we struggle for survival. Shown and viewed together in the same gallery space (which is how I first saw them), these two renderings of the same journey establish an intermediate space that is entirely aural. As sound and music leave the frame of one screen and travel towards the other a meeting occurs in this third space between the two screens: a shy and perhaps impossible rendezvous, a furtive greeting, a mingling of two separate temporalities, a declaration of love in times of fear. Experientially and psychologically speaking, 1 + 1 make 3.

Filmmakers are, of course, experts in using and manipulating time (and space). They do what snipers do: wait for the decisive moment, the perfect shot. There are moments in 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED where the camera detects the woman, singles her out, aims at her like a sniper would: zooming in, bringing itself in shooting position. The woman seems to feel the gaze of the sniper-photographer following her. She turns around – the close-up he’s been waiting for. How accurately the camera reproduces the sniper’s mission. Shoot! Now!
The original French edition of Cartier Bresson's influential photobook "The Decisive Moment" was indeed entitled "Images à la Sauvette," which translates as Images on the Run. In 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED there’s a recurring static wide angle shot filming pedestrians running across 'sniper alley', which visually evokes Cartier Bresson’s iconic photograph of a solitary male figure jumping over a puddle behind Gare Saint-Lazare, both feet in the air – the twilight, the camera angle, the posture …it’s all there, and more! It’s as though Sala and Kamerić unfreeze Cartier Bresson’s decisive moment, adding more time.

Filmmakers also do what conductors do: direct the movement and performance of multiple players acting simultaneously. Sala and Kamerić do both, which is why in 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED they are able to tell us something both vivid and subtle about the obvious fact that it takes time to survive a siege.


Psychoanalysts, needless to say, are, of course, also experts in using and manipulating time (and space). Freud, for example, envisioned the psychoanalytic setting as a form of siege, a “trial of patience” in which the patient must be brought to accept the idea that his illness is “an enemy worthy of mettle”. Meanwhile “the doctor has nothing else to do than wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened” – while at the same time, by way of interpretation, “wrest[ing] from the patient the weapons [of the past] one by one.” Lacan’s word for catching the decisive moment was “punctuation”. It is also worth noting that to this day and age psychoanalysts of all stripes – those who edit journals or publish in them – are still drawn to treatment narratives that build up to a decisive moment when a word, a gesture, an enactment suddenly change the course of the therapy.

Not everyone is or was a Freudian. Donald Winnicott’s “The Place Where We Live”, written in 1968, is a promising place to start thinking about, from a psychoanalytic point of view, what it means to make time away from sniper alley. Doing so involves a slight shift of attention: where Winnicott is interested in place, I’m interested in time. But because time and space can only be separated in theory, Winnicott ,whose explicit focus is on place, cannot avoid speaking about time. So he begins his exploration, rather optimistically, with the “wish to examine the place, using the word in an abstract sense, where we most of the time are when we are experiencing life, … when we are doing what in fact we are doing a great deal of our time, namely, enjoying ourselves” – which in Winnicott’s idiom equals feeling real to oneself, free from the demands of others. One of Winnicott’s questions is: where are we and “what, for instance, are we doing when we are listening to a Beethoven symphony?” My question is, what kind of time, for instance, are we making when we are listening to a Tchaikovsky symphony?

We are, Winnicott proposes, in a “potential space”, “a place for living that is not properly described by either the terms inner and outer”. This potential or third space, as it is sometimes referred to, is an intermediate area, in which we can be in a state of “relaxed undirected mental inconsequence,” unbothered by the constraints of everyday obligations. This potential space may be large or small, colorful or painted in shades of gray. It is a mental space we learn to make as we separate self from other. Which is to say that this third space is never simply there; it needs to be built and maintained by the individual and by society. The arts, literature, music, sports make room for this intermediate area of experiencing. Without it we are no longer living, we are merely toiling away, killing time.

Winnicott thought of this potential area as a time and space for play and enjoyment (except when it is exploited by propaganda in which case, he writes, “it leads to a pathological condition in which the individual is cluttered up with persecutory elements of which he has no means of ridding himself.”) But there are times when this third area is less about play and more about survival, psychic and otherwise. There are times, and a siege is one of those times, when it becomes a kind of portable shelter, a space in which time is not the enemy. Let me say it this way, it is through making my own time that I can hope to avoid that decisive moment when I enter the sniper’s time, and he pulls the trigger.

But how does one make one’s own time? And what happens to us when this potential time feels like the only possible time?

