A Judgment on Judgment: Milosevic On Trial.

A Judgment on Judgment’, (on Michael Christoffersen's film Milosevic On Trial).

This is in a collection, A Critique of Judgment on Film and Television ed. By Dennis Rothermel (Univ. California State) that attempts to offer a critical intervention into a field dominated presently by law scholars. My article provides a critical analysis of Michael Christoffersen’s award winning film Milosevic On Trial (2007), which documents the legal proceedings of the International Tribunal at the Hague of Slobodan Milosevic. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt it explores questions of political and aesthetic judgment in the way in which the trial is portrayed, looking back comparatively to earlier filmic representations of war crimes trials, including documentaries and archival footage of the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial. It examines what is at stake in the representation of jnternational justice, both as enacted in the trials themselves but in the filmic records of them, pointing to the problems, resistances and exclusions present in filmic representations of international judicial process and how these mirror the problems of international justice itself. Examining the aesthetics of Christopherson’s supposedly ‘objective’, ‘fly on the wall’ approach to documenting the trial, the article points to an underlying logic of judgment that nevertheless prevails in its presentation of the events.