War & Peace Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

There is a quiet provocation in Žbanić’s complaint: war doesn’t just get misrepresented on screen, it gets upgraded. “Aestheticised or spectacular” is her scalpel for a whole visual economy where bullets become choreography, rubble becomes production design, and suffering gets translated into something legible, even pleasurable, for an audience. The line lands harder because she includes “even films directed by women”, refusing the comforting assumption that representation behind the camera automatically purifies what ends up on it. Gender is not a moral solvent; industry grammar is sticky.

Her intent feels twofold. First, it’s a demand for fidelity to lived experience: war as fear, boredom, filth, waiting, humiliation, the banality of terror. Second, it’s an accusation about spectatorship. When war is packaged as spectacle, it invites consumption rather than reckoning; it lets viewers feel moved without feeling implicated. That “not my experience” is a boundary line: she won’t trade authenticity for cinematic prettiness, even if prettiness sells.

The context matters. Žbanić emerged from the post-Yugoslav landscape, where war is not a distant metaphor but a recent wound with names, neighborhoods, and mass graves. In that setting, stylization isn’t just an artistic choice; it risks becoming an ethical error, a kind of second violence that smooths atrocity into something narratively satisfying. Her sentence is also a warning to filmmakers: the camera doesn’t only record; it confers meaning. What you make beautiful, you may also make easier to forget.