Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema 9781503625839

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Disintegration in Frames

Disintegration in Frames

Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema

Pavle levi

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

2007

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the Stanford University Department of Art and Art History. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levi, Pavle. Disintegration in frames : aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and postYugoslav cinema I Pavle Levi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-o-8047-5368-5 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-ro: o-8047-5368-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures--Yugoslavia--History. 2. Motion pictures--Former Yugoslav republics--History. I. Title. PNI993·5·Y8L48 2007 791.4309497--dc22

2006031230

Designed by Bruce Lundquist Typeset at Stanford University Press in nlr3.5 Adobe Garamond

For jelena and Luka

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

1 The Black Wave and Marxist Revisionism New Yugoslav Film

IX

I

11

Sex and the Socialist Revolution

13 18

Montage: Praxis

29

The Raw Image

35 46

Tito and Jesus

2 Yugoslavism Without Limit New Primitivism

57 62

Sarajevo Surrealists

67

"Sucking the Wooden Pole"

78 81

From the War-Torn Sarajevo 3 Aesthetics of Nationalist Pleasure

85

The Father

87

An Aesthetic of the Genitofugal Libido

90

Yugoslavism with (Ethnocentric) Reserve The Question of Responsibility

96 101

Enjoyment as Danse Macabre

105

viii

Contents

4

Hatred Explained, Hatred Legitimized

109

"Inevitable Wars"

n2

War Veteran as Filmmaker

II7

Collective Belief

120

Croats as Serb Extremists

127

Transvestites, Punks, and (Once Again) New Primitivs

129

Joke, and Its Relation to War

132

5 Of Ethnic Enemy as Acousmetre

135

Politics and Noise

136

Ogre in a Boar's Head

139

Contra Essentialism

154

Post Scriptum

159

Notes

165

Bibliography

r85

Index

193

Acknowledgments

MANY INDIVIDUALS DESERVE MY GRATITUDE for their help during the various stages of this book's evolution. The stellar guidance and vigorous support of Annette Michelson, William Simon, and Richard Alien were indispensable. Slavoj Zizek, whose influence on the theoretical foundation of the project is evident, generously offered perceptive comments about my writing. Thanks are also due to Robert Stam, not the least for his being ever ready to share his views on cinema and nationalism. I am greatly indebted to Sam Ishii-Gonzales, who patiently helped crystallize my arguments and unselfishly supplied his editorial skills whenever I was in need of them. My research and writing also strongly benefited from the kind help and sagacious advice of Branko Vucicevic, Dina Iordanova, and Ivone Margulies and from the numerous illuminating conversations I had with Branimir Stojanovic, Lazar StojanoviC, Filip David, Kemal Kurspahic, Srdjan Vuletic, Dusan Makavejev, Pjer Zalica, Boro Kontic, Branislav Jakovljevic, Nebojsa Jovanovic, Greg Taylor, Scott Bukatman, Nevena Dakovic, and Zdravko Grebo. Many of them, as well as Asja Mandic, Matko Dujmovic, Gordana Logar, Ivan Levi, Ann Harris, and Zelimir Zilnik, also helped locate and obtain some of the films and images I needed for the book. I thank Soyoung Yoon and Michael Gonzalez for many valuable suggestions and tremendous work on production of stills during the late stages of preparing the manuscript. I am grateful to Norris Pope, my editor at Stanford University Press and an avid lover of cinema, for enthusiastically endorsing the project, and to the two readers for the Press, Catherine Portuges and Tomislav

x

Acknowledgments

Longinovic, for their insightful evaluations of my text. The kind help of Mariana Raykov and Joe Abbott is also greatly appreciated. The summer research grant I received from the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University enabled me to bring the book to completion. Finally, I owe much more than thanks to Jelena Levi, as well as Maja and Bozidar Levi. This book would not have been possible without their unceasing and generous support.

Disintegration in Frames

Introduction

marked the beginning of the final stage in the painful process of disintegration of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. War broke out in Slovenia, moved swiftly to Croatia, and in 1992 was rapidly spreading across Bosnia and Herzegovina. In September of that year a peace conference on Bosnia, sponsored by the European Community and the United Nations, began its work in Geneva as a follow-up to the conference that ended the previous month in London. The Geneva sessions helped advance an already influential perception of the war, which down played the fact of its being, at its basis, an act of aggression on Bosnia by the military and paramilitary forces serving the nationalist-expansionist projects of Greater Serbia and Croatia, and emphasized, instead, its nature as a three-sided civil and interethnic conflict in which each side-Muslims, Serbs, and Croats alike-was fighting to realize the exclusive interests of its own ethnos. In the 1990 elections the three ruling ethnonational parties in Bosnia-the (Muslim) Party of Democratic Action, the Serb Democratic Party, and the Croatian Democratic Union-secured, respectively, 29.6 percent, 23.5 percent, and 14·4 percent of the popular vote (with a substantial segment of the population not voting at all). 1 These parties were now recognized as the sole representatives of the entire Bosnian people and, as such, were granted the mandate to negotiate at the conference the THE YEAR 1991

2

Introduction

division of the country along ethnic lines. This, at the very least implicit, "call for the completion of the process of ethnic homogenization" 2-the process that in principle may have suited all three ethnonational "warring factions" but in reality meant a systematic practice of savage ethnic cleansing, exercised by far the most against the Muslims-thus entirely negated the existence of the fourth "faction" in Bosnia: the significant and certainly not all too easily dismissible segment of the population consisting of all those who refused to be labeled exclusively in ethnic terms and, on this ground, opposed the idea of the partitioning of their multinational state; all those women and men born out of ethnically mixed marriages; those Muslims, Serbs, Croats, ethnic Yugoslavs, and others who lived together side by side, in unity, all their lives, learning to enjoy and to take pride in their diversity rather than to fear it. What they stood for was a vision of multiethnic and multicultural identity for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Back in the peaceful days of the socialist Yugoslavia, this type of vision would certainly have been designated "Yugoslavism." In the 1990s, however, as a consequence of this term having been usurped, abused, and discredited by the hegemonic project headed by the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic-a project turned into a full-fledged military aggression by the time of the Croatian war-any properly multiethnic vision ofBosnia came, in fact, to represent a form of opposition to the Yugoslav territorial pretensions of the Serbian regime. In 1993 an international tribunal was set up in the Hague, Netherlands, to investigate Balkan war crimes. 3 Frustrated by the international community's treatment of the Bosnian conflict as a "mere" tripartite ethnic strife, the well-known Sarajevan comedy troupe the Top List of the Surrealists responded to this news by performing the following tellingly ironic number in one of its wartime radio editions: "In September of 1995, the first person convicted faces the tribunal. He is a young Sarajevan, brought there because ... he advocated a unified and secular Bosnia and Herzegovina; second: because he publicly claimed that regardless of their nationalities, people ought to live together." 4 Stated succinctly, the tension that the above-described events bespeak, and the tension that today still generates key questions concerning the sociopolitical and cultural activity in the formerly Yugoslav lands, involves the following: to approach the bloody breakup of the Yugoslav

Introduction

3

federation-but also to anticipate the future life in the region-from the narrow and rigid ethnocentric perspectives? Or, to consider these issues in ethnically nondeterminist terms, by way of engaging antiessentialist conceptions of identity? This book investigates the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema. Specifically, it examines the variety of ways in which national identity is approached, construed, promoted, or critically dissected in film, video, and television texts from the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia and its successor states, especially Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. I begin by analyzing some representative examples of politically radical cinema from the late 1960s and the early 1970s (the era of the internationally acclaimed Yugoslav New Film) and proceed to consider works made in the period extending from 1980, the year when Josip Broz Tiro-the president-forlife and the "Father" of the modern Yugoslav nation-died, through the mid-198os, the age of state socialism's gradual collapse, to the 1990s, the time of the country's disintegration and the wars ensuing from it. All films are engaged on a level that pays close attention to their underlying aesthetic conceptions and their concrete formal properties. Specifically, stylistic traits of the chosen works-relationships established between image and sound, narrative logic or the absence thereof, nature of mise-en-scene, camera work-are elaborated in relation to the ideological functions they perform. Connecting this series of textual "case studies" is the book's overarching aim, to develop a systematic critique of ideology in cinema, at the foundation of which is the following premise about the breakup of the Yugoslav federation: naturalization of ethnic intolerance in the region, its seemingly "understandable" or even "inevitable" character, is the key mechanism of ideological deception by means of which the local political and cultural authorities have justified their territorial aspirations (war) and their will for power. In her book The Culture ofLies Dubravka UgrdiC, a writer and cultural critic, relates this point in the clearest possible terms: The peoples of Yugoslavia lived for several decades in their own country, building not only cities, bridges, roads, railways but also a certain complex of values. Built into the foundations of that complex of values were, among other

4

Introduction

things: "the ideology and practice of socialism" (today those same ex-Yugoslavs call that "communism," "Tiro's regime," "communist dictatorship"). It was a practice which to a considerable extent confirmed the earlier break with Stalin (even if the break was carried out on the principle of "the same medicine": numerous individuals, usually out of a sheer inability to cope with the rapid ideological U-turn, ended up on the Yugoslav Gulag, Goli Otok). Then there was that famous "Yugoslavism." This implied a multinational and multicultural community and was reinforced over the years not only by Tiro's popular slogans-"Preserve brotherhood and unity like the apple ofyour eye"-but also by the practice of daily life. Today those same peoples claim that they lived in a prison of nations, and that it was that idea, the idea of Yugoslavism-not they themselves-which is responsible for the present brutal war. 5 UgrdiC is one among a number ofYugoslav and post-Yugoslav intellectuals-critics, theorists, political anthropologists, historians whose analyses of the complexities of life in the region I engage when reconstructing the context of volatile sociopolitical and cultural activity in the 1980s and 1990s. By situating the chosen examples of fi.lm and video production within this larger context, dominated by the rise of nationalism against the background of the declining socialist order, I seek to offer a historically grounded assessment of the ideological "effects" of these works at the time of their appearance-effects that are not strictly, or inherently, textual but are a result of the dynamic relationships of mutual influence established between the works themselves and their audiences. Many of the central dynamics of the recent euphoric outbursts of ethnic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia-messianism, fascination with collective victimization, martyrdom, the cult of the leader-have been described by certain scholars as historically grounded in the (German) romanticist "collectivist-authoritarian" model of the nation. In his detailed historical account of both the theory and practice of "Yugoslavism," Andrew Baruch Wachtel, for example, outlines this model by differentiating it from what he calls the "individualistic-libertarian" one: "The difference between the two is simple but telling. Whereas the latter (characteristic of national thought in Great Britain and most of its former colonies) views the individual members of a nation as sovereign and is directly linked to democracy, the former sees individuals as important

Introduction

5

only insofar as they are part of a unique and sovereign national group to which their individuality is subordinated." 6 But individualistic modes of nationhood can just as well give rise to etatist self-indulgence, exclusivism, and hegemonism. On the other hand, their historical manifestations in a region notwithstanding, forces of collectivism are always also articulated synchronically-within, and in relation to, a wider sociopolitical constellation. This is why one needs to be careful not to simply interpret collectivist impulses (crucial as they, indeed, are for the proper understanding and critique of ethnic nationalism) as somehow characteristic of certain national "types"-as inherent in the "psychological makeup" of the entire Balkan peoples, for instance. Not unlike the "orientalist" discourses (dissected at great length by postcolonial studies), such reductivist and ultimately apolitical, "balkanist" explanations-frequently originating in the "civilized West"-merely betray the existing phobic cultural phantasms about the region and hardly help in creating an understanding of its dynamics? In this respect it is, for example, useful to recall that in the 1960s and the early 1970s a pronounced critique of collectivism permeated the ideas of the internationally acclaimed Praxis school of Yugoslav Marxist humanism (evoked in Chapter I, when tracing the wider intellectual climate out of which some of the best-known works of New Film emerged). Declaring themselves against all forms of authoritarianism, in favor of an open, democratic socialist society, the Praxis group posited a liberated individual (not a mere proponent of individualism, though) as the foundation of collective, societal progress. Particularly influenced by Marx's early manuscripts, but in dialogue with other forms of contemporary social thought-such as, for instance, the theories of the "Freudian left" (especially Herbert Marcuse's and Erich Promm's)-Praxis advocated a "merciless critique of everything existing" and argued that social and political ideals are not absolute, nor can they be fully accounted for in advance. "Rereading Marx from a new perspective resulted," wrote Mihailo Markovic at the time, "in rediscovery of many forgotten humanist ideas about human creativity, ... various forms of alienation, ... and about communism as a society in which the freedom of each individual will be the condition of the freedom of all." 8 Significantly, however, when in the 1990s he became one of the official ideologues of Slobodan MiloseviC's

6

Introduction

political doctrine, Markovic demonstrated that certain ideas about "universal human emancipation" can also be successfully appropriated as a conceptual fas;ade for the hegemonic "national emancipation" of the largest ethnic group in a multiethnic state, namely, Serbs in Yugoslavia. What the contemporary outbursts of ethnic nationalism in the formerly Yugoslav lands may be said to explicate is, then, not some "intrinsic" regional tribalism but the postsocialist radicalization of the collectivist resistance to, or denial of, the society as inherently heterogeneous and antagonistic; radicalization of that social dynamic that, in fact, has made years of successful implementation of the paternalistic state-socialist doctrine possible in the first place. Numerous "rediscoveries," at the time when state socialism was collapsing, of the Yugoslav peoples' ethnic roots are, thus, wrongly seen (positively so by the nationalists and negatively so by the disappointed liberal critics) as signs of a simple return to "the way things ('naturally') were" before they were ("artificially" and "forcefully") interrupted by the onset of the transnational communist project. Rather, as Slavoj Zizek points out, the specific function of the 1990s revival of ethnonationalism in the Balkans (and in Eastern Europe in general) is that of a "shock-absorber" against the sudden exposure to the capitalist openness and imbalance. It is as if, in the very moment when the bond, the chain [statesocialist system] preventing free development of capitalism, i.e., a deregulated production of the excess, was broken, it was countered by a demand for a new Master who will rein it in. What one demands is the establishment of a stable and clearly defined social body which will restrain capitalism's destructive potential by cutting off the "excessive" element; and since this social body is experienced as that of a nation, the cause of any imbalance "spontaneously" assumes the form of a "national enemy." 9

The breakup of Yugoslavia thus represents a good example of the tendency that Wole Soyinka sees as common to the societies undergoing radical transformation, whether in Eastern Europe, Mrica (his native Nigeria, for example), or elsewhere. It is the tendency to "retreat into real and pseudo-ethnic bonds," to "resort to [one's] cultural affiliations," in situations "when politics appear to have failed." 10 This tendency frequently leads toward the formation of exclusivist, dangerously homogenized,

Introduction

7

unhealthy cultures of totality-cultures given to radical stigmatization of all types of otherness. In the case ofYugoslavia there is no doubt that the intellectual and cultural elites invested in nationalist mythomanias and static, phobic notions of collective identity are to be directly blamed as principal instigators, promoters, and rationalizers of ethnic hatred in the region. For all practical purposes, this hatred may, therefore, also safely be seen as having originated-as having been manufactured-in the historical present! For, at the turn of the 1990s, the interethnic atmosphere in Yugoslavia was still such that animosity was not at all widespread, and the belief that there would be war did not predominate among the population. That is why, as civil rights attorney and publicist Srdja Popovic points out, the crimes committed in the beginning of the war by the members of the Yugoslav Peoples Army and by the specially organized paramilitary formations were so horrific: "[T]hey were poking eyes out, killing people en masse ... spreading hatred. I believe that all this was contemplated in cold blood, so that the war can be fed. The moment you show corpses and cut-off heads on television, when you kill someone's child, the whole universe changes. It is forgotten that, if we did not exactly madly love each other, at least we tolerated each other and lived together.... The violence, then, did not come about spontaneously, but was ordered from the top, and carried out by the professionals." 11

