Late last March, the same week NATO forces began blasting targets in Serb territory, Serbian filmmaker Goran Paskaljevic visited the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to discuss his award-winning 1998 film Powder Keg. The film takes place during one night in Belgrade as political leaders are negotiating the Dayton Peace Accords half a world away. Rather than present a high tech ballet of tanks, troops and terrorists like Hollywood's Peacemaker, and rather than comment on the mediatization of war like Channel 4's Welcome to Sarajevo, Powder Keg probes the interpersonal relationships of Serbians living in Belgrade as the war pounds on around them. The film's melange of characters includes a couple of estranged boxing buddies who beat one another to a bloody pulp, a professor turned taxi driver, young lovers who are reunited only to be molested and tortured by two junkies, and youth street gangs who operate a labyrinth of black markets. As the film's title suggests, each of the characters is a ticking time bomb on the verge of exploding, and violence is figured as a kind of final social act. That is, when all social structures break down, violence becomes the last form of human expression-a gesture that is both tender and abhorrent. Powder Keg evokes the frustration of Serbs wedged between a militaristic regime and the desire for a civil society, and embedded within the film are the voices of the hundreds of thousands of Serbs who flooded the streets of Belgrade in 1996 and 1997 demanding Milosevic's resignation. This film, produced despite censorship efforts by the Serbian government, adds texture and perspective to the neatly drawn simplicity of American television news accounts.

After the screening, as Paskaljevic sat on a stool in front of a packed theater, he challenged Americans to delve beneath the veneer of CNN's Headline News when trying to understand events in the Balkans. Hands darted up and viewers asked questions like: "Who is the bigger influence on your work? Robert Altman or Spike Lee?" or "You've seen Santa Barbara-it's paradise. How do you expect us to relate to such a violent film as this?" To my surprise no one mentioned that the fictional world represented in the film was now being pummeled by NATO bombs, and that perhaps this was the most violent thing of all. While the film invites American viewers to formulate a more complicated understanding of events in the region, particularly of Serbian life, viewers seemed largely uninterested in the film's political context. When one viewer did try to address politics asking "How does ethnicity play a role in peoples' relations in Belgrade?" Paskaljevic coldly responded, "There is no such thing as ethnicity." In this very awkward moment Paskaljevic may have been speaking as an optimistic liberal in a right-wing state, but he may have also been brazenly reinforcing the racist logic guiding Serbian aggression. Perhaps he was both. In any case, the events that unfolded in the theater that night led me to think more about media, politics and the war in the Balkans.

By now media and cultural studies scholars have formed critical and pedagogical strategies to address media coverage of American involvement in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, but how will we discuss US intervention in the Balkans? We have watched similar play-by-play coverage of military maneuvers; we have heard the same rhetoric of demonization; and we have witnessed the same flexing of technological muscle as with earlier wars. But it seems that the ultimate challenge in making sense of the Balkans war is that of forming a defensible leftist political position. Consider the following conundrum: one might respond to the situation as a feminist who opposes state-sanctioned violence, as an anti-imperialist who opposes US (Western) intervention in the affairs of other nation states, and as a humanist who opposes the widespread human rights violations and genocidal practices of the Milosevic regime. During the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars, the political positions of anti-war demonstrators were fairly clearly delineated (if diverse), captured in such one-liners as "Make love not war" and "No blood for oil." In the case of the Balkans, however, anti-war sentiment has been more difficult and contradictory. For opposing NATO intervention also amounts to complicity with genocide. I do not mean to suggest that forming political positions is ever an easy process, but I do want to suggest that there has not been enough critical analysis of this process as it relates to US intervention in the Balkans. Discussions about the NATO campaign have been dispersed across an expanding information infrastructure (including cable and satellite television and the Internet) in which we seem to filter, sort and surf more than we protest, demonstrate and march.

In order to be able to generate compelling analyses of Balkans War media, we need to discuss and identify viable leftist political positions. For the process of critiquing images of war images involves being able to determine which ideological interests they serve, what perspectives they exclude, and which complex events they reduce. The terms of analysis have shifted since Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, which analyzed hegemonic relations between Vietnam War protestors and American media, and since Doug Kellner's more recent The Persian Gulf TV War, which details the information management strategies and political economy of Persian Gulf War media. Analyzing Balkans War media is not just a matter of asking "How has media coverage of NATO efforts in the Balkans differed from coverage of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf wars?" It's a matter of being able to recognize the ideological and hegemonic operations at work in these images. How can we engage in such a critical practice if we are uncertain and ambiguous about our political positions on the Balkans war? In other words, my concern is that it's more difficult to critique wartime media without some kind of leftist political consensus, and I wonder whether the new technological order further exacerbates the problem of forming one. I don't by any means want to suggest that Internet and new media technologies are antithetical to important political movements and practices, but rather I want to raise a question about leftist politics. How does the simultaneous centralization (in the case of the Department of Defense's monopoly on the press release) and the dispersal (in the case of the Internet, satellite and cable TV) of information about war shape leftist political responses? Does it lead to densities of resistance and coalitional politics? Or, are we drowning in information, shrugging our shoulders and tossing up our hands?

The Santa Barbara screening and discussion of Powder Keg, awkward as it was, is precisely the kind of cultural event that we need to consider more carefully. For as much as we all watched a powerful film that night, we also saw the politics of war and culture reach beyond the frame, demanding a response from the audience. Despite the dissonance between Santa Barbara filmgoers and a Serbian filmmaker, the film theater became a place where Americans, no matter how hard they tried, could not escape the violence of war. While in Vietnam, photographers and journalists "brought the war home" in powerful visual terms, our mediated experience of war has since become much more distanced, observed through satellite reconnaissance, official military press conferences, and euphemistic accounts of "collateral damage" and "ethnic cleansing." What has been lost is an awareness of the immediate conditions faced by those living in war zones. The judgments so necessary to forming effective political alliances are simply not possible unless we grapple with the experiences of those involved. All too often we try and keep the powder kegs of distant wars at arm's length, but perhaps we would create more effective political critiques by allowing ourselves to be shaken by what we see.