By JOÃO LANARI BO*
Commentary on the documentary directed by Slava Leontyev & Brendan Bellomo.
Porcelain war, a 2024 documentary about the war in Ukraine, intends to play on the instability of matter in its title – in this case, porcelain, an impermeable, translucent and shiny object. “Porcelain is fragile,” says Slava Leontyev, a Ukrainian artist and co-director of the film, “but eternal, it can withstand extreme heat and even after thousands of years of burial be restored.” A metaphor, in short, for the Ukrainian people, “easy to break, but impossible to destroy.”
Slava and his wife Anya, a ceramics couple, star in the scene, along with Andrey Stefanov, a painter turned photographer. Life was idyllic in Crimea, with plants and insects as sculptural models, outdoors, and everyone dedicated to artistic activities, a kind of metaphysical encounter between creation and existence – this is what the images captured by Slava suggest.
The swift and decisive occupation of the peninsula by Russia in 2014 put an end to this scenario and forced the couple to move to Kharkiv, close to the eastern border with their powerful neighbor. Years passed, and the region was troubled by separatists financed by Moscow. The invasion in February 2022 cemented the principle of reality: war was now just a step away.
Crimea returns intermittently in flashbacks, but Porcelain war leaves no doubt: we are on the front line, an imaginary but dangerously real line. Slava becomes a weapons instructor for the civilian squads that are organizing, Anya decorates the drones for the flyovers – and Andrey puts away his paintbrush and canvas and picks up the camera, to record testimonies, skirmishes and drones, including drone footage of other drones dropping small bombs on the invaders.
In these, the point of view is vertical, vertiginous. In one shot, Slava comments on how Russian (or North Korean?) soldiers are sent to the front literally as targets, to allow the enemy to be located. His unit, Saigon, continues to drop bombs despite being aware of this fact.
Locate and destroy, the basic motto of warfare, has reached a new level with the saturation of surveillance drones, transmitting images in real time, in the war in Ukraine. Everyone can see practically everything. The battlefield has become transparent, drones of all sizes and origins, more or less technically sophisticated, have expanded the scope of military reconnaissance – especially in a scenario of permanent friction – to an unprecedented level.
Combined with satellites and reconnaissance aircraft, the vision is all-encompassing. To block the ubiquitous drones, the Russians and Ukrainians have engaged in a ferocious electronic warfare: disguised civilian cellphone signals, short-range radios, multispectral camouflage nets to block heat, invisibility cloaks to counter thermal cameras.
“They’re just a few miles from the front line, and I was working in Los Angeles. We were separated by this huge distance and a language barrier,” said the documentary’s co-director, Brendan Bellomo. It was a film conceived, produced and edited via Zoom, in itself another technique for eliminating distance between images. Cameras and equipment were sent to the theater of war through a humanitarian NGO – and ordinary citizens transformed into soldiers ended up producing images with unique and singular points of view, from inside the fighting.
Porcelain war is articulated around contrasts, from the metaphysics of creation to technologically optimized destruction. Porcelain, after all, is a poor conductor of electrical currents. In this world of incompatibilities, in which a nuclear power like Russia claims “perception of insecurity” – the supposed threat of NATO – to invade its neighboring country and break with the international order, art and war are ontologically equal.
Neighboring countries are also entitled to “perceptions of insecurity” – for a Polish or Lithuanian citizen, for example, the only alternative to escape vassalage to the Russian Empire, Belarus-style, is to join NATO. After the invasion, Sweden and Finland, previously neutral, joined the group.
The Trumpist turnaround threatens to throw the conflict in Ukraine into a phantom zone – Ukrainian territory would be divided into two zones of domination, Russian to the east and American to the west. A division reminiscent of what Hitler and Stalin did with Poland when they signed the German-Soviet Pact in 1939, defined “as an agreement of convenience between the two great and bitter ideological enemies”.
Donald Trump's attempts to convince Ukraine to sign a rare earth minerals agreement, while simultaneously making gestures of rapprochement with Russia, are part of this unpredictable scenario. The Ukrainian population shows no signs of accepting this game. Every man for himself.
*João Lanari Bo He is a professor of cinema at the Faculty of Communication at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Cinema for Russians, Cinema for Soviets (Time Bazaar).[https://amzn.to/45rHa9F]
Reference
Porcelain war (Porcelain war).
Ukraine, 2024, documentary, 87 minutes.
Directed by: Slava Leontyev & Brendan Bellomo.