Navigating my analysis along different trails of national imagination-ranging from libertarian to centralist conceptions ofYugoslavism, from divisive ethnic essentialism to internationalist solidarity-! present my material in a loosely chronological order, structuring each chapter around a set of issues pertaining to a historically specific mode of cinema's intersection with politics. Chapter r looks at films made in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the time of intensive cultural and intellectual activity on the political left. I focus particularly on Dusan Makavejev's view of political oppression as generated by sexual repression-put forth in his cinematic collages Innocence Unprotected and WR: Mysteries ofthe Organism-and on Lazar StojanoviC's explicit critique of the personality cult of Josip Broz Tito, in his first and only feature, Plastic Jesus (for which he was also imprisoned). The central theoretical issue explored in this chapter

8

Introduction

concerns the extent to which the viewer's active involvement in determining the meaning of these montage-driven films can be considered on grounds that structurally parallel the call for the absolute liberation of the individual, an idea developed around the same time by the Marxist-revisionist philosophers of the Praxis group. Chapter 2 discusses the activities of the 1980s Sarajevan subcultural movement, New Primitivism, especially its appropriation of the widespread stereotypes about Bosnians, performed in the name of progressive, radically open multiculturalism. Focusing on the New Primitivist television series The Top List ofthe Surrealists, I analyze the group's comic representations of Yugoslav identity through abundant use of aesthetic paradoxes and signifying inconsistencies, foregrounding, in particular, the sociopolitical implications of their transformation of the post-Titoist socialist everyday into a series of bizarre sketches about the life of a disjointed nation. Chapter 3 looks at the cinema of Emir Kusturica and the ways in which the director's treatment of the multiethnic Yugoslav ideal has changed from his 1985 film When Father Was Away on Business to his 1995 work Underground. I pay close attention to Kusturica's rich, excessive visual style-what I call his "cinematic choreographies of enjoyment"-arguing that the primary sociocultural functions that this style had served at the time of Underground's release in Serbia were those of reinforcing ethnic narcissism and of preventing the issue of responsibility for war crimes from escaping the collectivist mentality. Chapter 4 is concerned with cinematic attempts at explaining, legitimizing, or criticizing the causes of ethnic hatred in the Balkans. Seeking to oppose all teleological and ahistorical explanations of the Yugoslav breakup, and to situate it, instead, in the properly political crisis of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I examine a wide range of Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, and Macedonian films, including Jakov Sedlar's Four by Four, Andrej Kosak's The Outsider, Milco Mancevski's Before the Rain, Zelimir Zilnik's Marble Ass, and Vinko Bre5an's How the War Started on My Island. This chapter is centered around an exercise in critically appropriating the abundance of unintended textual reflexivity in Stjepan Sabljak's amateur combat-film Surrounded, with the aim of exposing ethnophobia as, at the root, a staged, performative act.

Introduction

9

Finally, in Chapter 5 I explore the problematic, yet common, view of ethnicity as the primary criterion for differentiating among the opposing sides in the Bosnian war. I begin by establishing and critically evaluating the character of the 1996ir997 carnivalesque street protest against Slobodan MiloseviC's authoritarian regime and proceed to discuss Srdjan DragojeviC's Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, a film about the Bosnian conflict that is in some ways representative of this "appositional national spirit" in Serbia at the time. The central portion of the chapter is devoted to probing the functions of what Michel Chion terms the "acousmatic voice" (the seemingly sourceless, disembodied voice) in textual/narrative constructions of ethnic otherness, as evidenced in DragojeviC's work.

1 The Black Wave and Marxist Revisionism

of the multiethnic, multicultural Yugoslav state and the wars fought on its territory are clear symptoms of aggressive ethnonationalism becoming the dominant ideological model in the region. Contrary to the fashionable views about the "ancient" Balkan hatreds, however, this disintegrative model was in no way predestined to overwhelm the Yugoslav society but rather developed as a direct consequence of the complex political struggles in it. Although the flames of nationalism fully flooded the region in the 1990s, during the mid and late 1980s they were carefully and patiently nurtured by the "ethnically concerned" intellectual and cultural elites (the two key events in this respect being the appearance in 1986 of the "Memorandum," charted by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and in 1987 of the "Contributions to the Slovenian National Programme," written by sixteen individually signed authors and published in the magazine Nova Revija; both signaled the legitimation of open, public promotion of ethnocentric national platforms and thus the beginning of organized political-ideological contestation of the existing Yugoslav federal order). 1 The emergence of these nationalist leaderships-whose popularity grew ever more rapidly as the decade of the 1980s approached its end-were, in turn, predicated on the gradual dissolution of the socialist ideology and its sociopolitical structure in the country, the visibility of which process became ever more THE VIOLENT BREAKUP

12

Chapter 1

prominent after the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980. In other words, Yugoslavia did not die because of its multiethnic, multicultural composition. It did not die, as the now prevalent ethnoessentialist discourses would have it, because it represented an artificial construct, a "prisonhouse of nations." Rather, the death of the Yugoslav nation is directly linked with a certain "deadlock" of politics, with a failure to uphold the political identity of the federation. Amidst the wider context of statesocialism's demise in the late 1980s Eastern Europe-at the twilight of the cold war era-Yugoslav republics and republican authorities were unable to reach an agreement about the need and ways to reform the federal order. As a consequence of this failure to politically and economically revise the existing socialist system, the reactionary populist and organicist mechanisms of social control were transposed to, and activated in, the realms of ethnicity and culture, as pillars of new social "stability," of the new collective identities. Latinka Perovic, political historian (and until the early 1970s a high-ranking communist official in Serbia, who, because of her reformist orientation, eventually came in conflict with the Titoist hard line), succinctly explains the immediate causes and dynamics of the Yugoslav breakup: Yugoslavia spent the whole decade after Josip Broz Tiro's death in a deep inertia, founded upon the fear of uncertainty. The first encouragement of reform came from Slovenia. Three types of reform were suggested: economic, political, and reform of the party. In Serbia, all these suggestions were marked as breaking-up the ruling communist party's unity, and therefore the unity of the state itself. In other words, as separatism. They were answered with the "anti-bureaucratic revolution." ... After the proposals for a confederation and an asymmetrical federation-as forms of maintaining state unity, without giving up the economic and political reforms-were turned down, Slovenia took the path of parting, that is leaving Yugoslavia. Having remained faithful to state socialism and the formula of centralist federation, immanent to all multi-national oneparty states, Serbia continued its "anti-bureaucratic revolution" with arms. 2

According to this author's analysis, it is, then, the "conceptual differences as regards the social model" for the federation in the post-Tito era that lie at the basis of Yugoslav disintegration. Significantly, however,

The Black Wave and Marxist Revisionism

13

these differences would increasingly and, ultimately, almost exclusively come to be viewed by all sides as ethnonational in nature. Certain aspects of the dynamic underlying what in the 1980s became a major crisis of Yugoslav state socialism may, to some extent, be seen as structurally related to the political turbulences of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. At this time the tension between, on the one hand, the reformist initiatives of the regional socialist leaderships in a number of Yugoslav republics and, on the other hand, the rigid, conservative reaction to these initiatives by the federal authorities initially manifested itself.3 It is with the cinema of this period that the present chapter is concerned.

New Yugoslav Film To be making a modern film means nothing other than incorporating symbols into the structure of events in such a manner that they do not hurt the eye with their intrusive meaning, but make the viewer discover, in their overlapping and mutual entanglement, the multi-faceted possibilities of meaning, dependent upon how far one can reach with their incorporation into the whole. "Ha," the doubtful ones will say, "so novi film is a riddle that I am supposed to solve, the trap out of which I am supposed to escape." In some sense this is true.

Dusan Stojanovic

Yugoslav cinema, like cinema in other East-Central European countries of "really existing socialism" (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc.), was nationalized after the Second World War. During the so-called administrative period of the late 1940s, regional centers of production were established in all Yugoslav republics (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro), the infrastructure of the film industry was intensively being developed, and first schools for training professional film cadres were founded in the cities of Belgrade and Zagreb. The first feature produced in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia was Vjekoslav AfriC's Slavica (1947), which depicted the Partisan forces battling the fascist Italian army at the Adriatic coast (fig. 1.1).

14

Chapter 1

FIGURE 1.1

Slavica (Vjekoslav Afric, 1947)

The rigid cultural and artistic doctrine of "socialist realism"-also known as "Zhdanovism" (which developed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and moved into Eastern Europe after the war)-did not last very long in Yugoslavia, even though ideological supervision of culture by the political authorities remained in effect even after its demise. The prescriptive set of "socialist realist" rules-which demanded that artists depict the socialist reality programmatically and idealistically-began to be gradually abandoned toward the end of the 1940s, even earlier than, say, in Poland, where it started to wane around the time of Stalin's death (1953). In 1948 Tito confronted Stalin and declared that the country would not develop under the Soviet dictate but would, instead, pursue its own "autonomous path toward socialism." After 1950, this autonomy developed under the sign of the project of "socialist self-management," conceived as enabling the working class to directly participate in socioeconomic decision making and presented as a progressive alternative to the Stalinist deformations of the true Marxist-Leninist objectives.

The Black Wave and Marxist Revisionism

15

(In practice Tito, the state, and the Communist Party leadership still acted as final political arbiters, but they exercised power in a more relaxed fashion.) In the "self-managed" Yugoslav film industry (as elsewhere), "workers' councils" were thus introduced as decision-making bodies overseeing film production, distribution, and exhibition, while the creative personnel associated with the process of film making (directors, cinematographers, screenwriters) were given the status of freelance professionals. Throughout the 1950s, war themes-the struggle against fascist occupation, and the communist-led revolution (without a doubt, the brightest spots in the modern history of all South Slavs)-strongly prevailed as the key source of inspiration for film authors. The impressive level of emotional and psychological complexity toward which the still young and developing Yugoslav cinema was already aspiring was clearly announced in such intimate and tragic dramas as Branko Bauer's Don't Turn Around, Son (1956; about a father who is killed just before he and his young son manage to join the Partisan guerilla fighters), and France Stiglic's The Ninth Circle (1960; a love story about a Croat man and a Jewish woman, set in the wartime Nazi satellite, the Independent State of Croatia). On the other hand, Veljko BulajiC's The Train Without a Schedule (1959) brought a neorealist-inspired sensibility to the subject of economic hardship in the immediate postwar years, while the same director's later production Kozara (1962) set the standard that many subsequent works in the epic genre of Partisan war film would long aspire to meet. The 1960s, frequently referred to as the "golden age" of Yugoslav cinema, saw a true outburst of creativity. The decade witnessed a proliferation of films by talented young authors who, working under the sign of individual expression and aesthetic experimentation, broke out of the thus far rarely disputed ideological framework maintained by the socialist state. Finding both inspiration and support for their artistic inclinations among the abundant innovative tendencies of the recent international cinema (above all the Italian neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague), Aleksandar Petrovic, Bostjan Hladnik, Zivojin Pavlovic, Dusan Makavejev, Ante Babaja, Vatroslav Mimica, Kokan Rakonjac, Krsto Papic, Matjaz KlopCic, Bato Cengic, Zelimir Zilnik, and others offered in their films the taste of what would be designated "novi jugoslovenski

16

Chapter 1

film" (New Yugoslav Film) but subsequently-as a consequence of an ideological campaign launched against some of these filmmakers by the political-cultural establishment-also became known (in certain of its incarnations) as the "black wave" of Yugoslav cinema. The 1960s were a dynamic period in Yugoslavia's social and political life, characterized by developments in the theory and practice of its project of socialist self-management. Associated, as Daniel Goulding points out, with other progressive trends of the period-loosening and decentralization of the state's political control, economic reform, increased democratization of the social sphere-New Film "claimed for itself the right to serve as a critic of all existing conditions" and "to be a conscience-often an unavoidably somber one-of the land, the nation, the society, and the individuals that comprise it."4 Importantly, although often strongly critical of the concrete social, political, and cultural manifestations of Yugoslav socialism, the views of these filmmakers were for the most part not opposed to socialist ideas as such. They were, however, opposed to ideological dogmatism and reification and were committed to a critique of the "unquestionable" collective national mythology promoted by the Yugoslav state and pertaining to the National War of Liberation (1941-45), the revolutionary struggle of the Yugoslav peoples, and the nature and functioning of the Yugoslav socialist model. Thus, for instance, Zivojin Pavlovic, one of the foremost representatives of the New Film, had the following to say about the epic Partisan war films, classic instruments of ideological propaganda in the hands of the socialist establishment: "Those who here spoke about the war by way of the celluloid . . . did not scold history, they beautified it, but in a most disgusting way.... In Yugoslav cinema, various forms of un-truth permanently replace each other. ... Quasi-poetics replaces quasi-epics, quasi-drama replaces quasi-psychology, and quasi-mythologization of history replaces quasi-documentation. Instead of art about the revolution, we have revolutionary kitsch." 5 The social and political critique of the existing socialist system and its ruling elite, however, did not represent the New Film authors' sole, or even primary, ambition. 6 In no small measure, this critical dimension was, in fact, a quality generated out of a desire to assert the autonomy of the subjective truth and of the independent authorial vision (even if,

The Black Wave and Marxist Revisionism

17

as was often the case, the filmmaker chose to produce "ambiguous images," to speak in "open cinematic metaphors")_? It was born, inevitably as it were, out of that "valuable characteristic of the new Yugoslav film," recognized by film theorist Dusan Stojanovic, in the fact that "on the philosophical, ideological, and stylistic planes, it [the New Film] offers a possibility-which in practice it realizes on a daily basis-to replace one collective mythology with endless individual mythologies." 8 "I dare say," wrote Stojanovic in 1965, that in the present historical moment our new film is not "socially engaged." After Babac's, ZivanoviC's, Rakonjac's, PetroviC's films, one may say in good conscience that, instead of that famous "social engagement," our cinema is ruled by a free, independent, personal, even anarchist, spirit. We lived to see our film authors become individually engaged and "nothing more," we lived to see them have courage . . . to express their personal opinion about anything, regardless of whetherthat opinion will be understood by some as "socially positive" or "socially negative," "constructive" or "destructive," "engaged" or seemingly disinterested, optimistic or nihilistic. Free creative mind is gradually winning over the bureaucratized mind, the latter losing the cover which hides dogmatic contents, inherited over the long years of preaching to the Yugoslav arts. 9

Generally speaking, in many of its aspects praised by Stojanovic (ethical, theoretical, practical), the New Film orientation approachesand therefore asks to be addressed in relation to-the set of sociopolitical concerns engaged around the same time by the Yugoslav Marxist humanist intellectuals associated with the influential journal Praxis (Gajo Petrovic, Milan Kangrga, Mihailo Markovic, Rudi Supek). And as a result of the political and aesthetic radicalism of his cinema, Dusan Makavejev is perhaps the New Film auteur whose work most dearly illustrates this link. The rest of this chapter will therefore (r) explore ways in which Makavejev envisions, both theoretically and practically, in two of his best-known works, Innocence Unprotected (1968) and W'R: Mysteries ofthe Organism (1971), a "liberated mode" of spectatorial interaction with his films; and (2) compare such forms of interaction to the spectatorial effects produced by two other "black wave" authors-Zivojin Pavlovic and Lazar Stojanovic, in their films When I Am Dead and Pale (1969) and Plastic Jesus (1971).

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Sex and the Socialist Revolution Makavejev must be seen as both an international artist and an intensely Yugoslavian one.

