Director: Heejoo Kim
Behind the Loom is an experimental animated short film, which discusses the impact of war on women – and particularly focusing on sexual violence during the end of the Second World War. Before I discuss it in more detail – which will bring up themes which some reader may find upsetting – I will just make a couple of technical notes.
The animation – featuring threads from a loom joining together through a trio of photo-frames – works nicely to visualise the connections between a harrowing past, to our narrator in the present day. The testimony from the unnamed narrator is given ample space to sink in, supported by visuals which never become distracting, but instead help us to concentrate on every last syllable.
To that extent the film’s director, Heejoo Kim, deserves credit for constructing an abstract space in which we are able to think long and hard about the grim reality being presented to us.
Getting into the more troubling aspects of the film, the narrator is a woman recalling a series of upsetting memories from her family history. As implied by the animated threads weaving their way towards her, they are physically tied to her in the modern day, by her interactions with an old loom she first discovered in her childhood.
One day, she recalls, her mother came to her to talk about a “family tragedy”. During the final days of the Siege of Berlin, a relative had taken the lives of her four young daughters and herself, apparently in an act of fear, with the Red Army inbound for their position. In the lead up to the fall of Berlin, soldiers had inflicted acts of mass rape on women across Eastern Europe – with some estimates suggesting there were more than 100,000 cases – and our narrator believes avoiding this fate is what drove her relative to such desperate measures.
Later, it is revealed that the loom was built by the surviving husband and father of that relative – who only discovered their fate when he arrived home from the war. He brought the loom with him to start a new life in the US, where our narrator came into contact with it. When she realises this in later life, it leads to a potent moment of reflection, as to how women’s bodies remain such a potent ground for conflict to play out. However, it is here that perhaps the film’s format undermines this message slightly.
Wartime sexual violence remains a historical silence, and is still weaponised amid countless modern atrocities. Often it is not merely the action of rogue soldiers, but a deliberate tactic of warfare, which terrorises survivors, displaces families and destroys communities. During the Second World War, it was tolerated on all sides. J. Robert Lilly, Regents professor of sociology and criminology at Northern Kentucky University, for example, compiled research in Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe in World War II to estimate that 14,000 rapes were committed by US soldiers in France, Germany and the UK between 1942 and 1945 – while Alice Kaplan, an American historian of France and chair of the Department of French at Yale University, also noted that only around 904 American soldiers were tried for those crimes.
In German-occupied Russia, meanwhile, some experts estimate that rapes of Soviet women by the Wehrmacht range up to 10,000,000 incidents, with between 750,000 and 1,000,000 children being born as a result. Since 1941, rape was theoretically punishable with the death sentence as a matter of military discipline, but rapes were rarely prosecuted in practice and rapes by Germans of non-German women were not taken seriously.
Clearly, discussing the way that the brutalisation of women during war is a worthy topic, then – and it is also worth noting that no ‘side’ was innocent of it during the war, or the horrific ideological assumptions its practice normalises. The trouble is, in Behind The Loom’s 11-minute run-time, the film only finds space to talk about it in the context of the Red Army. The subject is talking about a specific context, relating to her own family background, and so from her standpoint that might be understandable – but the broader film failing to build any greater context about the horrific use of rape during war, or its lasting legacy on the world, feels strange. Particularly when the story moves quickly past the surviving family member, who discovers his family is dead only when he returns home from serving in the war himself.
That is absolutely not to infer anything about him as an individual. But having brushed past the collective national military he was part of, further contextualisation around the crimes related to that collective is badly needed – and its absence is conspicuous. Distractingly so – to the point that a little of this otherwise hard-hitting message, rising from a human place of family loss, is undermined. While it is probably not a deliberate choice, it seems to place a very heavy emphasis on the crimes of one actor in war, while pointedly overlooking the actions of the states that are present allies of NATO – that could invite unnecessary conspiratorial thinking from some viewers when it should be directing people to think of the inhumane and discriminatory norms of all warfare.
Apparently Behind The Loom is part of a wider The Loom documentary project. I do hope that doesn’t mean this is just a story taken from the cutting-room floor of that particular film, and is instead built into that in a more rounded and extensive way. In this case, as polished as the delivery is, it feels as though it is stranded, isolated from a wider context that could really enhance its impact. For a movie which emphasises interconnectedness in its visual themes, that is a slight disappointment.