Captive Images: The Wars in Chechnya from Tolstoy to Khashchavatski’s Prisoners of the Caucasus

Abstract

The article examines the use of documentary film as a tool of political intervention that enlists the resources of broadcast journalism and literature in the representation of war. Access to images is a determining factor in the shaping of public opinion and affects citizens’ political views about the waging of war. The private files of four freelance cameramen who provide footage for news agencies and television networks and covered the wars in Chechnya are the main sources for Yuri Khashchavatski’s documentary Prisoners of the Caucasus (2002). The film traces a connection between this contemporary representation of the war in the Caucasus and Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century narratives and denounces both how the war was conducted and the invisibility in the media of the suffering of civilian victims and regular soldiers. Connecting the stringers’ files to an earlier literary tradition is a way of claiming the political dimension of memory, a political exercise at the crossroads between the media and the arts.