Phi/lip Lopate

Already in his first feature, Man Is Not a Bird (r965), Dusan Makavejev established montage as the crucial element of his cinematic technique. Two years later, with Love Affair, or the Tragedy of a Switchboard Operator (r967), he radicalized his editing-oriented approach by introducing the compilation film as the cinematic form of his choice. With Innocence Unprotected, his third film, the director fully asserted himself as a foremost contemporary master of the film collage. Originally, Innocence Unprotected was the tide of the first Serbian "talkie," produced and directed in 1943, during the Second World War, by the real-life Belgrade strongman and acrobat Dragoljub Aleksic. In this heavy-handed, almost campy, melodrama of "primitive vitality" (as Makavejev himself pur it), Aleksic also plays the main character, himself. An orphaned girl, Nada, is blindly in love with Aleksic. He, too, loves her, but Nada's evil stepmother has somebody else in mind for her: the rich and evil Mr. Petrovic. Aleksic eventually saves Nada from Petrovic's brutal advancements, and this happy resolution confirms what the film has been intent on depicting all along: AleksiC's heroism, bravery, and superhuman strength (fig. r.2). Formally, AleksiC's film represents a mixture of the fictional melodrama and the documentary footage of the acrobat performing his amazing stunts, such as climbing the "pillar of death" and (the illusion of) holding only with his teeth onto a rope suspended from a flying plane. Makavejev appropriates AleksiC's film, hand-tints parts of it, and gives it a more elaborate sound track, bur, most important, he "expands" it by making it part of a larger cinematic collage. In this expanded edition of the film, he intercuts the original film Innocence Unprotected; archival materials from the same period, including shots of German destruction of Belgrade in April 1941, and footage from the

The Black Wave and Marxist Revisionism

FIGURE 1.2

19

Innocence Unprotected (Dusan Makavejev, 1968)

"Nova Srbija" (New Serbia) propaganda films depicting Serb quisling leaders Milan Nedic and Dimitrije Ljotic; new color footage, directed by Makavejev himself, consisting of interviews with the now aged Aleksic and members of his cast and crew, and a series of tableaux in which the still well-built strongman poses for the camera. By contextually "opening up" the original story, Makavejev introduces a dose of ambiguity into the simplistic, straightforward melodramatic narrative of Innocence Unprotected. He invites the viewer to reinterpret this piece of cinematic fiction by sorting out and assigning meaning to the numerous montage links and juxtapositions established between the different film texts. "Through the multiple perspective he [Makavejev] creates," suggests Roy Armes, "he is able to use the original Innocence Unprotected to probe both the ironies of history and the paradoxes of

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film. Which is the real 1942-the film's heroics or the newsreel horror? What do we mean by innocence? Which is truer, AleksiC's vision of virtue triumphant or the Nazi propaganda film's declaration of Serbo-German friendship?" 10 On the one hand, Makavejev's explication of the grim realities of the historical context within which AleksiC's film was produced (German occupation and bombing of Belgrade; indigenous fascist forces in Serbia) seems to further enlarge, as Goulding puts it, "upon the 'innocence' of Innocence Unprotected-with its naivete, air of honest enthusiasm, resourcefulness, seeming obliviousness to the harshness and deprivations of the time, and the uncomplicated, cartoon-like moral universe of good and evil which it portrays." 11 In this light AleksiC's death-defying stunts are to be seen not only as acts of bravery but also as acts of resistance to the oppressive, constraining, and ultimately murderous society. Continuing in the footsteps of various hypnotists, circus performers, and other entertainers from Makavejev's earlier films, the acrobat functions like an Eisensteinian generator of"attractions," which excite viewers and trigger in them a strong sense of visceral and emotional negation of the broader social environment within which they are situated. If one adds to this the fact that it is Aleksic and his "free as a bird" lifestyle that Nada also longs for (opposing her stepmother's wishes and PetroviC's advancements), then the release from the societal constraints, a theme heavily promoted in the film, cannot but be seen as having a sexually liberatory function as well. On the other hand, by unveiling in his original color footage both the strongman's enormous pleasure in posing for the camera and his inclination toward self-glorification, Makavejev is calling attention to the extent to which one of the primary functions of the original Innocence Unprotected was to strengthen the myth about this "Balkan superman." In doing so, AleksiC's self-promotional film was in one sense blatantly neglecting all the complexities, difficulties, and painfulness of life in Belgrade under the German occupation. Instead, what it offers is a collection of simplified and purified images about the strongman's victories. With his new version of Innocence Unprotected Makavejev "pierced," as Petar Ljubojev put it, "the historiographic hole" existing in the original film, thus explicating the escapist and reductivist character of the

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cinematic myth/illusion about the superhero who flies above the city, watching over and protecting its inhabitants. 12 What is particularly significant about this demythologizing "interpretational option," offered in Makavejev's expanded version of Innocence Unprotected, is that it is laced with allusions to the official socialist mythology and iconography of the Titoist Yugoslavia. One of the final interview scenes with Aleksic takes place, for instance, in front of a large photographic portrait of Josip Broz Tito. Cinematic tableaux in which the strongman (who, much like Tito, began his career as a metal worker) poses for Makavejev's camera sometimes recall the not-too-different images of the Yugoslav president, notorious for his own pleasure in being photographed. 13 And, as Goulding piercingly observes, on a more metaphorical level, AleksiC's death-defying stunts and acrobatic heroism suggest "the legendary stories of Tito's narrow escapes as an illegal party organizer, his leadership of the Partisans during the war, in which he repeatedly led his forces through the encircling rings of vastly superior enemy forces, and the diplomatic tight-wire act he performed after the war in charting Yugoslavia's independent course between East and West." 14 With the "Hymn to Aleksic," composed in the spirit ofYugoslav Partisan songs and repeatedly played throughout the film, the sense of the acrobat's bravura being mythologized in a manner reminiscent of the methods used by the Yugoslav socialist cultural establishment is given its final touch. As such, the film seems to ask, how can these acts still be experienced as liberating? How can they still symbolize unbound human freedom? Questions of this type are explored even more thoroughly in Makavejev's next film, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, with the emphasis now explicitly placed on the antithetical relationship between sexual freedom and political oppression. The filmmaker offers as his starting point a documentary segment on the life and work of Wilhelm Reich (thus the film's title: WR), the controversial German psychoanalyst who sought to reconcile Freudian and Marxist ideas and was expelled both from the Communist Party of Germany in 1933 and from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934. Reich posited patriarchal sexual repression (repression that is social in origin) as the foundation of political authoritarianism and economic exploitation in the class society.

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In an essay entitled "1he Materialist Discoveries of Psychoanalysis and Some Idealist Deviations" he claimed that the definition of the reality principle as a social demand remains formalistic unless it makes full allowance for the fact that the reality principle as it exists today is only the principle of our society.... To be concrete, the reality principle of the capitalist era imposes upon the proletarian a maximum limitation of his needs while appealing to religious values, such as modesty and humility. It also imposes a monogamous form of sexuality, etc. All this is founded on economic conditions; the ruling class has a reality principle which serves the perpetuation of its power. 15

After raising the question-"But in what way does social ideology affect the individual?"-Reich further argued: The Marxian doctrine of society was obliged to leave this question open as being outside its proper sphere; psychoanalysis can answer it. For the child, the family-which is saturated with the ideologies of society, and which, indeed, is the ideological nucleus of society-is temporarily, even before he becomes engaged in the production process, the representative of society as a whole. The Oedipus relationship not only comprises instinctual attitudes: the manner in which a child experiences and overcomes his Oedipus complex is indirectly conditioned both by the general social ideology and by the parents' position in the production process; furthermore, the Oedipus complex itself, like everything else, depends ultimately on the economic structure of society. More, the fact itself that an Oedipus complex occurs at all must be ascribed to the socially determined structure of the family. 16

In Makavejev's film, documentary material about Reich-whose synthetic theories provide the basis for the director's own approach to the relationship between sex and politics-includes photographs and homemovie snippets of the psychoanalyst and his family; original footage shot in the United States (where Reich Red from the advancing Nazism), at the Reich Museum in Rangeley, Maine, and outside the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, where he was imprisoned by the McCarthyites and where he died in 1957; "direct cinema"-type interviews (conducted by Makavejev) with Reich's son Peter, daughter Eva Reich-Moise, and a number of contemporary Reichian psychotherapists-Myron Sharaf

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23

(who introduces Reich's unusual device, the "orgon accumulator"), Alexander Lowen (who discusses the "character-armour" theory, and the BioEnergetic therapy), and Robert Ollendorff (who claims that total sanity, if achieved, would result in suicide). But the director extends his montage method toward creating a multileveled audio-visual collage, and besides this documentary material on Reich he also incorporates into the film: a fictional story, set in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, depicting Milena-a young Reichian revolutionary who promotes ideas about the liberating power of orgasm-trying to educate Vladimir Ilyich, the visiting Russian champion skater (named, conveniently, after Lenin), about the advantages of a humanist, revisionist Marxist approach over the hard-line Stalinist dogma (fig. 1.3); footage of the late 1960s U.S. counterculture, depicting various radical political, artistic, and sexual practices, such as antiwar activities of the beatnik and hippie movements (represented by Tuli

FIGURE 1.3

WR: Mysteries ofthe Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

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Kupferberg of the rock band The Fugs, whose ironic protest songs include lyrics such as "kill for peace" and "who will police our judges?"); sex-art ("masturbatory paintings" by Betty Dodson, on display at the United States ofErotica gallery, and sculpted penises by Nancy Godfrey); drag and transsexuality (Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol's "Superstar" from Women in Revolt and Flesh); excerpts from Mikhail Chiaureli's film 1he Vow, a Soviet socialistrealist ode to Stalin; shots from a Nazi propaganda film about mental institutions and the "benefits" of euthanasia; images of political rallies in Mao Tse T ung's China; a variety of music and sound tracks: from Soviet communist hymns to Coppertone and Coca-Cola radio ads; from Yugoslav folk songs to "Lili Marlene"; from Bedrich Smetana's "Moldau" to American rock poems of the 196os. 17 In WR American capitalist society and the Soviet model of state socialism are both treated as "monuments to sexuality misdirected into power politics and militarism." 18 McCarthyism, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Leninism, Stalinism, and their legacy are all seen as symptoms of the political neuroses caused by unresolved sexual issues. Achievements of the more liberated American counterculture are not simply taken for granted either but are approached with a dose of equivocation. They are sympathetically endorsed yet at the same time questioned about the limits of their political subversiveness and their ability to fully escape the grip of consumerism and commodity fetishism. Thus, for instance, as Jackie Curtis strolls down a busy street, passionately licking an ice-cream cone, one wonders if the sound track accompanying his/her stroll-consisting of radio ads for Coppertone and Maybelline-is here intended to reinforce the camp effect s/he is generating or, rather, to comment ironically on the ability of the American mass-culture industry to "tame" the countercultural "excesses" of this sort by assimilating them into itself. Similarly, when Tuli Kupferberg patrols midtown Manhattan, dressed in a combat uniform and sporting a machine gun, the transgressive political content of this performative burlesque seems, in fact, some-

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what undermined by the not-too-"encouraging" reactions elicited from the passers-by: ignorance, sneer (from some corporate types), or surprise on the face of an elderly lady. The icons and symbols of Yugoslav state socialism also come under WR's Reichian cine-critique, for these, too, are icons and symbols of an institutionalized ideology not unfamiliar with oppressive and dogmatic methods. Thus, the Yugoslav People's Army is exemplified in the character of Ljuba, a soldier who claims that he "mounts guard by day and girls by night" and who attributes equal importance to his sexual coupling with Milena's roommate, Jagoda, and the Yugoslav War of Liberation. In a similar fashion Milena, commenting on the Yugoslav idea of "socialist self-management," instructs the working class that "between socialism and physical love there can be no conflict. Socialism must not exclude human sensual pleasures from its program!" She also adds, in a manner inclusive of some self-criticism: "No excitement can ever equal the elemental force of orgasm. That's why politics attract those of us whose orgasm is substandard, defective, disturbed, or premature!" Finally, in an infinitely humorous and, from the perspective of the Titoist socialist regime, an overtly blasphemous scene, a Partisan snake dance is organized by the Yugoslav workers singing, "Life without fucking isn't worth a thing!" Makavejev, suggests Goulding, "assumes an ironic and satirical attitude toward all forms of dogmatism and cant-including an affectionately satirical handling of Milena's naive, simplistic, and rhetorical presentation ofReichian sexual politics." 19 Despite all her sexual-political enlightenment and radicalism, Milena also demonstrates a weakness for the "old-fashioned," traditional romanticism: the moment she first sees Vladimir Ilyich, she is awed by his grandiose appearance. At the same time, however-and all the satirical criticism leveled against the Yugoslav state ideology notwithstanding-Reichian ideas about sexual liberation are voiced in the film from within Yugoslavia and by a Yugoslav revolutionary (Milena). In the context of Makavejev's explication of a widespread sexual and political oppression, the integrity and originality of the country's "autonomous path to socialism" are thus still preserved. As Vladimir Ilyich puts it, relating his impressions of Yugoslav socialism to Milena: "Well, I've been to the East and I've been to the West, but it

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was never like this. Wonderful!" What is more, in a moment of weakness, seduced by Milena's charms and her enthusiasm for Permanent Revolution cum Permanent Orgasm, Vladimir even admits to the existence of a tender, loving side of his own personality, which he, nonetheless, keeps suppressed by means of the (body) politics of the firm hand. The words Makavejev puts into his character's mouth at this point represent, in fact, Lenin's own admission that music may weaken one's political resolve: Nothing is lovelier than the "Apassionata." I could listen to it every day! Marvelous, superhuman music! With perhaps naive pride, I think: what wonders men can create. But I can't listen to music .... It gets on my nerves. It arouses a yearning in me to babble about nothing ... to caress people who, living in a hell, can still create such beauty. But nowadays if you stroke anybody's head, they'll bite off your hand! Now, you have to hit them on the head, hit them on the head mercilessly ... though in principle we oppose all violence! After delivering the speech, Vladimir slaps Milena, at which point Makavejev cuts to a shot of Stalin. Intended as Milena's point of view, the shot visually conveys her recognition ofVladimir's incurable rigidity and authoritarianism. And indeed, in the end, afraid to confront the amorous feelings he has developed for Milena, Vladimir cuts her head off (offscreen) with one of his ice-skates. He has remained, as Milena's decapitated head (placed on an autopsy table) proclaims, "a genuine Red Fascist." Yet this is no reason, as the cut-off head further suggests, for Milena (and Makavejev) to become "ashamed of my communist past." For what she stands for in the film is the abundant revolutionary and sexual energy, the emancipatory force that "got stuck" underneath the reined political armor of the socialist state ("The October revolution was ruined when it rejected Free Love!"), but the release of which is not yet a lost cause-at least it would seem so in Yugoslavia at the time. This dynamic interplay of "freezing" and "releasing" the energetic (revolutionary, sexual) potential is certainly among the most important structuring principles underlying the film as a whole. Taking place under the sign of Reich's quantitative theories of "sex-economy" and "orgasmic potency," it is emblematic of Makavejev's commitment to a libidinal-materialist (as opposed to semiotically inclined) cine-aesthetic and his investment in filmmaking as a process of "charting the cathexes,

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27

decathexes, and countercathexes of the libidinal economy." 20 The interplay of "arousal" and its "interruption" (as Makavejev himself describes it) motivates a number of interesting visual juxtapositions in the film, such as the one contrasting Chinese revolutionary masses (literally, movement and arousal of enormous proportions) with Stalin assuming a stiff dominating posture in front of his obedient subjects. Another, much more "sexually explicit," expression of this technique is found in the famous, elaborate montage sequence at the core of which is the comparison of Stalin's authoritarian figure with a red sculpted penis (figs. 1.4, 1.5, 1.6). This collage-sequence incorporates images of sculptress Nancy Godfrey producing a plaster-cast ofJim Buckley's (editor of Screw magazine) erect penis (phallic fetishism); Stalin (from the fiction film 7he Vow) proclaiming that "the first stage of communism has been successfully completed"; patients in a mental asylum (excerpt from a Nazi propaganda film, used here to suggest confinement and submission to authority); Tuli Kupferberg simulating masturbation on a rifle (sexuality subljmated into militarism and political violence). Engaging, in addition, a sound track just as heteroglossic as its image counterpart (The Fugs' song "Kill for Peace," Smetana's "Moldau," a hymn to the Communist Party, and FIGURE 1.4 WR: Mysteries ofthe Organism a cheerful Yugoslav folk song), (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

