This blog post is part of the Seminar Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience, April 10, 2025, funded by the WARFUN project.
I am currently wrapping up an essay film, Falling, about my fraught relationship with Pepe and his brother, two retired Argentine military officers whom I met during my doctoral research on crimes against humanity from the perspective of those who suffered and those who perpetrated political violence. As an ethnographer interested in the aftermath of Argentina’s ‘dirty war’, absorbing their way of life has given me a deeper understanding of both human suffering and the infliction of violence. Our relationship has sharpened my intellectual growth and deepened my understanding of cultural anthropology. But it has also made it terribly complicated. As anthropologists, we are trained to approach our subjects with empathy. But when those subjects are involved in acts of violence, this approach can become problematic. How do we maintain social responsibility while dealing with the moral implications of the military actions we study? How can we engage with war experiences soldiers themselves consider fun?
The essay film Falling is the result of that introspection—a reflection on how these encounters have shaped my work and my understanding of what it means to be an ethnographer and a filmmaker engaged with individuals whose actions have contributed to war crimes.
We first met in 2009. Pepe was accused of crimes against humanity, which marked the beginning of our relationship. Both he and his brother were military officers involved in a period of state-sponsored violence during which thousands of people disappeared, were tortured, and killed by the military in the name of fighting a perceived communist threat. Some of them were pushed out of airplanes alive above the South Atlantic. The military’s brutal actions were part of a wider effort to crush any form of opposition, real or imagined. But as I got to know Pepe and his brother, I came to realize that their understanding of these events of ‘those years of lead; was shaped by a different narrative – one in which their actions were justified, glorified sometimes, and they did not fully acknowledge the horrors that had taken place.
I think one of the most insightful aspects of these interactions with Pepe and his brother was the realization that retreat from the atrocities was a powerful force in their lives. Pepe would often prefer to talk nostalgically about the physical rush of parachuting, about the moments of pure freedom that he felt as he soared through the air. He then kept talking about his time as a paratrooper, describing the adrenaline, the thrill of the jump, the camaraderie among soldiers. I realized that these earlier moments of exhilaration and fun seemed to define his identity. These memories were, in his eyes, the highlight of his military career. The highlights of his war. He once claimed that adrenaline had first drawn him to the military. He believed that my interest in his past was driven by the same fascination with excitement and danger that had motivated his decision to become a paratrooper.
At first, I resisted his idea of resemblance, dismissing it as a simplistic interpretation, offensive even. But over time, I began to wonder: was he right, perhaps? Was I too drawn to violence because of adrenaline?
Incongruously, concrete references to the violence were often pushed to the periphery of our conversations. Even when I pressed him about the atrocities, as I thought I had to in the beginning of my fieldwork, his silence spoke volume. It was a silence that was part of a larger military code of ethics that I gradually came to learn about. Pepe’s brother in return would often downplay their involvement in the worst aspects of the conflict, referring to the military’s actions as isolated incidents of corruption rather than systematic abuse.
Could I simply indulge in such talk, I often doubted?
As an ethnographer, I had taken up the task to understand, not to judge. I had come to study the military world in Argentina, to grasp the complex social and cultural forces that shaped individuals like Pepe and his brother. I gradually realized that the theoretical frameworks and methodologies I had relied upon in my academic training were ill-equipped to help me navigate this moral terrain. Over the course of a decade of fieldwork and thinking and writing about it, I found that no amount of theory could adequately account for the nuances and discomforts that had shaped our encounters. The silence about the atrocities and the thrill about the ‘fun’ parts of the past that permeated our conversations were not something that could be explained away by academic discourse. Ethnographic vignetters neither did justice to these experiences. It was as if our evasiveness and the excitement demanded their own space, their own recognition.
I had not done justice to these brothers’ experiences of his war. Nor had I accurately portrayed the complexities of their military past? I had not been faithful enough to the nuances of Pepe’s joyful retreat in my writing and unwillingly I had imposed my own interpretations and those of hefty scholars onto his story.
In academic endeavors to formulate a compelling argument regarding perpetrator status, there is a tendency to present executors of violence as either monsters or victims, thereby rendering life more comprehensible and morally acceptable (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Hinton 2016). Recent fascination with perpetrators in audiovisual media (Herzog 2011; Oppenheimer 2012) has also frequently resulted in the labelling of perpetrators as ‘cruel sadists’, ‘true believers’ or ‘pliant conformists’ (Mohamad 2015, 1161), which implicitly acts as a form of moral ‘othering’, I think this tendency to objectify militaries by creating fixed images that anchor them in a violent past (Anderson 2018, 95) offer only limited opportunities for engagement with the complexities and nuances of war in everyday life.
