Billowing gray smoke intermingles with moody cloud cover, while scores of grim-faced Ukrainian citizens watch the skies, arms folded. The visual opening salvo of “Militantropos,” directed by Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, could be the opening scene of a Hollywood disaster movie, albeit one of the more dour and serious-minded sorts. Moments later, we’re at a train station and the visual reference switches: Huddled masses are being evacuated from Kviv to Vienna with their suitcases and children. We’re setting up a heartfelt period drama, perhaps. And then, in close-up, a bulldozer turns over rubble, and a family photograph is glimpsed in the debris, a tattered symbol of what has been lost.
The makers of “Militantropos” seem well aware of how the visual touchstones of war have been borrowed or appropriated by cinema, and their film loops us back around again, confronting us with the source images. The neologism that gives the film its title, coined for and by this film, is defined on-screen as “a persona adopted by humans when entering a state of war.” Such textual musings return periodically and are part of a toolbox of techniques aligning this doc with formally experimental work, despite ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter which might lead you to expect a more standard-issue approach.
Written with Maksym Nakonechnyi, the director of the bleak drama “Butterfly Vision,” “Militantropos” repeatedly considers the effect of war on children. The bubble any parent tries to build for their child is always temporary, as the illusion that the world is for the most part a benign or even magical place must inevitably be dismantled — but whether that dismantling is a gradually managed part of growing up or the quick and brutal consequence of events beyond the parent’s control is brought home here with vivid urgency.
A school where children have been forced to stay, with artwork on the walls — some of which are normal kids’ drawings and others of which depict bombings — gives a grounded sense of place to the horrific childhoods endured by young Ukrainians. This film’s anthropological interest in how people are shaped by an ongoing immersion in a state of war is simultaneously deeply personally felt and conveyed with a sense of analytical remove. Perhaps that’s partly the consequence of having been directed by a group: There’s a balance and care here that is likely the consequence of collaboration and conversation between three director-editors also known as the Tabor Collective.
One imagines that some of those conversations must have involved the ethics of aestheticizing war. It’s certainly a relevant talking point here. Do beautiful images of an ugly thing risk conferring some sort of palatability to that ugliness? It’s a very specific version of the age-old debate about whether cinema tends to glamorize what it depicts. In the case of “Militantropos,” it matters a lot who is doing the depicting: People who are living the reality of war over an extended period of time are arguably entitled to discover beauty where they find it. Hope springs in unlikely places, including in a grove of cherry blossoms that fill the screen toward the end of the documentary.
Despite its aesthetic virtues, “Militantropos” ultimately captures the dreariness of military engagement: the bloodless greys and muted khakis, the palette leached of all life and humanity. Crucially, when guns fire and bombs detonate, the documentary eschews the language of cinema: The filmmakers don’t zoom in for a slow-motion shot of a man’s face grimacing as he dies. You can’t always quite tell what has happened, and there is no on-screen devices to help orient us in the mission. There may not even be a mission, as the feeling of senseless intermittent destruction remains palpable throughout “Militantropos.”