WR: Mysteries ofthe Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

FIGURE 1.5

WR: Mysteries ofthe Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

FIGURE 1.6

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this complex audio-visual mosaic invites the viewer to contemplate the idea that the Revolution, not unlike an aroused male member, was full of potential but that-again, not unlike the latter, when bound by a plaster cast-it was arrested in its development, brought to a premature halt, by the authoritarianism, ideological rigidity, and oppressiveness of its leaders, these powerful yet symbolic (frozen, not real, as the director likes to point out) phalluses! 21 Similarities between Makavejev's "cine-Reichianism" and Herbert Marcuse's contemporary model of "psycho-Marxist" theory are here difficult to overlook. In his Eros and Civilization (1955), a work popular among the 1960s intellectuals in Yugoslavia (as in the West), Marcuse developed the notion of "surplus repression," which he distinguished from "primary" repression, posited by Freud as constitutive of civilization (as separating the human from the animal world, the "pre-history" of human subjectivity from its history). Modeled after Karl Marx's concept of surplus value, "surplus repression" describes the historically specific and (broadly speaking) ideologically motivated forms of secondary social repression: those types of libidinal control that ground inequality and exploitation in the class society. In light of this theory the project of Reichian "sexual liberation" can rather naturally be commended as a pioneering effort aimed precisely at criticizing and subverting the excesses ofsubjugation, which various political, economic, and cultural norms of conduct readily yield. 22 But Marcuse also recognized (already in Eros and Civilization and especially in his 1964 work, One-Dimensional Man) that "surplus repression" is a phenomenon too complex to be successfully countered merely by adopting a liberal-humanist attitude of social permissiveness and espousing a multitude of nonnormative, "alternative" types of cultural practice. This view particularly strongly informs Makavejev's alreadymentioned "ambivalent endorsement" of American countercultural activities depicted in WR: praiseworthy as they are in their own right, sexual freedoms characterizing the socioeconomically advanced West cannot be simply equated with an actual elimination of surplus repression. In fact, according to Marcuse-and Makavejev-the (seemingly) nonrepressive cultural logic of individualist liberalism can, at its worst, even help perpetuate the existing reality of socioeconomic inequality, by

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29

"numbing" one's interests in a community-oriented politics of radical change and by reducing one's desire to strive for-to attribute a politically transformative power to-that which lies beyond the limits of the permissible and the accessible. 23

Montage: Praxis Whether his films deal with Wilhelm Reich and his theories of sexual liberation orwithAleksic, the "Balkan superman," and his stunts performed in the sky above Belgrade, one of the central and persistently explored themes of Dusan Makavejev's cinema is the essential incompatibility between the notion of human freedom and the various institutionalized and reified forms of social and political life. In this respect Makavejev's views come exceptionally close to some of the major ideas of the Praxis school of Marxist revisionism. As Herbert Eagle explains, "Makavejev's films probe the principal dichotomy between liberated individual consciousness and various forms of alienation and repression (ideological dogmatism, determinism, institutionalized rigidity and elitism), thus reflecting very accurately the major concerns of the Yugoslav Marxist humanist thinkers, who have declared themselves against all forms of authoritarianism and domination and have criticized those institutions of power, authority, and socialization that are by their very nature alienating." 24 Summarizing the basic position of the Praxis group, who developed their ideas under the influence of Karl Marx's early manuscripts, Mihailo Markovic writes: "[M]an is essentially a being of praxis, i.e., a being capable of free creative activity by which he transforms the world, realizes his specific potential faculties and satisfies the needs of other human individuals." 25 In the same vein Gajo Petrovic, another member of the school, claims that revolution as we see it is possible only as an activity through which man simultaneously changes the society in which he lives and himself.... The vulgar Marxist idea that we should first create the new social structure (which would easily produce a new man) is as much a failure as the Christian belief that we should first achieve a change in man's heart (because the changed man will easily organize a better society). 26

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According to the Praxis thinkers, individual freedom is a necessary precondition for collective, societal freedom. In his study "Order and Freedom" Ljubomir Tadic, for example, suggests that "freedom is possible only when man is truly the subject, the creator, of his own fate, and not a mere object over which power is exercised." 27 Of course, such a position-and its cinematic correlate, found in the New Film authors' call for total freedom of expression and individual, over collective, forms of engagement-inevitably opens up the related question of how, and whether at all, it is possible to avoid considering Marxist revolutionary ideals in static terms, as a set of concrete, predetermined properties, the practical realization of which is being sought or may even be claimed to have been achieved already. Or, as Gajo Petrovic summarily put it, "When, if at all, should creativity of a socialist revolution stop?" His answer to this question is, "Obviously, when every self-alienation is abolished, when man becomes fully man, and society completely human. However, when should such a moment actually arise? Hopefully never. . . . If man is to be, developing to the full extent his potentialities, then the socialist revolution is thinkable only as a never-ending process. Only in living as a revolutionary can man fulfill his essence." 28 Contemplating the relationship between art and revolution from a similarly libertarian perspective, director Zivojin Pavlovic posits the latter as an "essentially anarchistic event," the true purpose of which is "[n]ot the change in the name of something, but the change for change's sake, as the meaning oflasting existence." "That is why," he further claims, assessing the socially critical dimension of his cinematic practice, "I do not think I would be able to say in the name of what I am engaged, but I do know that I must be engaged." 29 Where Makavejev's own understanding of this issue is concerned, he prefers to emphasize that rather than simply advocating an anarchist position, he believes in "a kind of well organized anarchy!" 30 Linking this idea with his cinematic form, he asserts that in WR the central objective was to build a movie that is a kind of interplay between organization and spontaneity. For it seems to me that the all-anarchism [sic] of, let's say, the New American Cinema or the anarchism of the New Left ... is inefficient because it lacks organization; yet if it turns to organization it takes the same old forms, like the

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highly organized ... groups, so this just perpetuates the old system of power and fighting power with power. And it seems to me that we have to fight power with spontaneity and humor, but in a more organized way." 31 For Makavejev, then, acquisition of individual freedom against the background of societal norms and dominating ideological frameworks simply does not suffice. What seems even more important is that the society and its power structures themselves enter the process of permanent transformation and improvement by seeking to accommodate themselves to the needs and desires of the individual. As James Roy MacBean asserts in his excellent reading of WR, "precisely because Makavejev's method is so profoundly dialectical, we sense that the contradiction between the individual and the social aspirations need not precisely be an antagonistic one: the plea ... is a plea for the individual, but for the individual who himself subscribes to the communist commitment to create a society which provides to each according to his need." 32 One major implication of the thus conceived dialectical operation between the individual and the society is that no "proper" form of social organization can be determined in advance because no such thing as collective sociopolitical ideals can be said to exist in themselves, external to the realm of human practice. And it is only with this point in mind that one can fully understand Makavejev's use of montage as a device by which to accomplish a cinematic critique of ideology (state-socialist but also capitalist). He conceives of the viewer of his films as precisely that individual whose complete freedom he is advocating. Thus, for example, in relation to Innocence Unprotected spectators can position themselves in a number of ways: As they watch the film, viewers will spontaneously make choices according to their own predispositions. Some will believe that they are following a melodrama filled with adventures and moral dilemmas, into which certain documentary materials have been incorporated like some big footnotes, which may also be neglected. Others will be convinced that they are watching a contemporary document about the still-living authors of our first sound film, combined with huge quotations from the film itself, like in some sort of "Time-machine" dedicated to the beginnings of our cinema. Feel free to choose one or the other approach and impression, it depends solely on what you consider first and what second, whether

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you move from the present towards the past, or from fiction to reality. The third approach, the one that would please me the most, I would call rotational: the film is now fictional, now documentary, the one paying close attention to it has to keep "re-aligning" him/herself. ... This "re-alignment" is possible because all the fragments are long enough to avoid the effect of "film associations." 33 The "truth" of a film, of a work of art, is not to be located in its textual fabric, which lends itself to governing, to controlling, the viewerrecipient's comprehension of it as long as it continues to function as a vehicle of the supposedly "objective" meaning contained in it. Rather, the truth resides in the process of each individual spectator's dynamic engagement with the work, in the gesture whereby a subjectivity anchors, so to speak, an artistic text's (or, for that matter, any sociocultural discourse's) specific way of functioning, its specific way of producing meaning. One of Makavejev's favorite techniques used to foreground, to make manifest, this type of activity during the film-viewing situation is, as Armes put it, "to set up an emotional charge in one scene and then, by well-timed cutting, carry this emotion over into the following sequence to which the spectator, left to his own devices, might well have responded very differently." 34 Rather than simply affirming, or opposing, the concrete ideological postulates incorporated into his films, Makavejev invites the viewer to define his or her own position vis-a-vis this ideological bundle. In the filmmaker's own words, once again: If you have a number of disparate things in the film, if one scene is connected not only with the preceding one and the following one, but connected also with a dozen others, ... then according to your own mood, according to your own interest in politics, or sex, ... or humor, you will see different shapes .... Some people are strongly moved by Stalin, other people are moved by sexual freedom. So you have ... shapes that are overlapping, overlapping shapes .... [T]his borderline experience with this double image is actually your emotional content put into some shape that is really something else. 35 This montage effect of "overlapping shapes" is also what differentiates Makavejev's version of the dialectical approach to film form from that of Sergei Eisenstein, whose theoretical and practical work the Yugoslav filmmaker greatly admired and closely studied. In the well-known

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essay "The Dramaturgy of Film Form" (1929) Eisenstein elaborated "dialectical montage" (the possibilities of which he explored most radically in his 1928 film October) as a method aimed at engaging the viewer to respond to shot juxtapositions in an active but exact fashion, generating precise concepts and ideas. For Makavejev, however, montage is dialectical first and foremost insofar as it destabilizes the singularity and certainty of textual meaning and invites a number of possible responses from the viewer. The Yugoslav filmmaker seems intent on making possible through montage what, according to Andre Bazin, has historically been its function to deny (and what only the more realist, mise-en-scene oriented approaches to cinema-those grounded in the use of deep focus and the long take-have been capable of achieving). Writes Bazin in his famous essay "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema": In analyzing reality, montage presupposes of its very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event.... In short, montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of expression .... On the other hand, depth of focus reintroduced ambiguity into the structure of the image .... The uncertainty in which we find ourselves as to the spiritual key or the interpretation we should put on the film is built into the very design of the image. 36

In Makavejev's work, however, one finds evidence of the fact that, pace Bazin (and despite the fact that his views, crucial in the development of postwar film theory, have played an important role in inspiring the antididacticism of the New Yugoslav Film), equivocation and uncertainty can also be built into the very montage design of a film: that an Eisenstein-inspired technique may itself successfully give rise to a polyphony of perceptual and intellectual reactions. (After all, it is too often and too easily forgotten-and the legacy of Bazin's own, rather rigid, understanding of Eisenstein has not been helpful in this respect-that in his post-October period the versatile Soviet filmmaker was himself already at work on testing the possibilities of a "democratic" approach to film form, one driven precisely by the equality, and equivocation, of the multiple textual stimuli: the "over-tonal" montage.) 17 Face-to-face with Makavejev's film collages, every viewer is supposed to actively supply his or her own political and cultural predispositions, his or her own experiences and sensibilities. The process of deciphering the

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ideological, social, and ethical implications of all the juxtapositions, possible associations, and contradictions established between the films' disparate images and sound tracks may be described as productive precisely insofar as it manages to involve the viewer (the more passionately, the better) in comparing and contrasting his or her own convictions, prejudices, desires, with the variety of textually disseminated (and contextually almost always destabilized) ones. In the final analysis it is a "debate"taking place along the spectator-text axis-that is at stake here. What is, therefore, expected of each viewer-participant is to fully assume the responsibilities accompanying the freedom granted to him or her, to choose a specific perspective, a concrete idea, he or she will stand for. 38 The terms of this debate unfolding in the cinema cannot, however, be equated with some sort of simplistic endorsement of complete interpretative relativism. For, notwithstanding the pluralist thinking it aspires to encourage, Makavejev's work does, in the end, implicitly presuppose a basic leftist political inclination of its viewer-participants.39 Yet it is precisely on account of this point that the question also has to be raised: does not the ultimate measure of one's "responsible" attitude toward the freedom of choice reside precisely in questioning the structural limits of freedom itself? Are not the views, decisions, acts (as well as the "libidinal currents") of even the most autonomous individual-of the "liberated individual" promoted by humanist theory-always already those of a subject produced within, and by, a wider network ofsocioideological factors? Perhaps the truly liberated, and the most productive, viewer of Makavejev's films would, therefore, have to be an individual invested with a degree of''Althusserian" self-consciousness-a subject whose active spectatorial choices are underwritten (but far from undermined) by an awareness of being inescapably caught inside ideology. (A subject perhaps somewhat akin to the protagonists of Godard's Le gai savoir, of Mikl6s Jancs6's 1he Red Psalm, or of Zelimir Zilnik's Early Works (fig. FIGURE 1.7 Early Works (Zelimir Zilnik, 1969) q)-a 1969 film literally, but

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this time ironically, titled after Marx's writings and distinguished as the work of New Yugoslav Cinema most explicitly concerned with diagnosing the ideological limits and deviations of the 196os political radicalism, while at the same time acknowledging its own indebtedness to it.) 40

The Raw Image A clear diagnosis about the absurd senselessness of reality is by itself an undisputedly positive reactant. Even if it does not cure, it gives rise to an irresistible urge to be cured.

Miroslav Krleza (quoted by Zivojin Pavlovic)

The relationship between individual freedom and collectively defined social interests and norms is also one of the key themes of Zivojin PavloviC's oeuvre, masterfully pursued in such films as 1he Enemy (1965), When I Am Dead and Pale (1968), and See You in Another 'War (1980). And while Makavejev (and Praxis intellectuals) worked primarily within the framework ofMarxist-humanist theory, invested in the idea of constructive socialism, Pavlovic tended to consider the problem of freedom from a historically less-specified and politically less-optimistic perspective, which included humanist ideals as themselves also an object of critiqueY His work developed along a trajectory that may be seen as a highly condensed version of the evolutionary path of the language of cinema, as outlined by Bazin in his above-mentioned, seminal essay. PavloviC's earliest films-amateur productions made under the auspices of the cineclub "Belgrade" (Triptych on Matter and Death, 1960; Labyrinth, 1961) and the first professional shorts (Living Waters, 1962; 1he Ring, 1963)-are formalist, rhetorically driven works, made by a critic-turned-filmmaker, who, heavily inspired by the Soviet revolutionary cinema in general and Eisenstein's theory and practice in particular, invested himself in montagist fragmentations and reconstitutions of space, in visual symbolism and metaphoric modes of expression. Gradually, however, Pavlovic began to discover the directorial possibilities contained in an altogether different approach to cinematic form: an approach grounded in a heightened authorial respect for the

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integrity of the profilmic reality, in the use of lengthy camera takes, and the so-called integral narration (the camera following the action, subordinating its movements to the narrative content, rather than seeking to realize a predetermined pattern of shots, of incomplete but interdependent framings that, edited together, would create a synthetic filmic space and a sense of unified action). It was some entirely practical considerations-having to do with the blocking and editing of certain scenes in his first feature, 1he Return (1965)-that initially triggered this discovery. But what began in 1he Return as a brief and unplanned, instinctive departure from the "expressionist" abstraction of space (as Bazin would have it) subsequently developed into PavloviC's increasingly systematic use of deep-focus cinematography and elaborate staging of action across multiple spatial planes: it developed into a distinct realist style. The film that marked a high point of this style is PavloviC's fourth feature, When I Am Dead and Pale. With 1he Rats Are Awakening (made a year earlier, in 1967) and 1he Ambush (produced in 1969), this piece of rough cinematic naturalism-a portrayal of life on the margins of economic existence-forms part of an informal "trilogy" of socially engaged works, representative of the director's obsession with what he termed "poetics of viciousness" and "aesthetics of the disgusting."42 When I Am Dead and Pale tells the story of Janko Bugarski, nicknamed Diimi Barka ("Jimmy the Boat"), a young man in his twenties who, having no permanent employment or regular living habits, aimlessly wanders around the Serbian province, distinguished by impoverished, dilapidated workers' settlements, collective farms, and village fairs-all places evocative of harsh living conditions and marked by an overall "antiaesthetic" visual appearance (ugliness). Centered around its protagonist's "journey through life," the film has a loose, episodic narrative structure, akin to that of a "road movie." Jimmy is an ambitionless and disoriented character-in the director's own words, "a man without a compass"-whose nomadic and, in no small measure, absurd life ends abruptly and in an equally absurd manner: in the film's memorable final scene, he is shot to death on a toilet. 43 Jimmy is not particularly representative of the protagonists commonly found in PavloviC's films and literature (besides being a director, he was also an established novelist, essayist, and author of short stories).

