Darkness There and Nothing More

Wars never really have winners. And never really end—especially if if they are fought within a country. This is true in the U.S. as much as it’s true in Nigeria. In Darkness There and Nothing More, a title that has echoes of Poe’s “The Raven”, the war is the Bosnian War and in particular the Srebrenica massacre, and director Tea Tupajic has gotten two men involved with the war to talk about it.

The setting is a dark stage, with mostly only the film’s “cast” illuminated. Tupajic and her invitees separately talk about the war and its aftermath. There is some artifice—Tupajic’s background is mostly theater—but what is discussed does appear important to the director/performer as much as it does to the men, Frank and Harm.

Is there anything anyone can say to someone who has gone through the war to console them with regards to its ravages? There can hardly be anything and it should come as no surprise that the men involved with the story have different responses to Tupajic’s theme. For Frank, there is some sadness about the war but there is also an unwillingness to grapple with its consequences. Tupajic tries to get him to give her something that might lead her to hope, but Frank has no real interest in that. The man is in a vastly different place and has what seems like a blithe acceptance of the past. His view of all that has happened is in keeping with war’s own internal logic, its inevitability according to its proponents. And yet, it is reasonable to wonder if Frank’s responses are genuine. How much of it is a result of a camera being thrust in his face as he speaks to Tupajic? How much of what he says is a cover to prevent him from collapsing into guilt? It is impossible to tell.

Tupajic may not even be able to tell herself. Harm, the other man, is more forthcoming. For him, his failure to save or account for a boy he knew has troubled him. As his dialogue with Tupajic progresses, a certain intimacy, palpable onscreen, begins to develop. Is that guilt moving through him? Or is it, again, the effect of a camera?

Both men have an important relationship to the war and the events following it. Frank represents acknowledgement but unwillingness to go much further than acknowledgment. Harm is the opposite. Put side by side with Harm’s more self-interrogatory approach, Frank’s inclusion in Tupajic’s film makes sense because both men are avatars of two dominant post-war ways of thinking, both on a personal and the national level. For Tupajic, a victim of the war more in terms of psychology than physically, the bias is quite clear. Although what she prefers comes through, her viewers should be able to work through their own feelings about the conflict and the attendant responses.

The documentary loses Frank at some point and focuses on Tupajic’s interaction with Harm. A strict journalistic approach might have allotted both interactions equal airtime, but our director is hardly an unbiased intercessor. At a vexed moment in her discussion with Frank, she stands up to draw a curtain, and perhaps it’s symbolic of something that the sound we hear is a violent one. In a film that is mostly quiet and dark, that action is a brutal attention-grabber. She is perhaps trying to say something that she will not—or cannot—articulate.

Tupajic’s staging of the film in a single space and the lack of an actual story means Darkness There and Nothing More won’t quite work for a large audience. But its exploration of a war that occupies the imagination of the European mind suggests its audience has been waiting for it. They just didn’t know that.