After breathing music is our next best way of making time, our own time. “Tempo, Tempo!” “Allegro.” “Let’s do it again.” “Go slower” The only words spoken in both films are those of conductor Ari Benjamin Meyers whom we see rehearsing sections of the “Pathetique” with the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra in what looks like a socialist style community center. People come and go. Some stay and listen in for a while, attentive yet absent-minded, taking in the music as if replenishing their ears. A resource to draw from when they are in need of time, rhythm and movement. Meyers’ directions provide cues and orientation not only for the members of the orchestra but even more so for the citizens on their dangerous outings. The orchestra and its conductor are the safe-keepers of time: as long as they keep playing, time will be on the side of the people of Sarajevo; and as long as there’s music, there will be ways of making time – their time, not the enemy’s. The Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, which performed throughout the siege (though not under Meyers), is where the city feels it pulse, its heartbeat. A source of life, a pool of nonconformist time.

The films end with a final tracking shot alongside a row of rusty containers and garage doors. The camera comes to a halt like a train arriving at its terminal destination. There’s no one around to greet the travelers.


3.
If I had only one question to ask about 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED, this would be it: why return to Sarajevo to shoot? And then show the results of the shoot to audiences around the world?
Because the two videos repeatedly draw our attention to the sniper’s and the photographer’s shared ambition this is neither a rhetorical question nor an attempt to make a clever remark. Rather, it is asking how the analogy between a weapon and a camera might help us understand something about how to carry on after having survived massive collective trauma.

One way of answering this question is to think of 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED as re-membered, processed and then projected compilations of the traumatic images trapped and looping in every survivor’s psyche. Sala and Kamerić are creating environmentality for those raw and unsymbolized psychic fragments, free-floating radicals, if you will, that attack when we least expect it. I borrow this term from Giuliana Bruno’s fascinating study “Atmospheres of Projection. Environmentality in Art and Screen Media”.

Bruno conceptualizes environmentality in the context of re-positioning the importance of contemporary screen media for creating new, kinder, more humane and more empathic ways of communality. To this end, Bruno conceives of projection as a medium of relatedness (rather than an act of externalizing unwanted or unbearable psychic context), and of screens as receptive, possibly enlivening surfaces that change the environment they are placed in as much as the environment changes them. Interacting with the screen, the viewers become aware of the environment and the way they feel and move in it in a new way. In a psychic sense, environmentality describes a setting where the contents of my mind feel safely held by what surrounds me. Screen art, successful screen art, Bruno argues, facilitates such an exchange, enables us to feel more empathic with and less alienated from the environment we live in. Taking this a step further, I would say that environmentality describes a setting in which, if things go well enough, our mind is inside and outside at the same time, impactful and receptive, in bits and whole.

With 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED Sala and Kamerić created such a setting. And by doing so, they have offered to the people of Sarajevo (and perhaps to all survivors of a siege) an opportunity to safely retrieve psychic shards that had to be abandoned, and to release others that had to stay in hiding.

This is why the films work best when projected onto buildings in Sarajevo (or elsewhere), as Kamerić did in 2011. The citizens of Sarajevo lingered or passed by, sat in silence or spoke with others as they safely watched and listened and remembered those awful 1395 days without a holding environment, without the possibility to find themselves, their bodies and minds in their city, without the ability to change their reality. But perhaps the greatest gift of screening 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED in its original place lies in the confirmation, or rather re-affirmation, that a camera is not always and not necessarily a weapon, thus restoring to the people of Sarajevo the pleasures of looking and being looked at in public as well as the joy of seeing and being seen when out and about.

Shoot! Now! …and no one dies! To see one’s dangerous reality represented on a screen without there being actual bullets, explosions, deaths.
As the present releases the past, red returns.

Derek Jarman knew this:

“Love, like the heart, is red.
Not the colour of red meat, /
but the pure scarlet of flowers.
Could you conceive of a bloody heart on Valentine?”

Postscript
The first version of this essay was written and published in 2011, after several viewings of 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City, where I lived and worked at the time. In August 2024, with Israel's genocidal siege on Gaza going into its 11th month, I re-read, revised, and added to what I had written then.

I now live and work in the city of Granada, where the palaces of the Alhambra stand as testimony to the reality (and dream) of peaceful convivencia of Muslims, Jews and Christians in al-Andalus, which was brought to a brutal end in 1492 by the so-called reyes católicos, Isabel and Fernando. Granada is not Sarajevo, and Sarajevo is not Gaza. I think of them as siblings across centuries. I dedicate this essay to the besieged Palestinian people of Gaza.



References
Alareer, Refaat, I I Must Die (2023), https://ifimustdie.net
Bruno, Giuliana, Atmospheres of Projection. Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, The University of Chicago Press 2022.
Freud, Sigmund, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” SE 14, The Hogarth Press 1957 [1915] pp. 271 - 300.
Jarman, Derek, Chroma. A Book of Colour – June ’93, Vintage Classics 2019.
Winnicott, Donald. W., “The Place Where We Live,” in: Playing and Reality Routledge Classics 2005 [1974], pp. 140-148.

1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED, written and directed by Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers, and Liria Begeja (video 2011, color, 43 + 63 mins).
excerpts here:
Kamerić: https://vimeo.com/134604787
Sala: https://vimeo.com/134604646