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Typically, his characters tend to be ideologically disillusioned individuals-often disappointed communists (as is the case in 1he Ambush and 1he Red Wheat, made in 1970)-who embody the gap between ideological idealism and practice/reality, the discrepancy between "how we would like things to be" and "how they in fact are." Knowing "neither what he wants, nor what he does not want," Jimmy is, by contrast, envisioned as a representative of a state of mind that Pavlovic thought widespread among the Yugoslav youth in the mid-196os (the period preceding the student uprisings of 1968): an intellectual and moral apathy, an attitude of resignation toward issues of ideology, provoked by an all-out exhaustion of the grand narratives of human emancipation, be they traditional (religion) or modern (Marxism). 44 Yet even if he is disoriented, Jimmy does not lack energy, vitality: the force of life pulsates strongly in him. For film scholar Nebojsa Pajkic this suggests that he is not simply a character without any identity but a social outcast whose life is a trajectory without a past or a future, a series of intense moments belonging only to the permanent present. 45 In the film Pavlovic emphasizes this dimension of his character by presenting the viewer with a succession of scenes typically deprived, in the process of editing, of proper dramatic exposition and resolution-a technique inspired by Godard's elliptical approach to narrative in films such as Breathless (1959). Thus, Jimmy may also be understood as a local, Yugoslav version of Godard's Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) or as something of an equivalent of such literary antiheroes as Saul Bellow's Augie March (1he Adventures ofAugie March) or Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty (On the Road). 46 Each stop on Jimmy's journey is defined by a relationship with a different woman: first Lilica, his pickpocketing partner; then Duska, a roadhouse singer; Mica, a postal worker; an unnamed dentist's assistant; and, once again, Lilica. All of these characters are portrayed as more decisive than Jimmy and superior to him in their ability to economically sustain themselves. But their identities and aspirations remain clearly formulated within the patriarchal framework: despite, or perhaps because of, Jimmy's complete lack of commitment, the women in the film function as agents of his (potential) social integration. Partnership with Lilica (ever ready to fake pregnancies) is the best way to sustain the lifestyle of a

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social parasite. Duska begins to build Jimmy's career as a folksinger (despite his horrendous voice). Mica provides him with a temporary home (she is the clearest maternal surrogate in the film-fig. 1.8) and gives a further boost to his career by helping "institutionalize" him as a singer in the military garrisons. The dentist's assistant expects Jimmy to stop wandering, marry her, and lead a life of social and economic stability. Yet, as some recent analyses of the film have pointed out (Branko Dimitrijevic, Goran Gocic), although the behavior of the female characters seems to reinforce the standard patriarchal myth about the "taming" of the unbound male Eros, at the same time it is Jimmy-and not his female companions-who is regularly sexually objectified, fetishized. 47 Thus, for example, he temporarily occupies the place of the "young male game" in Duska's busy sexual life, and he satisfies ageing Mica's fantasy about still

FIGURE 1.8

When I Am Dead and Pale (Z ivojin PavloviC,

1969)

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being sexually desirable. But after his miserable failure at a singing competition in Belgrade, Jimmy responds to the dentist assistant's complaint that his aimlessness is ruining her life by hitting her in the face. With this aggressive manifestation of his frustration over a feeling of impotence ("Do you think I wouldn't want things to be better?" he asks, standing in front of a prominently displayed Yugoslav flag), Jimmy's wandering is also revealed as grounded in a crisis of patriarchal masculinity. His persistent refusal to accept the society's rules of the game has, partially at least, been a refusal to assume those roles and "duties" that the decidedly patriarchal order he inhabits has carved out for him. Firmly situated at the forefront of When I Am Dead and Pale's visual register is the unobtrusive, antirhetorically conceived sequence shot, a stylistic device deemed most suitable for tracing the complexities and the ambiguities of the multilayered pro filmic reality. Often evocative-in its apparent absence of directorial intervention-of documentarist factography, the film largely realized PavloviC's (by then clearly articulated) ideal of "creating an atmosphere that will by no means seem arranged, but rather as a consequence of incidental occurrences."48 An acclaimed example of this approach is found in the long panning shot set in a provincial workers' settlement, depicting Jimmy and an army officer walking by a group of chatting peasants, then crossing paths with some protesting workers (who criticize the building of "political factories"), while in the far background a platoon of singing soldiers is on the move, followed by a group of playful children. 49 Also frequently praised by critics is the scene of the singing audition in Belgrade, in which the emerging urban youth culture of the mid-r96os is contrasted with the thus far depicted culture of the provincial Serbia. Featuring the Black Pearls (one of the earliest Yugoslav rock bands), this scene is entirely filmed in the cinema verite style. In its lengthy opening shot the camera patiently focuses on the drummer awaiting his cue; once he energetically begins to play, it embarks on a sideways track, revealing the location and introducing other musicians. 50 PavloviC's propensity for integral narration, for the mise-en-scene driven organization and control of space (radically different from the montage-based approach of his colleague and friend Makavejev) may be partially attributed to his burgeoning infatuation with Italian neorealist cinema-Luchino Visconti (his Ossessione of 1942, in particular), Antonio

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Pietrangeli, and Mario Monicelli-as well as to his admiration of such older masters as Jean Renoir and CarlTheodor Dreyer. Yet Pavlovic never considered realism to be a goal unto itself but rather a formal strategy, an instrument, in the service of his cinema's central objective of confronting the viewer with the "drastic" or "raw" image-an image capable of triggering a powerful visceral reaction, commonly a mixture of shock and disgust. "How is it possible," he asked in Poetics of Viciousness, a series of theoretical essays written in the early 1960s, "to bring the human being to the point of emotional catharsis by consistently triggering in him repulsive reactions?" 51 Putting a naturalist style of filmmaking in the service of the drastic image's "unpleasant associativity" seemed to Pavlovic like the most effective solution, so he strove to "nurture the irrational while firmly respecting the laws of cinematic realism." 52 Thus, one invariably finds in his films images depicting the "uglier side" or reality: images of decay (urban and rural), filth, social maladjustment, drunken brawling, people stabbing each other with knives, defecating, excessively cursing, rolling in mud, engaging in violent sex in dilapidated barns and roadhouses, and more. The killing of Jimmy at the end of When I Am Dead and Pale-culminating in the final shot of the film's dead protagonist sitting on the toilet, while the camera slowly dollies in to reveal his bloody face (fig. 1.9)-masterfully accomplishes what is perhaps best understood as the channeling of an entire narrative trajectory toward its resolution in a "raw" image. It is through this desire to aesthetically nurture the impulsive, the irrational, and, ultimately, the destructive manifestations of human existence that the formative influence of Eisenstein's theory and practice on PavloviC's work exhibits its enduring effects. For the "drastic/raw" image ofZivojin Pavlovic is directly rooted in Eisenstein's early theory of"montage of attractions," which defines attractions precisely as intense, aggressive stimuli, as physiological "shocks" directed at the audience with the aim of provoking a visceral reaction. 53 Poetics of Viciousness is replete with references to the greatness, the genius, of Eisenstein: The foremost poet of brutality, the one who used strictly cinematic tools to extrapolate its overtonality-its "over-brutality" (possible only in true art)was certainly S. M. Eisenstein. Wherever he engages the piercing power of

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FIGURE 1.9

41

When I Am Dead and Pale (Zivojin Pavlovic, 1969)

associative destruction, at whatever point in his work-whether as an element of a larger event (the raising of the bridge in October); or, as the true sense of a state of being (the procession and the separator in Ihe General Line); as the amplitude of an event, its central axis of meaning (as in the "Odessa Steps"); or, as the climax of a tragedy (peons' death in Que Viva Mexico)-he manages to achieve its maximum concentration, while also avoiding turning it into a

self-sufficient goal; instead, he enriches it with cine-poetry, a pure kinesthetic poetry ... aligned with the author's fundamental obsessions. 54

But Eisenstein developed the theory of "montage of attractions" within the framework of his famously antinaturalist approach to art. He spoke of attractions as aggressive stimuli that are sufficiently independent, even arbitrary, in relation to the work's proper diegetic content. In PavloviC's

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cinematic practice, on the other hand, the intense physiological impact of the "raw" image crosses paths, coexists, with the declared "Bazinian" desire to maintain respect for the integrity of the profilmic reality. For him, attractions are an essential element of cinema, but they are truly effective only when interpolated into the profilmic continuum. (In this respect it is quite telling that besides Eisenstein, it was Luis Buiiuel who, in PavloviC's view, excelled in producing drastic images, true cinematic attractions; but it was primarily those of his works "unburdened by the surrealist caprice and [montage] artificiality"-Los Olvidados, El, and Land Without Bread-that interested the New Film auteur.) A question, therefore, has to be asked at this point: after attractions have been integrated into the pro filmic continuum-after they have been deprived of their fundamentally antinaturalist quality, as autonomous elements in the montage chain-is there any reason why they should still be thought of as "Eisensteinian"? After all, the Soviet filmmaker himself explicitly warned against an attraction being allowed to exist "within the limits of the logical action," to "rest within," or to "operate beneath," the overt dramatic content of the work. 55 Is, then, PavloviC's realist modification of film attractions in the end any different from, say, Jean Mitry's proposed reconceptualization of the same-a reconceptualization that, as Jacques Aumont clearly demonstrated, so fundamentally missed the antinaturalist character of Eisenstein's cinema by seeking to tame its formalist "excesses" through a docile reinstatement of the primacy of narrative logic? Writes Aumont, in his critique of Mitry's retailoring of Eisenstein's theory: Reality should not be "betrayed," nor are we justified in "interpreting" or "taking advantage" of it. Since Eisenstein pays precious little attentjon to the rules of the "lifelike," the "concrete," or the "implied," his crimes are almost complete, and Mitry scarcely has time, particularly with October and Strike, to deal with all the ways in which they deviate from his norms; there are whole pages in which he "invalidates" most of the metaphors in October, positing against their "bad" montage of attractions, a "good" reflex montage, by which he means a montage that "uses only those symbols determined by the content. In other words, a montage of significant facts maintained and understood within the limits of the unfolding logic of the narrative action." 56

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There is, however, something about the intended aim of the "raw/ drastic" image that makes it distinct from (and, therefore, not quite reconcilable with) Mitry's project. Even though the formal means Pavlovic employs to induce the "unpleasant associativity'' of the image differ from those favored by Eisenstein, the primary status of such an image as the mediator of the viewer's relation to the diegetic world still remains squarely within the framework of the latter's thought. That is to say, for Pavlovic, as for Eisenstein, attractions or "raw" images function as accentuated visual elements channeling or directing the process of spectatorial investment in the diegetic reality. Eisenstein envisions this process as directed toward the realm of the "logical action": by causing intense visceral reactions, attractions provide the viewer with external points of entry into the film's dramatic and thematic content (this "externality" being a consequence of Eisenstein's antinaturalist foregrounding of discontinuous montage). The viewer's response to an autonomous, independent attraction-a response that is initially physiological but, as Eisenstein's conception of montage develops, begins to incorporate emotions, psychology, and, of course, intellect-is carried over a cut, transposed into (or onto) the narrative. Pavlovic, on the other hand, wishes to orientate the operation of spectatorial channeling in the opposite direction: his "drastic" images are intended to effect a denaturalization of the viewer's comprehension of the "logical action," to obstruct his or her perception of the diegesis. To fully grasp what is at stake here, one has to turn to the central philosophical problem at the core of much ofPavloviC's cinematic and literary oeuvre: the problem (posed in rather Nietzschean terms) of human nature stretched between its two, ultimately irreconcilable, poles. On one side there is life as a biological phenomenon: as a pulsating, irrational force, a series of drives for food and sex but also for violence and destruction. On the other side is that "carcinoma of nature" that distinguishes humans from all other living beings: consciousness. Seeking to make human existence pleasurable, or at least tolerable, consciousness, in the end, always either "degenerates life itself or, its own efforts result in failure." 57 Proceeding from such an understanding of the human condition, Pavlovic assigns to art the function of socially destructive criticism: of expressing the "paroxysms of existence," of tapping into an "unhealthy ground" on which the affective, impulsive forces and the senseless acts

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manifest themselves in situations of suspended or, at least, loosened consciousness. And it is precisely along those lines that he also interprets Eisenstein's notion of attractions. Reflecting on his fascination with The Battleship Potemkin, the filmmaker points out: I went to see it. And the film literally crushed me. Afterwards, I recuperated and began to think: what was it about this film that impressed me so strongly that I stopped liking everything I saw before. That is how I arrived at montage. But this was merely an illusion .... For what fascinated me so much about the film was above all the "Odessa Steps" sequence. And "Odessa Steps" are not merely about montage. "Odessa Steps" are, first and foremost, grounded in irrational directing-not random directing, but directing given to foregrounding the force of irrationality; a force which films are only occasionally capable of attaining, but when they do, nothing can surpass this grandiosity, this power. Of course, it was only later that I realized: what allured me toward Eisenstein and his film was not strictly montage. 58

For Pavlovic, then, the most significant feature of Eisenstein's technique is that it supplements the film image with outbursts of irrationality, of the "unaccountable." Attractions do not simply assist or guide one's perception of the image; rather, they confront the viewer (in a rather Bataillean fashion) with the unknowing of the represented reality, with what might be described as a loss of"perceptual digestibility" of the profilmic. Understood thus, attractions or "raw" images cannot but be integrated into the diegesis; they cannot but be presented in a "Bazinian" manner-as visceral stimuli interpolated into the profilmic continuum, existing within "the unfolding logic of the narrative action." For their function is none other than to outline the limits of legibility of this continuum, of this logic of action. In films made by Zivojin Pavlovic an attraction marks the ultimate failure ("denaturalization"!) of the total comprehensibility of the signified. It permits the impulsive, the irrational, the nonsymbolizable, to have its revenge-in no less than the arena of cinematic naturalism-on that "carcinoma of nature" that is the spectatorial cogito. An attraction prevents the image from being fully consumed by what Eisenstein himself referred to as the "retardations of conscious volition." 59 Finally, it is only when considered against the backdrop of such a conception of the film image that the precise nature of social critique

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found in a work like When I Am Dead and Pale can be fully grasped. The film offers a demythologizing portrayal of the Yugoslav socialist everyday, a vision in sharp contrast to the official, state-sponsored stories of general prosperity taking place under the sign of an enthusiastic collective commitment to the communist goals. Specifically, following on the trail of a large-scale economic reform introduced by the federal authorities in 1965, When I Am Dead and Pale takes the viewer on a tour of what may unambiguously be read as symptoms of this reform's failure. Moreover, this diagnosis revolves around the film's central premise's stating that from any "socially constructive" point of view imaginable, the main character, Jimmy the Boat, cannot be seen as anything but entirely useless, "pure waste." Not only is he regularly unemployed, but (much like Accatone and other such protagonists of Pier Paolo Pasolini's borgata films) he prefers not to have to work at all (at one point he even openly boasts that he is "too lazy to work"). In a manner paralleling his induction of the "perceptual indigestibility" of the raw image, Pavlovic uses this "inassimilable" dimension of Jimmy's personality as the key point of reference inside the narrative: in relation to it, the Yugoslav system of"socialist selfmanagement"-which envisioned workers as decision makers, as direct participants in the management of production-comes across as a system perpetually concerned with managing the appearance of productivity and social prosperity. As film critic Sasa Radojevic lucidly observed, all that is expected of the many characters in the film ... who constantly talk about work, but actually do not work, is socialization. No one is desperate because there is no production, but because there is no socialization. Proletarians and soldiers are not supposed to enthusiastically fulfil! their duties at work, but to endorse a spirit of friendship and leisure, a castration of revolt that might bring down the glass-tower in which the foundational myths of the socialist society are piled up. 60

By the early 1970s, a politicized offensive against the New Film's tendency toward overt social criticism was gaining momentum. Led by the dogmatic cultural watchdogs of the Yugoslav socialist establishment, the offensive focused on the harmful, even "subversively antisocialist," views that have, supposedly, severely contaminated Yugoslav cinema, giving rise to what would be labeled its "black wave." 61 According to some unfavorable

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opinions expressed at the time, directors such as Aleksandar Petrovic, Makavejev, Zilnik, and, above all, Pavlovic-whose ominous, unscrupulously destructive authorial vision proved itself a particularly fertile ground for frequent attacks on him as a paradigm of damaging "social nihilism"-painted in their films a picture of the entire country as nothing more than "one big toilet." 62 Consequently, a number of "black wave" films encountered various sorts of official and unofficial bans on their releases: Zilnik's Early Works, PavloviC's The Ambush (which, although never officially banned, was held out of distribution until the early 1990s), PetroviC's Master and Margarita (1972; based on Mikhail Bulgakov's novel by the same name), Makavejev's WR: Mysteries ofthe Organism (cleared for screenings abroad but not at home). Other films, such as Zilnik's Freedom or Cartoons (1972)-ostensibly loosely inspired by Marx's Das Kapital (which Eisenstein, much more famously, desired to put on the screen decades earlier)-were never permitted to be completed. The offensive against the black wave culminated in 1973 when, as a result of the scandal caused by student Lazar StojanoviC's film Plastic Jesus, Petrovic and Pavlovic were declared morally, politically, and pedagogically "inappropriate" and were removed from their teaching posts at the Belgrade Academy of Dramatic Arts (Pavlovic continued to direct in Slovenia, where he completed four features during the 1970s). Plastic Jesus would soon become known as the only film in the history ofYugoslav cinema whose author was imprisoned for his creation.

