The Camera As a Weapon: Shorts of Babylon’13

A man and a woman stand in front of the camera against the backdrop of an unfurling European flag. “Our people have been beaten,” the woman’s voice rings with emotion. They are in the centre of Kyiv on Mykhailivska Street, where protesters have gathered once the government decided to suspend preparations for the signing of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU, later known as ‘Maidan’. Behind the frame are documentary filmmakers who have joined the protest, taking video cameras with them. This is how it all began. The film Prologue (2013) marked the birth of Babylon’13, an association of documentary filmmakers that would make over 500 shorts documenting Ukraine from the beginning of the civil protests in November 2013 to the ongoing full-scale invasion.

The core rules of the newly and urgently emerged collective were as follows: film professionals with backgrounds in directing and cinematography would create short, anonymous documentary films portraying reality through their personal vision. “This is a subjective view; its value lies precisely in the fact that the person who films represents that emotional impression, that personal experience,” says Volodymyr Tykhyi, filmmaker and producer of Babylonʼ13, explaining how subjectivism is a key feature of their documentary approach. At the same time, distinguishing themselves from journalistic work was more complex, as the collective initially also fulfilled the function of an anti-authoritarian source of information, creating audiovisual reports for Ukrainians in resistance, like themselves. Nevertheless, in its rawest news-style documentation, Prologue is the beginning of the collective’s evolution, which would gradually absorb more artistic visual techniques, symbolic layers, the construction of a more complex framing, and, finally, a slow-burn departure from television aesthetics.

The founding principles of the collective’s work rhyme with early definitions of documentary filmmaking, which was often considered the flagship of a cinema of social engagement and distinctive vision. It is clear that the early shorts of Babylon’13 under the slogan “cinema of civil protest,” according to John Grierson’s definitions, served as more “sociological rather than aesthetic aims”. The reality forced the filmmakers to root their cameras in the crowd, looking for their place, presuming that they should stay there for a while and, at a certain moment, it would be ready to intensify its function: to provide global society with urgent documentation, and Ukrainian society with the reflection it needs no less.

As protest took the confident form of armed insurrection on the first day of December 2013, Babylon’13 began testing its first cinematic weapons: frequency and urgency. The sequences filmed on the Maidan were astonishing in their ubiquity and the swiftness with which the camera entered the immediate battlefield. This crystallises in the short films documenting battles on Grushevskogo, where deadly clashes occurred. The name of one of them best expresses the event: In hell (2014). The screen is flooded with blazing fire—protestants are burning tires and throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. The camera in the epicentre of the battle becomes a weapon in their hands, while the person behind it becomes an equal combatant in this fight, being at eye level with the fighting protesters. Together, they formed a united army, which used all the resources that might help in that battle. By that, Babylon’13 has introduced two important technical aspects that became its hallmark: the constant risk implied in the duration of the long take.

Alongside combat documentation, cameras began to look deep into society behind the battlefield. Filmmakers turned their gaze to phenomenal micro-events, puzzling over a larger picture of irreversible change. In the film Christmas Tree (2013), the static camera lingers in a long take of a Christmas tree on the Maidan, decorated with Ukrainian flags instead of ornaments. In the centre of the frame, there is a stool on which children climb to recite poems. As they take turns stuttering yet managing to utter complex rhymes, the adults in the background are chanting revolutionary slogans. Someone shouts, and something explodes; the child says, “That’s it,” and leaves the frame, joining the crowd.

© Christmas Tree (Babylon’13)

In one minute and twenty-seven seconds, the director not only captures the event but also distills it into a hyper-symbolic mise-en-scène. Christmas Tree predicts the future through its cinematographic and semantic perspective: the new generation is in the foreground, symbolising the purpose of the initial Maidan as a whole—to ensure a European future for the next generations. In a decade, this generation will inherit the revolution that turned into a full-scale war, and people born in 2006 will begin to mobilise.

Maidan marked the beginning of a great war and opened up the various approaches that documentary form can offer. The development of artistic form has become an integral product of escalation, which happened with each micro-event. In the 2014-dated films, there is a very visible intention to make the presence of the person behind the camera tangible. It’s the word “civil” in the collective’s initial slogan, which always refers to the nation as a whole. Even if the director does not interact with reality at the moment of filming, they are a priori participants in these events as citizens. This is a film by the people, for the people, and about the people, made as a reminder that this war is the shared tragedy of the country.

In many ways, ​​Babylon’13 is about the irrepressible desire to show, educate, and sustain the spirit of patriotism. In the context of the collective’s early short films, these principles can be seen as the canon of Soviet documentary filmmaking, comparable to the first attempts to define documentary cinema as a tool for communicating social issues or as propaganda in the hands of the state. However, the methods of Soviet documentary, made over a hundred years ago and often even on Ukrainian soil, are becoming increasingly alien, like the entire Soviet legacy that the aggressor is trying to forcefully impose. From this perspective, it is important to remember that the war in Ukraine is a colonial war and that the Maidan protests began a long process of decolonisation. The state aims to get rid of all Soviet influence, which is not only used to be present in the documentaries but in all aspects of society. Therefore, Babylon’13 uses the opposite of Soviet documentary cinema by shifting the focus from the collective to the individual. Personality is emphasised through an honest, individualistic approach to people in front of and behind the camera.

When the Maidan protests evolved to the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and, consequently, the invasion of Donbas in April 2014, the slogan “cinema of civil protest” was replaced by “cinema of civil society”—this was not a protest anymore but the beginning of a real war that extended to all. Babylon’13 relocated to film ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances who went to the frontline to defend the Ukrainian land, as well as a civilian population living nearby. Spanning almost eight years, frontline documentation prevails. Mostly, these are series of documentaries made up of talking head interviews or non-interfering observations filmed on camera or mobile phone. During this period, Babylon’13 fulfilled a clear political function, using the camera as an informational weapon to document the evidence of war. The initial war in Donbas has often been devalued to the word ‘conflict’, and Babylon’13 concentrated on that region to prove that wrong.

