War & Peace Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

A war movie director admitting she can’t find “anything beautiful or spectacular” in killing is less a confession than a line in the sand. Žbanić is pushing back against the camera’s oldest temptation: to turn violence into choreography. War cinema has a well-worn visual grammar for making death look impressive - the painterly smoke, the slow-motion collapse, the heroic silhouette. Her sentence refuses that grammar. “Beautiful” and “spectacular” aren’t neutral adjectives here; they’re indictments of an industry that routinely sells suffering as aesthetic experience.

The intent is ethical and formal at once. She’s signaling that her films won’t offer the viewer the pleasure of virtuoso destruction. That’s not just moral squeamishness; it’s a critique of how spectatorship works. If war is packaged as spectacle, the audience gets to feel adrenaline, mastery, even catharsis - emotions that can quietly launder complicity. Žbanić’s phrasing suggests an anti-spectacle cinema: keeping violence stubbornly unglamorous, bounded by consequences rather than cinematic payoff.

The context matters because Žbanić comes out of the post-Yugoslav world, where “war scene” isn’t an abstract genre setting but a lived archive. In that frame, beautifying killing isn’t only tasteless; it’s historically dangerous, a step toward myth-making. Her stance also doubles as a feminist intervention in a tradition dominated by masculine heroics: no triumphal gore, no tidy narratives of righteous violence. Just the refusal to let the lens turn atrocity into a souvenir.