Tito and Jesus This expression, the "Black Wave," was invented by some people who were building their political careers at the time .... In fact, their imagination was very wild, politico-pornographic, and they took for granted much more than we did, in our own, na·ive, ways. These passionate pursuers brought an enormous amount of darkness into our films, having been obsessed both with the need for that darkness, and the need to cleanse themselves of it. Thus were our films, as "black films," used for some social exorcism, for the spiritual release in some people, ... bur this had nothing to do with us.

Dusan Makavejev

Made in 1971, Plastic]esuswas Lazar StojanoviC's thesis project. 63 Like Makavejev's films discussed earlier, it is a work of collage structure. Its fie-

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tional color segments depict the adventures of the main character, Tom, a Croatian filmmaker living in Belgrade, while the black-and-white, primarily documentary, footage-pertaining to the Second World War and the postwar Yugoslav history (up to the late 196os)--establishes a larger sociopolitical context within which the film's central narrative evolves (fig. 1.10). Stojanovic began writing the script and raising the budget for his film in 1968. At the time a common practice at the Belgrade Academy of Dramatic Arts was that graduating students would produce thirtyminute-long works that would subsequently be combined into featurelength, theatrically released programs-the so-called omnibus films. These student shorts were typically paid for by state funds, but having secured some additional financing from the Belgrade-based distribution company Centar Film, Stojanovic decided to attempt a feature-length production. The goal seemed reasonable given the abundance of archival material he was, from the outset, planning to incorporate into the film. According to the director, choosing the appropriate way to portray the film's protagonist, Tom, was from the outset an issue of great importance. At the time Tom Gotovac was already an eminent performance artist and experimental filmmaker whose works- Morning ofa Fawn (1963), Direction (1964), and especially Circumference (1964, an early example of the type of structural-minimalist cinema soon to be made famous by

FIGURE 1.1 o

Plastic Jesus (Lazar Stojanovic, 1971)

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Michael Snow)-were regarded as some of the most important conceptualist products from ex-Yugoslavia, and Eastern Europe in general. "My own film, however, was nothing like a documentary about Gotovac," explains Stojanovic. "I sought to create a situation in which the audience wouldn't find it easy to decide whether the short films attributed to my main character were good or rubbish. I have a character claiming that he is a filmmaker, he has his films shown, and yet it is still not clear whether he is producing something good and important or not." One of the last products of the Yugoslav black wave, Plastic Jesus plainly and directly addresses not only the issue of individual freedom but also the highly sensitive topics of past (World War Two) ethnic hatred among the South Slavs and the personality cult of the Yugoslav president, Josip Broz Tito. The film's critique of the latter is built around the omnipresence ofTito's persona in the sociopolitical and cultural life of the country. "I thought it was very funny," Stojanovic recalls, "that Tito's photographic portraits were hanging everywhere, yet they were rarely shown in films. Furthermore, whatever happened in the country, whatever was decided, whatever new deal was made-it was always in Tito's name, and in the name of the Communist Party. His birthday anniversaries were publicly celebrated by the 'baton-rally' which took place across the entire country. All this was in my opinion very Nazi-like." 64 The overwhelming presence of the president serves as an important, if initially downplayed, element of the social and cultural climate which the film recreates. In such a climate the film's protagonist, an aspiring filmmaker coming from the bottom of the social ladder, is placed along a diegetic path that-owing to the "divine" intervention of the force known as film montage-ultimately leads to an encounter with Marshal! Tito himself, the foremost state authority, the figure at the very top of the power structure. The national leader, the final arbiter of all key aspects of sociopolitical existence, on the one hand, and Tom, an experimental artist and a libertarian, on the other hand, cross paths at that point in the narrative when the latter is arrested by the police because of his parasitical and seemingly useless lifestyle. Immediately following Tom's arrest, Tito appears "in person" (for the first time in the film) by way of an excerpt from his famous speech-delivered to the nation via television-which brought about the end of the 1968 uprising of Yugo-

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slav students. Placed within Plastic Jesus's narrative about Tom's escapades, the original meaning of this documentary footage underwent a modification: it now came to function as an assurance to the public that the conflict between Tom and the police is under control and that it is being resolved under the personal supervision of the Marshall himself. As a collage film, Plastic Jesus differs from Makavejev's Innocence Unprotected and WR in at least two major ways. First, while he is just as invested as Makavejev (or, for that matter, Pavlovic) in the issue of individual freedom, Stojanovic focuses less on each spectator's role as an autonomous producer of meaning (of subjective meaning) pertaining to the events transpiring on the screen. Rather, his immediate concern is with exposing and discrediting the deeply rooted authoritarian and collectivist foundation on which all oppressive political systems-different as they may be amongst themselves-inevitably rest. Second, unlike Makavejev's films, Plastic Jesus does not really allow for the possibility of its disparate image tracks being related to each other in a dialectical fashion. On the contrary, StojanoviC's work strives for what is perhaps best understood as a "montage-based anarchism" and a global critique of ideology: an effect of total leveling, a provocatively absolute equalization of the seemingly different ideological paths and political structures addressed in the film. 65 1he three most explicit examples of this nondialectical strategy-influenced, in part, by the collagist work of the American underground filmmaker Bruce Conner (especially his experiments in false spatiotemporal continuity, achieved through the "Kuleshov effect")-are the following: comparison of communism and Nazism, by way of incorporating into the narrative-and without offering any value judgmentsome World War Two documentary footage of both the Yugoslav communist-led Partisan forces and the German army; "equation" of Josip Broz and Adolf Hitler-again, by allowing the documentary footage of both leaders to coexist within the larger antihierarchical narrative; suggestion that the progressive, socialist and multinational Yugoslav society is rooted in retrograde ethnonationalist hatreds and intolerance-accomplished by freely, and without much attention to causality, juxtaposing the semidocumentary color segments of

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Tom's adventures in the late 196os with the black-and-white archival footage of the World War Two Serb and Croat nationalist forces (Chetniks and Ustashas). StojanoviC's strategy of cinematically equalizing disparate ideological strains-and, above all, his provocative implication of a continuity between the Nazi and communist power structures-proved transgressive enough to raise some serious concerns in the Yugoslav political establishment. Contradicting the communist regime's persistent efforts in maintaining the impression that the socialist reality of interethnic "brotherhood and unity," established after the war, will last forever, Plastic Jesus suggests, instead, the presence of "a phantom state of political affairs" in the historically shaky Balkans. 66 Using the propaganda materials depicting the advancement of the Nazi army across Europe, Stojanovic evokes a notorious example of a political and military force that, while on the rise, also believed in its own eternity but that, some twenty years after its defeat, would be remembered only for its evils. Coexisting in the film with the documentary shots of the Yugoslav Partisans, this Nazi footage raises the possibility that the communist rule may too, sooner or later, come to its end. Consequently, Stojanovic was charged with having produced a piece of"hostile propaganda" aimed at overthrowing the socialist regime and was sentenced to three years in prison. Plastic Jesus itself was, bizarrely enough, seized as an instrument of crime-" like a weapon with which murder has been committed"67-and stored in police vaults, side by side with other "similarly" dangerous objects (axes, guns, etc). It stayed there until 1990, when it was finally "released" and granted an immediate theatrical run. While undeniable, the boldness of the filmmaker's critical vision can, however, only partially account for the drastic course of events that befell Stojanovic and his work. Additional "responsibility" for their fate, and for the similar fate of some other black-wave films (including WR, banned for domestic distribution some time before Plastic Jesus), rests with the broader (not specifically cinematic) sociopolitical turbulences in Yugoslavia of the early 1970s. In 1968 massive student demonstrations took place across the country, with centers in the cities of Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana. The

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protest marked the high point of an overall liberalized atmosphere made possible, among other things, by the increased democratization of the regional communist leaderships in a number ofYugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia). In Croatia, however, along with the reformist socialist program, a nationalist platform was also being developed, which gave rise to a populist movement, maspok ("mass movement"). The movement eventually acquired such momentum, and went to such extremes, that Tito and the Yugoslav federal leadership-at first tolerant toward the liberalism of the republican government-decided to take action. Initially, power was exercised by pressuring the republican authorities to settle their local affairs themselves. The republican leadership, itself invested in the issues of Croatian nationhood, did, indeed, ultimately distantiate itself from the political and cultural activities of the extreme nationalists and their intelligentsia, 68 but its insistence on maintaining an open public sphere, and its preference for political "tolerance and dialogue" over the use of a "firm hand," did not in the end bring about a sufficiently strong or effective condemnation of the nationalist platform. (On the other hand, members of the Zagreb Praxis group from the outset strongly opposed maspok.) As Mirko Tepavac succinctly concludes, maspok "unfortunately weakened its democratic requests for reform of the centralist federation, by accepting support which came from Croatian nationalism, and even ustashism [a Croatian extremist movement, at its historical peak in the 1940s, during the existence of the fascist Independent State of Croatia] ."69 Maspok, this author further points out, was the first movement after the Peoples War of Liberation (1941-45) "to discover how impressively useful massive nationalism can be for political mobilization. Despite all the subsequent attempts, especially in recent times, to characterize Maspok (the 'Croatian Spring') as only democratic and not also as nationalist, [the movement] was led in a tactically equivocal, and politically incorrect way." 70 Consequently, in 1971 a crackdown was exercised by the federal government on both maspok and the highest level of political authority in Croatia. Institutional purges and numerous arrests took place, bringing about the movement's end. The crisis in Croatia-at the forefront of which were the sensitive issues of nationhood and nationalism-reflected, of course, on the overall situation in Yugoslavia, freezing for the moment

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many political and social liberties and discouraging all attempts at critically addressing the question of interethnic relations in the country. The release of Plastic Jesus, a film concerned with precisely such issues (and, in addition, made by one of the Belgrade student activists), thus became impossible for the time being. Soon, however, political events in Yugoslavia would take yet another turn, and the situation with StojanoviC's film would worsen even further. This new political development took place in 1972. Another crackdown was performed by the federal authorities, this time on the reformist political elite in the republic of Serbia. The so-called Serbian liberals (who, among other things, distinguished themselves by a strongly nonnationalist perspective) did not, in Tito's view, do enough to prevent the spread of a variety of"negative phenomena," such as critique of state-centralism and economic liberalism. As soon as the top officials in the Communist Party of Serbia were removed from power, about a dozen student leaders, writers, intellectuals-most of them members of the 1968 protest-were arrested. Among the arrested was Lazar Stojanovic, whose Plastic Jesus thus emerged as material evidence of sorts: as a concrete proof that the subversive tendencies and the danger of "counterrevolution"-against which the regime supposedly reacted-were, indeed, very real.7 1 The above-mentioned instances of political bans, police raids, and arrests announced the onset of a new political climate in the country: a reaffirmation of the local version of the hard-line bolshevist doctrine (gradually abandoned since the mid-1950s), grounded in the centralist control of power, monolithism of the Communist Party, and authoritarianism of the supreme leader (Tito). The Praxis group-whose activities had already been closely monitored-soon, too, came under an open attack from the authorities. In 1975 a group of eight professors, members of Praxis, were expelled from the University of Belgrade. In Zagreb, the journal Praxis was forced to cease publication (an issue of it had already been censored in 1971), and the internationally successful sessions of the Praxis-led "Korcula summer school"-which, for years, had been bringing together some of the foremost European and U.S. thinkers and scholars (Ernest Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Zygmunt Bauman, Erich Fromm, Lucien Goldmann, Jiirgen Habermas, Agnes Helier, Henri Lefebvre, and others)-were terminated.

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To some extent political suppression of reformist social thought in the 1970s helped pave the way for the irrationalities of the narrowminded, ethnonational mythomanias emerging in the 1980s. But Praxis theory was not without its own limitations either. In the late 1980s, when the political rift between the reformists and the conservative centralists manifested itself once again within the now-crumbling system of Yugoslav state socialism, some of the foremost Praxis thinkers in Serbia-Mihailo Markovic, Ljuba Tadic, Svetozar Stojanovic-sided with the ethnohegemonic project at the helm of which was placed Slobodan Milosevic and in the process transformed their universal-humanist ideas into those of Serb national (pseudo)emancipation. 72 A partial explanation for this transformation may, perhaps, be sought in the fact that, despite their extensive critique of authoritarianism and ideological rigidity, not all of Praxis's multiple incarnations ultimately managed to overcome perceiving themselves as prescriptive narratives of human liberation. Facing the dissolution of the internationalist emancipatory idealism and the advancement, in its place, of particularist identity politics, some members of Praxis endorsed the megalomaniacal aspirations of the Serb nationalist ressentiment, which-proceeding from a falsified diagnosis about the "oppression" of the Serb ethnos but simultaneously making use of the deceivingly "pro-Yugoslav" and metastasized socialist rhetoric of MiloseviC's regime ("antibureaucratic revolution")-sought to impose its "remedial" judgment on the rest of the federation. On the other hand, there are also members of Praxis (as well as other 196os and 1970s reformists) inclined to align their past Marxist views with the ideas of contemporary social democracy and with certain (most progressive) values of liberalism.73 While the voicing of such claims in the postcommunist era (amidst the climate of widespread anticommunism) may strike one as a bit too opportune, perhaps these claims should, indeed, be taken at face value and also criticized accordingly. That is, maybe a "weak spot" of Praxis resided precisely in the extent to which, proceeding from an apt critique of Stalinism, political bureaucracy, and the rigidity of the systems of "really existing socialism," it overly neglected the importance of the struggle to uphold socialist and communist ideological hegemony. Thus, while advocating a return to the "true," humanist Marx, Praxis also, ironically, laid the ground for

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yet another type of departure from Marxism proper: it permitted too much political "neutralization," too much deregulation of the ideological dimension inherent in the ideals of human freedom, civil society, democracy, pluralism, and so forth.