Probably the most important phenomenon inherited from Maidan and ultimately established as the basis of the collective’s cinematic language is continuity: both continuity within one shot and continuity as a constant act of documentation. In short films from the front line, one can see the same long shot associated with risk, which is now combined with a classical character-driven type of documentary. In Airport. The Right Sector (2014), military volunteers are defending the Donetsk airport in one of the bloodiest battles in the history of this war. The camera stands behind a door and films two fighters who shoot back at the enemy. Then, they immediately sit down to be interviewed about their volunteer experiences in a Right Sector regiment. The urgency is conveyed not only by the precise timing but also by the straightforward juxtaposition of observation followed immediately by reflection. The camera fulfils the dual role of documenting events and being a tool for literally stopping the shooting in order to speak up—it is indeed a weapon, but it acquires multifunctionality and becomes a peculiar therapeutic aid.

© Father (Babylon’13)

For eight years, Babylon’13 undoubtedly evolved under the influence of the vast numbers of produced films until reality presented a new challenge that demanded different action. The further escalation to full-scale war required new tactics of cinematic combat. Just as on the foreign policy level, Ukraine began to need Western weapons, sanctions against the aggressor, and information support, Ukrainian documentary cinema similarly needed a new weapon capable of capturing the globality of war, its scale, and its omnipresence. Thus, drones, Go Pros, video calls, and recorded screens joined the fight along with cameras and phones. Warfare on the periphery has expanded and become hyper-real and ubiquitous, requiring a consonant approach.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the collective has begun to categorise short films into more radical artistic series. If these cycles used to be tied to geographical locations or specific military events, they now have taken on a very tangible stylistic code, which continues to emphasise the synergy of authorial visions that encourages experimenting with form. It can be seen that the collective, trained as a veritable (cinematic) battalion over eight years, was prepared and skilled for the shocking yet expected full-scale invasion. They are ready to ingeniously adapt to the new reality, with the limits and access that war offers, while at the same time extracting the creative form from it.

The cycle Gluttony War consists of ten short films, which are documentary adaptations of military prose and poetry written by the authors defending Ukraine. For the first time, Babylon has an obvious script, and another type of art intervenes, marking the need for a synthesis in a more radiant art form. This necessity lies in their attempt to find the right artistic balance for the new reality that would rhyme with the depth of the trauma. The poems that are read in Gluttony War, like most of the examples of its literature genre, are very personal. They deal with the constant death of fellow soldiers, homesickness, and philosophical refrains about the voracity of the war.

The second film in the series, Father (2023), is based on the poetry of paramedic Olena Gerasimyuk, who dedicated her work to a colleague who died saving others. The film is composed of footage of frontline resuscitation, capturing the traumatised bodies of soldiers. It intercuts with a parallel montage of a drone’s top shot of dead fields torn apart by artillery. This footage is interspersed with poetry that ascends to the level of a new prayer. The author turns to God and asks for three things: “time, shells, and harnesses”. While the visual form presents evidence of the trauma, the audio attempts to lick the wound by closing these horrific images with this poetry, which reads with a recitative tone. The time that the poem’s author asks for appears in a new cinematic space as the only way to place this reality in another dimension, to give it a therapeutic form in the course of a war that is beginning to lose its sense of time.

The catharsis of the war, and synchronically to that, the artistic development of Babylon’13 happened in May 2022. The Mariupol Fortress cycle is phenomenal because of its existence. Yuliia Hontaruk, one of the Babylon’13 founders, created films about the siege of Azovstal, one of the largest factories in Europe and a symbol of invincibility during the occupation of Mariupol. When Russian troops encircled the city, soldiers and civilians were forced to hide there. They held the defenses for eighty-four days in brutal occupation and under constant siege, with each new day bringing the realisation that there was no hope of salvation. Overwhelmed by its symbolism, Azovstal began to fall.

Hontaruk could make this cycle only remotely. The telephone was the only technology available, with its subliminal internet and pixelated images coming to the rescue—many of the films in this series are made over video calls with the soldiers. In a certain way, it brought Babylon’13 back to its initial vantage point: the necessity of audiovisual information takes over the visual, creative side of the form because of its urgency.

© Last Day at Azovstal (Babylon’13)

However, there is one film in the cycle that was able to artistically convey the symbolic death of Azovstal and what exactly it meant for the whole country: Last Day at Azovstal (2022), made by Azov battalion press officer Dmytro Kozatskyi. After spending eighty-four days in the blockade, he bids the place farewell by setting up his mobile phone camera for a long shot and walking away while smoking a cigarette. The broken factory, every detail screaming death, contrasts with the clear sky seen through the destroyed roof. It is similar to the poetics of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s films, but only this time, the conditions are unbearably real, and its ugly beauty creates a surrealistic effect. In this shot, an incredibly apocalyptic image is created with minimal yet powerful direction, consisting of the banal construction of the distance between the static camera and the director-hero. The frame is filled with his emotional state, and it seems this film has reached the apogee of the Babylon’13 mission. It is a creative treatment of actuality in its most genuine sense, where the director creatively processes the actuality in which he is deeply involved. It is a catharsis of form, where harsh reality and poetics are synthesised. Perhaps it is the purest form of documentary cinema.

In a decade of valuable work, Babylon’13 has learned to use the camera as a weapon, not only to document the war but also to make this weapon serve society, to reflect its changes, and to allow the film form to become an opportunity for creative reflection on reality. What is certain is that whatever form reality takes, the collective will adapt to its challenges to continue documenting it.