“Ancient Volscian Border Dispute Flares”

Abstract

Reception of the 2012 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, dealt with two particular themes: the homoerotic relationship between Fiennes' Coriolanus and the rebel leader Aufidius whose forces he eventually joins, and the choice to shoot the film in Serbia and Montenegro. While south-east Europe has become an increasingly popular location for Anglophone filmmaking, the promotion and reception of Coriolanus foregrounded the significance of Belgrade and the Balkans as a site of recent conflict. Moreover, the film constructs the world of Coriolanus and Aufidius through simulating or even re-using images of “Balkan” space with which viewers have already become familiar through news media, and it therefore draws on and contributes to representative practices that constitute the Balkans as a violent and warlike zone. Yet Aufidius' rebel force resembling militias from the Yugoslav wars is opposed to a highly disciplined “Roman” military equipped for urban warfare in 2000s Iraq. This article contends that the film achieves this contrast primarily through evoking different military masculinities associated with each force, which have been widely disseminated through still and filmed war photography, and secondarily through its use of specific ex-Yugoslav landscapes and cityscapes. The complex relationship between images of the Balkans, masculinity and military discipline in Coriolanus shows that images of military masculinities juxtaposed with a post-Yugoslav material environment continue to operate as symbolic resources in a contemporary western imaginary of war.

Keywords:

• Balkans
• Coriolanus
• film
• military masculinities
• popular culture

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Feminist Journal of Politics conference, University of Sussex, in May 2013. Thanks to Maria Adriana Deiana, Liz Gloyn and this journal's anonymous reviewers for comments, and to Téa Sindbaek for initial conversations on the topic.

Notes on contributor

Catherine Baker is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Hull. Her research interests include popular culture, narrative and the politics of (linguistic and cultural) translation, with particular reference to the Yugoslav wars. She is the author of Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991 (Ashgate, 2010) and The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). She is also the coauthor, with Michael Kelly, of Interpreting the Peace: Peace Operations, Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her articles have appeared in International Peacekeeping, Rethinking History, History Workshop Journal and elsewhere.

Notes

1 http://www.cornerhouse.org/film/cinema-listings/coriolanus (accessed 22 April 2013).

2 https://www.tynesidecinema.co.uk/whats-on/films/view/coriolanus (accessed 22 April 2013).

3 Borat – a film that assembled south-east European Romani music, language and customs, and scenes filmed in Romanian Romani settlements, to “represent” Kazakhstan – also used this song. The Borat simulacrum arguably becomes meaningful to western viewers through a “primitivism that an orientalizing western audience has come to expect of eastern Europe and, particularly, the Balkans: tribalism and ethnonationalism and the understood violence that comes with it” (Wallace 2008, 43).

4 Game of Thrones' other filming locations include Morocco, Malta, Iceland, Scotland and Northern Ireland (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944947/locations, accessed 22 April 2013).

5 A recent account doubts the chroniclers' depictions of Roman military tactics (which appear to belong to “the middle and late republic – with frequent set battles, legionary formations and castrimentation”) and indeed Coriolanus' own biography: chroniclers may have transformed a Volscian leader who turned back the Volscian attack into “a courageous and capable Roman” in order to “preserve . . . Roman national pride” (Forsythe 2005, 190–191).

6 Slavoj Žižek (1997, 38) and Dina Iordanova (1999) have argued that representations of the Balkans in Underground align with the “Balkanist” discourses Maria Todorova (1994, 2009) identifies. Alternative readings view it as critiquing official history in socialist Yugoslavia (Keene 2001; Longinović 2005; Homer 2009).

7 Some combatants in the post-Yugoslav wars appeared to echo this same corpus of US war films in preparing themselves for war (David Rieff [1996, 157], for example, comments that “[s]pit and polish gave way to the Rambo look” among Bosnian Serb forces after April 1992). Many commentaries on irregularly outfitted Croatian soldiers depicted a Croatian affinity for US culture against a construction of Serbs and the Yugoslav National Army as oppressive and totalitarian, though this widely publicized image was less representative of Croatian forces in general than the symbolism suggested (Senjković 1996).

8 Underground also used archive footage, though those images remained in their original historical context (Homer 2009).

9 Historians of discourses about the Balkans disagree on how far “Balkanism” should be considered a subset of “orientalism” or whether the concepts should be kept further apart (Hammond 2007). This debate is too detailed to be resolved within the scope of this article.