One of the most interesting aspects of Plastic Jesus's turbulent history is the fact that after the film was seized by the state, it fell into the hands of the censors, who removed from it a scene that would never again be retrieved. This scene was documentary in nature and depicted the wedding of Ljubisa Ristic, a prominent Yugoslav cheater director, who also played a minor role in the film (in the 1990s, Ristic became the president of the Yugoslav United Left, a powerful political organization headed by Slobodan MiloseviC's wife, Mirjana Markovic). Tom Gotovac attended the wedding as well, assuming the persona of the filmmaker he was portraying in Jesus. "Tom was supposedly filming the wedding with his little camera, while a beautiful relief profile ofTito, hanging on the wall, was overseeing all this." "In the finished film," Stojanovic recalls, "at the point when the marriage ceremony ends and people disperse and start kissing and celebrating, I cut to the World War Two footage of Chetniks, Serbian nationalists and throat-cutters, also dispersing, dancing, and celebrating. When I was later on trial, the public prosecutor claimed that all this suggested that the children who will be born out of this socialist marriage will grow to become Chetniks." 74 What had an even stronger, more direct bearing on the disappearance of this scene, however, is the fact that both the groom's and the bride's fathers were high-ranking Yugoslav army officials. Several of their friends attended the wedding, and, as it happened, they also turned out to be visible in the film. "As I later learned," Stojanovic explains, the groom's father and other state and army officials present in this scene, were mocked in the hallways of military and secret police. They were made fun of as "actors," because they "starred" in my film. They were actually seriously blamed for allowing themselves to be present in a hostile film, despite the fact that at the time of the shooting they could not have possibly known what kind of work this will be. So, enraged by the way I used their appearance in the film,

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SS

they decided to remove themselves from it! That is how they chose to react to the unjust criticism of themselves by the authorities . Their supposed primary sense of duty-to "protect" Tito who, after all, has a much stronger presence in the film-was entirely neglected. 75

The filmmaker's conclusion, however, about the censors' complete failure to protect Tiro's name and figure from "hostile" criticism may not be entirely accurate. Some less immediately visible effects of this policing measure may be deduced, once the specifics of Plastic Jesus's iconoclasm are taken fully into account. StojanoviC's critique ofTito is similar on one level to the type of critique practiced by Makavejev in Innocence Unprotected. In both films one encounters a parody of Tito-as-icon, as the foremost socialist authority. And in both cases this parody revolves around exposing the very act in which imaginary identification-identification "with the image in which we appear likable to ourselves" 76-is realized. In Innocence Unprotected it is Dragoljub Aleksic who, posing for Makavejev's camera, assumes an authoritarian posture reminiscent of that assumed by Tito himself in the portrait hanging behind the acrobat (fig. I.n). In Plastic Jesus it is literally Tito who is exposed-in one of the film's documentary segments-in the process of assuming his own, larger-than-life posture for the television camera, as he prepares

to

address the nation (fig.

1.12) .

In both cases

parody is employed to suggest to the viewer that "the Leader is naked": that the aura of greatness emanating from his (Tito's) authoritarian appearance is, in fact, an effect of the pose he has assumed-which he has

Innocence Unprotected (Dusan Makavejev, 1968)

FIGURE 1.11

FIGURE 1.12 Plasticjesus(Lazar Stojanovic, 1971)

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trained himself to assume. Showing the leader in the act of assuming his authoritative pose thus yields disenchantment with his iconic status-it exposes the unnaturalness of the image of power that otherwise would simply go unquestioned. With this in mind it is possible to see the functions and effects of the censor's "intervention" into StojanoviC's film as more complex than they initially may have appeared. The fact that certain representatives of Tito's regime-its proponents, as well as subjects-have decided to remove themselves from a hostile film, to prevent themselves from appearing in a film that criticizes and parodies the figure of]osip Broz, may be understood as indicative of their awareness that what is perhaps even worse than publicly admitting that "the leader is naked" is showing that there are those (in the leader's vicinity, no less!) who actually know this to be the case-those who are, indeed, able to clearly perceive the leader in his nakedness. From this perspective, what the censors sought-and managed-to accomplish with their molestation of StojanoviC's film, was to prevent themselves from being identified with the perspective from which all the comic inferiority of the leader, "caught" in the act of putting on his authoritative makeup, could be acknowledged. By eliminating themselves from a subversive film, the censors reaffirmed their symbolic identification (as psychoanalysis would have it) with Tito as the most valuable icon of Yugoslav socialism and their own status as representatives of that ideological perspective from which the leader's nakedness is made imperceptible and, therefore, nonexistent? 7 Finally, taking into account the broader context of the New Yugoslav Film, its call for the assertion of multiple individual truths and for an active engagement of the variety of spectatorial subjectivities, it may even be said that in the case of Plastic Jesus the censors gave rise to a perversion of this objective. By acting on it too literally, by violently imposing their own particular perspective, the censors obliterated, once again, all distinctions between that particularity and its enforcement as the collective social norm.

2 Yugoslavism Without Limit

of the "black wave" in the early 1970s, Yugoslav cinema entered a period of decreased ideological turbulence during which the stylistic and narrative vocabularies of genre filmmaking substantially developed. Directors such as Zika Mitrovic, Predrag Golubovic, and Miomir Stamenkovic achieved a great deal of popular success with their action-packed Partisan-war spectacles (sometimes referred to as "red westerns"), suspenseful secret police tales, and urban crime dramas. Aleksandar DjordjeviC's long-lasting television series Written Off-about the adventures of a group of highly skilled underground fighters in Nazi-occupied Belgrade-acquired a cult status with domestic audiences and was subsequently turned into a couple of feature-length films. Other filmmakers, like Krsto Papic (who in the 1960s made Handcuffs-a somber study of the psychology of Stalinist oppression) and Vlatko Gilic experimented in the locally rarely engaged genre of science fiction (The Savior and The Spine, respectively), while still others, like Milivoje Milosevic, specialized in the commercially lucrative comedies on contemporary and war themes. Toward the end of the decade, new forms of critical engagement with the Yugoslav reality also began to crystallize. 1 The emergence of a fresh crop of auteurs first became evident in the films of the so-called Prague school-a group of directors who received their education at FOLLOWING THE SUPPRESSION

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the Czech film academy, FAMU: Goran MarkoviC, Lordan Zafranovic, Srdjan KaranoviC, Rajko Grlic, and Goran Paskaljevic. Unlike their more openly subversive black-wave predecessors, members of the "Prague school" tended to assume, in Goulding's words, "an attitude of critical accommodation rather than dialectical confrontation" with the sociopolitical establishment: "Much like salmon swimming upstream, they bank and dart rather than plunge headlong against the main current." 2 The work of these filmmakers-concerned with the socialist everyday and the functioning, or the malfunctioning, of the system of workers' self-management (with emphasis placed on such topics as unemployment, bureaucracy, bribery, political careerism)-may be seen as the specifically Yugoslav version of the "cinema of moral concern," which at the time was developing in the broader region of East-Central Europe, most notably in Poland (Krzystof Zanussi, KrzystofKieslowski, Feliks Falk, Agnieszka Holland). Goran Markovic, for instance, built his oeuvre and reputation by placing under close scrutiny, dissecting, and, ultimately, satirizing one "self-managed" institution after another. Whether he chose to focus on reform schools (Special Education, 1977), junior-high schools (Majstori, Majstori, 1981), or health services and hospitals (Variola Vera, 1982), each of these particular institutions acquired in MarkoviC's hands the status of a microstructure allegorically referring to, and critically reflecting on, the socialist society as a whole. Another member of the "Prague school," Lordan ZafranoviC, introduced in his Occupation in 26 Pictures (1979) and The Fall of Italy (1981) a thus far unprecedented degree of stylization in depicting the war years and the struggle against fascism. Zafranovic's presentation of life in the Croatian coastal area (including the old city of Dubrovnik) under the Italian and the Ustasha (NDH) rule is grounded in an aesthetic of visual excess: decadence of the coastal aristocracy, mannerist treatment of the orgiastic pleasure seeking of the fascist authorities, and extremely savage, pathological violence to which the same turn as a means of oppression (fig. 2.1). The result of his cinematic technique, somewhat reminiscent of Luchino Visconti's last films, is an unmistakable atmosphere of fear, social morbidity and claustrophobia, and physical as well as spiritual decay. Ideas and ideals of progress-forces of revolutionary

Yugoslavism Without Limit

FIGURE 2.1

59

Occupation in Twenty-Six Pictures (Lordan Zafranovic, r979)

change-still exist in the war-torn world of Occupation and The Fall of Italy, but they are treated without much (ideologically motivated) didacticism, as a "promise of better potentiality" (to use Adorno's locution). The necessity of the Revolution emerges in ZafranoviC's work out of an exhausting, unbearable oversaturation with the tortuousness of the existing fascist order.3 In the early 1980s Karpo ACimovic-Godina, a prolific cinematographer who worked on some of the most significant Yugoslav films of the 196os and the 1970s (including ZafranoviC's Occupation), distinguished himself as a director with a penchant for the avant-garde (and thus, in some sense, as a successor to the stylistic experimentations characteristic of the New Film). His first feature, Medusa's Raft (1980)-made in collaboration with the critic and screenwriter Branko VuCicevic, a seminal figure of the "black wave" and a key contributor to Makavejev's and Zilnik's films-is a splendid pastiche of visual and verbal citations, taken from various works by such post-World War One Yugoslav and European artists as Ljubomir Micic (the founder of the so-called Zenithist movement), Dragan Aleksic (the leader of Yugoslav dadaists),

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Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, and others. The film's narrative is a fictionalized account of the adventures of a group of young avant-gardists who, in the 1920s, set out to spread their "radical-art gospel" across provincial Serbia. Subtly but unmistakably evocative of the very similar agitational trajectory pursued in 1969 by the zealous Marxist-revisionist protagonists of Zilnik's proscribed Early Works (which VuCicevic cowrote and ACimovic-Godina shot and edited), Medusa's Raft "celebrated" the beginning of a new decade in Yugoslav cinema by recapitulating a "master narrative" from its controversial past (fig. 2.2). Also in the early 1980s, Zivko Nikolic asserted himself as a foremost painter of life in the culturally isolated, rural regions of Montenegro Uovana Lukina, 1979; The Unseen Miracle, 1984), while Slobodan Sijan began to develop a distinct visual iconography in his dark comedies Who's That Singing Over There (1980) and The Marathon Family (1981). Set in the economically underdeveloped, pre-World War Two Serbia, and strongly influenced by the conventions of Hollywood cinema, both films managed to immediately acquire a cult following among the younger generation of Yugoslavs. As regards The Marathon Family-concerned with an extended, all-male family of morticians who proudly maintain their family business for six generations-the timeliness of its extremely morbid humor may have even increased over the course of years. For who would have expected back in 1981 that reality itself would "respond" to the hilarious misadventures of the grave-digging Topalovic family with an allout tragedy, in which national pride would be measured by the size of graveyards and funerary rituals would come to serve ethnonarcissistic functions. The Marathon Family is also worth situating in its immediate sociopolitical context. FIGURE 2 . 2 Medusa's Raft(Karpo ACimovic Godina, 1980) In 1980 Josip Broz Tito, the

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"father" of the modern Yugoslav nation and its president-for-life, died. His departure marked the turning point in the life of the country, inaugurating a set of issues revolving around the central question, Was "Tito's way" to be further followed after his death or not? And, if not, what would be the possible alternative forms of the country's sociopolitical orientation? There is a famous scene in Sijan's film, depicting the entire family of morticians gathered for an extraordinary lunch (fig. 2.3). Djenka, a local bon vivant and the owner of the nearby film theater, is also invited. He believes the veal roast that is being served is, in fact, the body of Pantelija, the recently deceased paterfamilias, the eldest and supposedly the wisest of the Topalovics. As the party enjoys the food, Djenka matter-of-factly comments, "This Pantelija is tasty." Understood allegorically, this suggestion that the patriarch may have been devoured by his children summons, of course, the highly pertinent question of the Yugoslav peoples' relation to their own, recently deceased, leader (significantly, much like pictures ofTito used to "preside" over the everyday activities of the Yugoslavs, Pantelija's portrait is prominently displayed in the Topalovic house, overlooking the lives of his descendants even after his death [fig. 2.4]). The ambiguity inherent in the implied act of cannibalism accentuates, in turn, the unresolved nature of the issue: is "eating the Father" to be seen as an act of idolatry or of iconoclasm? Does it represent an accomplishment or a mistake? Is it to be assigned a positive or a negative (social, political) connotation? Such questions-generated by Tito's continued presence, or newly asserted absence, in the lives of the Yugoslavs- are worth keeping in mind, for they substantially inform my analysis, in the remainder of this

FIGURE 2.3

The Marathon Family (Slobo-

dan Sijan, 1981)

FIGURE 2 .4

The Marathon Family (Slobo-

dan Sijan, 1981)

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chapter, of the 1980s Bosnian youth movement New Primitivism and one of its most accomplished products: the popular television series 1he Top List ofthe Surrealists.

New Primitivism I have a friend, ... don't know his tribe for he doesn't wear war-paint.

Zabranjeno puienje

The year 1997 saw the release of an album by the Bosnian, Sarajevobased rock band Zabranjeno pusenje (No Smoking). That same year, another album was also released in Belgrade, Serbia, by a different band with the same name, Zabranjeno pusenje. In an energized manner mixing rockguitar sounds with post-punk, anger- and irony-driven lyrics, a number of songs on both albums addressed various aspects and consequences of the recently ended Bosnian war (1992-95). The two bands with the same name, however, raised their voices from opposite sides of the Drina River, the natural border between the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and the site of much ethnically motivated destruction and killing during the war. Thus, what Zabranjeno pusenje sang in Sarajevo was quite different from what Zabranjeno pusenje sang in Belgrade-the former of the two bands comprised musicians who spent years in the besieged city, while the nucleus of the latter band comprised those who sought refuge from the war in neighboring Serbia. But let us turn to the beginning of the story. It is located at the time when there was only one-the one and only-band called Zabranjeno pusenje. Throughout the 1980s it was among the most popular rock groups in the former Yugoslavia, and it represented one of the paradigms of Bosnian youth culture during the decade. With another band, Elvis ]. Kurtovic and His Meteors, it essentially defined the musical expression of the loosely organized subcultural movement called New Primitivism. In a manner that brings to mind Andy Warhol's Factory and its superstars, the New Primitivs successfully built an image by proclaiming

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themselves the new icons of Yugoslav popular culture. 4 1hus, there was the "glamour" of Elvis J. Kurtovic-the "star" of the 1950s, r96os, 1970s, and 1980s (also widely regarded as the founding figure of New Primitivism); the "musical virtuosity" of the lead-guitar player, Zijo-"the fastest hand in central Bosnia, including the borough ofTuzla"; there was the "sex appeal" and the "intellect" of Zabranjeno pusenje's lead singer and front man, "Dr." Nele Karajlic (his last name alluding to his sexual promiscuity), the (quasi) author of the (nonexistent) sociological study Provincialism as the Highest Level ofPrimitivism; there was Malcolm Muharem, whose name and job-manager of the New Primitivs-alluded to the legendary punk manager and "swindler" Malcolm McLaren. New Primitivism, however, did not limit itself to the role of reshaping the rock culture of the former Yugoslavia. The movement also took hold in the realms of poetry, painting, theater, and film (as will be seen in the next chapter, its influence is clearly recognizable in the early works of Emir Kusturica). 5 Outlining some of the key elements of the New Primitivist style and subject matter, art critic N ermina Zildzo points out that "the main principle of SNP (Sarajevo New Primitivs) is the exploration of identity-an attempt to explain one's self in one's own words, through one's own, un-imposed prism. It manifests itself in: an alleged anti-intellectualism; the use of local iconic and lexical properties; the manipulation of prejudices about Bosnians, with a particularly productive use of elements from the Muslim milieu in the Sarajevo suburbs."6 The "little people," small-time crooks, petty thieves-all those from the margins of society "who do not own much, but know what it means to dream and feel" 7-constituted the center of New Primitivist attention, so it was various forms of mass culture and entertainment (especially the so-called neo-folk music and soccer games), the street jargon, and the local fashion that were appropriated by the movement and then modified to the point of exaggeration. Here is a "concrete example," as offered by Dr. Karajlic to help "better understand the specificity of the new primitivist perspective": Take, for instance, the phenomenon of "rain" and consider different reactions it provokes in poets of different profiles. In observing rain, a Romanticist will identify his soul with the grayness of the sky; Marques will note that the rain

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does not stop falling for thirty days and thirty nights; Oylan compares heavy rain with heavy cataclysm .. .. When a new primitivist poet notes that it is raining, his first thought is that the afternoon soccer match ... will be played on a wet, slippery field. 8