Film, I hoped, would provide a more flexible space for portraying their silences, Pepe’s fun memories of parachuting, and perhaps other themes of war other than the violence that had shaped their veteran life. But when I began to expound my film project to some friends and colleagues, I encountered immediate resistance. My attempts to capture the exhilaration of parachuting, to show the adrenaline and joy that defined Pepe’s memories beside his retreat from the past, were met with heavy criticism. Some argued that focusing on these ‘fun’ aspects of war was irresponsible and not including the voice of the victim offensive even. I too had had doubts in how showing Pepe’s jump might carry offense—an unspoken mockery of those people pushed from airplanes. They feared that such a portrayal would risk romanticizing violence and glossing over the atrocities that had been committed.
In my effort to experiment with media other than words, I found myself at a crossroads: how could I represent these militaries in a way that was faithful to their experiences without endorsing their actions? How could I balance the humanizing aspects of their stories with the moral weight of their crimes? As an anthropologist, my task is to explore the complexities of human behavior, even when those behaviors are reprehensible. But at what point does the intellectual pursuit of knowledge become morally indefensible. Ought I –as an ethnographer of the military– separate the intertwined excitement of parachuting from the violence that accompanied it?
Over the years, Argentinian colleagues and friends increasingly expressed concerns about the film I wanted to make. The ethical concerns around representing war criminals in a way that might elicit empathy or understanding were significant. These concerns were not just academic; they touched on my own personal experiences that forced me to engage in a continuous process of self-reflection. The film project itself became a process of contradictions, ambiguities, and uncomfortable experiences.
The cinematographic juxtaposition of images, sounds, and texts of exhilaration and silence, of freedom and confinement, of violence and fun, served me as a constant reminder of the complexity of human existence. Through breathtaking sceneries of parachuting, I explored the tension between personal joy and historical guilt, between the rush of adrenaline and the weight of past actions. During the montage and new stints of recording, the ethnographic ‘I” turned into a cinematographic “she” in order to make a compelling narrative. The tension between intellectual curiosity and ethical responsibility became a central theme of the film process eventually that turned the camera lens on the ethnographer and her ethical dilemmas, questions of complicity, and the intricacies of violence and accountability in her daily life. One of the key insights I’ve gained from this process of objectifying myself was the realization that the contradictions of the film making was not something to be resolved but as something to be embraced in the final edit.
After nearly eight years of work, the film is now almost complete. An intermittent process of montage has helped me to understand how to intertwine the adrenaline and nostalgia of Pepe’s fun memories with the dreadful violence of the past without completely erasing it as I had wanted to do at the beginning of the project—they are, of course, intertwined. And it is through this cinematographic potential of intertwining of sound, image and text, I think, that we can begin to appreciate better the complexities of war and its aftermath. Also, it’s fun parts.
By focusing on moments of joy and exhilaration, we are not absolving the perpetrators of their crimes, but rather inviting viewers to reflect on their own roles in the larger systems of violence we inhabit and the ways we live with violence and war ourselves. Creating a space where viewers can confront their own complicity in the consumption and production of violence, while also acknowledging the humanity of those who perpetrate it. This, I believe, is a form of epistemic justice—not one that justifies, erases or excuses, but one that opens up new ways of understanding and confronting on what kind of knowledge about war counts as true, valid and important and which are deemed inappropriate or sinful even.
Writing this blog reminded me of the words of Susan Sontag (2004) who cautioned against the commodification of suffering in the media. The portrayal of war and violence indeed too often focuses on shock and spectacle. The fun parts too turn easily appalling. Falling tries to challenge this tendency in a roundabout way by engaging with the quiet and fun aspects of war that encourages reflection rather than passive consumption (Baxtrom and Meyers 2018, 52-57). Yet, it is a reflection clouded with unrest—a consideration that ripples rather than returns any truth.
References
Anderson, Michelle E. 2018. Perpetrator Trauma, Empathic Unsettlement, and the Uncanny: Conceptualizations of Perpetrators in South Africa’s Truth Commission Special Report. Journal of Perpetrator Research 2 (1): 95–118.
Baxstrom, Richard and Todd Meyers. 2018. Violence’s Fabled Experiment. Berlin: August Verlag.
Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Rachel Gomme, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Herzog, Werner. 2011. Into the Abyss. Creative Differences.
Hinton, Alexander L. 2016. Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mohamed, Saira. 2015. Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity. Columbia Law Review 115: 1157-1216.
Oppenheimer, Joshua. 2012. The Act of Killing. Final Cut for Real ApS.
Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the pain of others. Penguin Books.