Another telling example of the New Primitivist treatment of Yugoslav popular culture is found in the group's "performative transformation" ofHajrudin Krvavac's 1971 Partisan war film Valter Defends Sarajevo (fig. 2.5). As already mentioned, from the end of the Second World War until the mid-1980s, the Partisan war/action genre has regularly served up as a major vehicle of socialist ideological dissemination in the realm of mass culture. Stylistically quite diverse, by no means uniform in their aesthetic accomplishments, these films often demonstrated a simplified investment in the founding myths of the socialist Yugoslavia: the National War of Liberation and the peoples' "brotherhood and unity." The latter is strongly stressed in Valter. The film is dedicated to the people of

FIGURE 2.5

Valter Defends Sarajevo (Hajrudin Krvavac, 1971)

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Yugoslavia, on the thirtieth anniversary of their armed uprising against the German occupation. Different religious temples prominently figure as elements of its urban mise-en-scene. And in a central scene of the film, in which a Nazi officer invites the parents of some slain resistance fighters to claim the bodies of their children, Sarajevans of all ethnicities are seen marching together, en masse, toward the German barricade, thus thwarting the oppressor's sinister plan to identify and execute anyone who had anything to do with the rebels. What is particularly interesting about Valter, however-and this applies to Krvavac's opus in general, which also includes works such as The Diversionists (1967), The Bridge (1969), and The Partisan Air Fleet (1979)-is that it demonstrates a genre determinism of the highest order. In its narrative structure and visual appearance-influenced by Hollywood westerns, action films, and comic-book iconography-the film strictly, intensely, all too obviously one could say, adheres to the conventions and formulas of these genres. Although its narrative is factually grounded, inspired by some actual people and events (Valter Peric was, indeed, a Sarajevan underground resistance leader), the primary objective of Krvavac's film is neither historical accuracy nor representational verisimilitude. Characters in Valter are underdeveloped, often entirely one-dimensional, while its basic, at times even reductivist, dual plotline serves merely as a pretext for some spectacular action involving Velimir Bata Zivojinovic (in the title role), one of the biggest Yugoslav screen stars and Krvavac's favorite actor. Sometimes pejoratively described as the Partisan war film equivalent of the James Bond series, Krvavac's works have been dismissed by some critics as either too populist and aesthetically insignificant or as mere instruments of state propaganda, or both. At the same time, however, it was precisely their generic overdetermination, the immediate appeal of their cinematographically saturated surface appearance, that has regularly awarded Krvavac's works with vast popularity among the Yugoslav audiences and Valter Defends Sarajevo, in particular, with the status of becoming one of the most-watched war films of all time. This reception climate surrounding Valter is crucial to note if one wishes to properly assess what it is that the New Primitivist perspective has "added," as it were, to the film. Staying true to their goal of approximating an ordinary

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Bosnian's view of himself as closely as possible, the group chose this boxoffice smash hit as an object of adoration, all the while treating the film's exaggerated genre codification as a formal excess symptomatic of its inherent ideological limitations. In other words, the intensity with which it sought to replicate the established conventions of some popular Hollywood genres rendered Valter, from the New Primitivist point of view, a baroque Partisan war film, explicative of the ideological schematism to which it subscribed.9 Proceeding in this manner, the New Primitivs could then utilize the film (or rather, its select fragments) as an index of its own "constitutive beyond," of that set of emancipatory ideas and concepts-above all the idea of fraternal solidarity among the Yugoslavs-that it strives to cinematically realize but in the end does so too programmatically. 10 This performative appropriation is clearly at work on the first album of Zabranjeno pusenje, released in 1981. Its title, Das ist Wafter (This Is Valter), is an explicit reference to Krvavac's work, as are the album's opening musical theme and a few lines of dialogue preceding it, all directly reproduced from the film's sound track. Pertaining to the two final scenes in Valter, this dialogue goes as follows: "Then look, pal, you can see him ...." This is what one underground resistance fighter says to another, when asked to finally reveal the secret identity of their leader, Valter. The camera points to none other than the third member of this small resistance unit, the one with whom the inquisitive fighter has been working side by side all along. Valter is here standing atop a hill, and the panorama of the entire city of Sarajevo is visible behind him. As if to make sure that the implication of the previous scene is clear to everyone-Valter is really not just one man but, figuratively speaking, all the inhabitants of Sarajevo-the film concludes with an exchange between two German officers:

First Officer: "Impressive ... Ever since I came to Sarajevo I've been searching for Valter, but could not find him. Yet now, when I must leave, I have finally found him." Second Officer: "You know who Valter is? Tell me his name right away." First Officer: "I will show him to you. Do you see this city? [The camera, once again, provides a panoramic view of Sarajevo] This is Valter!"

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On the completion of the last line of dialogue, the uplifting, heroic music brings the film to its end. As an immediate follow-up to this intertextual opening of their album, Zabranjeno pusenje offers the song ''Anarchy All Over Bascadija" (with the refrain "New Primitivs all over Bascarsija"-Bascarsija being the old town center of Sarajevo). What this musical "supplement" does to Valter's multiculturalist Yugoslavism is to strip the reified socialist wrapping off it and to align it instead with the spirit of absolute freedom and ideological negation (anarchy). The ideal ofYugoslav "brotherhood and unity" is thus still preserved but no longer as a function of the statesponsored dogma. Rather, the people's "unity in diversity" is now pushed beyond, and as such is rendered antithetical to, all the possible attempts at its ideologically motivated political and sociocultural implementation. In the New Primitivist perspective, being a "true" Sarajevan, a "true" Bosnian, is then equated with being an anti-institutional, transnational, Yugoslav libertarian. The Bosnian youth subculture has found a way to reenergize, and to further radicalize, those progressive views that, although inherent in Valter, have been figuring there as too strongly dependent on the official codes of the socialist culture industry.

Sarajevo Surrealists New Primitivism quickly infiltrated the mass media. Originally a radio program, later turned into a television series, The Top List ofthe Surrealists was one of the most sophisticated expressions of the neoprimitivist tendency and the one that achieved an extremely high level of popularity. It is this television version of the show-in which a number of young Bosnian performers (many of them members of Zabranjeno pusenje and Elvis J. Kurtovic's band) demonstrated their talent for comedy-that I wish to consider in some detail. The Top List of the Surrealists (hereafter referred to as TLS) first marked its appearance in 1981, as part of the youth-culture radio program "Primus." In what was then the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, the cultural space out of which TLS sprang represented, in Zildzo's words, "a fertile ground for the manifestation of ... some characteristics

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of the time period [early 1980s]: liberation from the strictly defined (socialist) frameworks; subversion of the big centers' monopoly on cultural diffusion; fatigue from intellectual pressure; liberation from the past, tradition, and the singular ideological systems; and relativization of firm ideological dogmas." 11 This was simultaneously a period of increased efforts by the state apparatus and social and cultural ideologues to preserve the appearance of calmness and unity, by exercising repressive measures against those who expressed disagreement or strayed from the socialist dogma. Anumber of "subversive" groups-"Belgrade intellectuals," "anarcho-liberals" from the town of Tuzla, "Muslim fundamentalists" in Sarajevo-were persecuted at the time and often rigorously punished. 12 Eventually, TLS's trademark sharp humor, with which it approached the Yugoslav everyday, also experienced some of the effects of this ideological grip. In 1985, first an episode was banned (to which the group responded in a truly "primitive" manner: they played classical music during their scheduled radio time), and later the entire show was taken off the radio waves. In the meantime, however, the first television version of the show was also produced in the mid-1980s, marking the beginning of a new stage in the life of TLS. The onetime alternative subcultural group made its way inside the domain of the cultural establishment. By the time the second television installment of the show was produced, in 1989, it seemed like TLS had been fully incorporated into mainstream culture. 13 By that time, however, the larger sociopolitical picture in Yugoslavia had also undergone further modifications. The tackling of the socialist dogma during the mid-198os gave way during the second half of the decade to the increasingly fanatical and intolerant promotion of another, ethnonationalist, dogma. Media scholar Milena DragiCevic-Se5ic provides an apt summary of the cultural effects of this transformation: [C]ulrure, permeated with socialist ideology, disseminated through schools, workers' and people's universities, has become nationalistic and propagandist in its most vulgar use of national myths. . . . Here we are faced with only seemingly new forms of the same essence: tradition and national culture are only disguises, hiding the old structure of power. The ideological consciousness (dichotomous, Manichean, black and white), has attached itself to the tribal

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one, resulting in a simple, though paradoxical transition from the communist to the nationalist ideology. 14 These changes in the life of the country provided an inexhaustible source of "raw material" for the TLS television acts. The diegetic content of the New Primitivist and "surrealist" vision ofYugoslavia that was being created depended directly on and followed closely the country's everyday reality, stretched between socialist and nationalist impulses. But it is the perspective through which politics, culture, and economy were observed by the New Primitivs that deserves particular emphasis here. It was this perspective-initially employed in 1981 and largely unaltered with the passage of time-that actually gave a subversive edge to the group's creative output during their radio years, as well as after their transition to the medium of television. For the Sarajevan surrealists it was not merely the matter of performing acts of insubordination in relation to the governing social and artistic canons or of striking a nonconformist pose in the face of the ruling cultural icons. What was at stake was, above all, applying this "resistant orientation" to the formal/structural dimension of the dominant sociocultural discursive practices. Thus, the New Primitivs and TLS opposed not only the existing, still-communist cultural establishment (promoting the worn-out socialist cultural politics of rhe state apparatus); they also opposed the emerging nationalistically oriented cultural formations that believed it possible to criticize and even openly fight the cultural establishment while maintaining and actually employing the same structures and institutions that the former created. As DragiCevicSe$ic rightly notes, the transfer of power within such structures merely marks the substitution of one dogma for another. 15 And it was primarily because of their resistance to this type of structural integrity that the New Primitivs were saved from being interpellated into the process of cultural transformation, which-under the pretense of carrying out the cultural evolution, or the resurrection of the repressed, traditional national forms-in fact represented a smooth succession between the two cultural doctrines (state-socialist and ethnonationalist). In this light, what at first may have seemed like a paradoxical and unattainable position of TLS-that of operating within mainstream

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television production while supposedly preserving the subversive aspects of their performative discourse-could, perhaps, be seen as not necessarily impossible. It was the realm of Yugoslav mass culture that served as one of the central stages for the 1980s transition from state-socialist to nationalist ideology, and it was precisely this realm that TLS chose as the setting for most of its activities. What the group aimed for was not merely a negation of the popular content pertaining to a specific cultural ideology (whether state-socialist or ethnonationalist) but, rather, a deeper subversion of the elementary discursive coherence, without which ideologies cannot be generated in the first place.

"Sarajevan surrealists" never sought to establish explicit links of any sort with surrealism proper-whether in its original French version, as it had flourished under the wakeful eye of Andre Breton, or in its Yugoslav variant, developed in the 1930s under the direct influence of the French group. This lack of a clear-cut genealogy between TLS (and New Primitivism in general) and the historical European avant-garde is worth noting, for it is indicative of the way the group presupposed a highly flexible, broadly conceived definition of the term surrealist. one that is historically uprooted and, applicable to a wide range of practices that, emphasizing the irrational, and the paradoxical, enact a certain destabilizing shift in our perception and understanding of reality. Yet, as I will argue, on closer inspection certain features of the TLS discourse do, indeed, invite an analogy with some of the principles of central importance for the original surrealists-for some "dissident" surrealists, at least, if not for Breton's school itsel£ The "sur-realistically" rendered Yugoslav everyday found in the TLS performances consisted of a series of bizarre and (self-)contradicting acts such as: report on the Yugoslav soccer team practicing techniques of hurting and disabling the opponent; visit to the socialist factory where workers-sickle and hammer in hand-pose as sculptures;

TLS's predicted future of Sarajevo: the city divided into East and West by a Wall; garbage-men fighting atop the Wall (fig. 2.6.);

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FIGURE 2.6

The Top List ofthe Surrealists (TV series,

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visit to Kdko (nuclear plant in Slovenia, the only one in the former Yugoslavia), where an argument among the employees causes a nuclear catastrophe; report on social unrest in Yugoslavia: politicians and bureaucrats on strike, protesting the coal miners' low level of productivity; visit to wartime pharmacy stores in Bosnia, where grenades and chemical weapons are sold as headache medicine; "gulping down electricity," presented as a paradigmatic Yugoslav cultural practice. What all of the above acts have in common is, to use Roland Barthes' words, "a systematic exemption of meaning," an opposition to the fixity ("hypostasis") of the signified. 16 If one were to put all these acts together, the result would be no more, and no less, than a list of diverse sociocultural and ideological fragments-originally familiar to the Yugoslav audiences-the stable and measurable values of which are made unreliable, as a new set of fantasmatic and irrational (or "surreal") qualities is mapped across them. This list, this "top list" as it were, would constitute a complete record of the refusal by the young generation of

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Sarajevan performers "to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning to the text (and to the world as text)." 17 All this strikes one as not too distant from what Georges Bataille held to be the essence of surrealism. Writing in 1945, on the occasion of the publication of Breton's Arcane I7, Bataille claimed that surrealism is the path toward liberty, and liberty implies precisely "that it is impossible to fix anything." Furthermore, "a distinct character of surrealism ... brings about a free poetic release without subordinating it to anything and without assigning a superior end to it. . . . The surrealist decision is thus a decision to decide no longer (that is, the free activity of the mind would be betrayed if I subordinated it to some result decided beforehand)." 18 Unlike Breton, who conceives of the surreal as the register of ulterior goals, of aesthetic elevation and sublimation, Bataille sees the sublation of reality (as governed by reason and meaning) into sur-reality as the function of desublimation. It is an "empty form of Aujhebung,'' as Derrida calls it, an opening unto the world of destabilized referents, toward the unknowing of reality. 19 Understood thus, surrealism entails a radical relocation of meaning outside the symbolic reality of discursive and textual systems and inside what is revealed as, simultaneously, its point of origin and final destination: the subject him- or herself. In this light it is further possible to suggest that the famous surrealist "reconciliation of the opposites" takes place precisely when (if) the subject qua audience and the subject qua author/artist come to occupy "the identical position ... in the face of the text." 20 Surrealist art does not provide answers to questions posed by the subject. Rather, it presents riddles, which it provokes the subject to resolve. As Denis Hollier points out, a paradigmatic example of this "riddling" effect between the artwork and the subject is found in the French surrealists' survey of "the irrational possibilities of penetration and orientation within a painting." The survey concerned Giorgio de Chirico's work Enigma ofa Day and consisted of fifteen questions, such as, Who does the statue (in the painting) represent? What time is it (in the painting)? and so forth. 21 And it may be said that it was precisely one such riddle that 1he Top List of the Surrealists also put in front of its viewers: in what way (and more than one is possible) do you, the spectator, define yourself as the Yugoslav subject? How do you reconcile the social,

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cultural, ideological opposites presented to your view? (Insofar as one is interested in pursuing historical continuities, it is here, as well, that a certain affinity may be discerned between TLS's performative strategies and Dusan Makavejev's approach to film form. A passionate devotee and student of surrealism, Makavejev, as we have already seen, also readily experimented with stimulating a multitude of subjective truths and individual perspectives through the "riddling functions" of art.) Significantly, as TLS persisted in questioning the stability of meaning and the fixity of subject positions and identities, they did not seem to doubt the certainty of their own identity. The one thing that was never questioned, but rather taken for granted as the ultimate truth of the TLS discourse, was the "Yugoslavism" of the Sarajevan surrealists/New Primitivs. The best way to explain this paradoxical strategy is to understand the group's performance as addressing the question ofYugoslav national identity through the tropes of a specific form of "passing." In Valerie Rohy's words, "the term passing designates a performance in which one presents oneself as what one is not." 22 And as Elaine K. Ginsberg further explains, "both the process and the discourse of passing interrogate the ontology of identity categories and their construction. For the possibility of passing challenges a number of problematic and even antithetical assumptions about identities, the first of which is that some identity categories are inherent and unalterable essences: presumably one cannot pass for something one is not unless there is some other, pre-passing identity that one is." 23 To begin with, it is possible to suggest that the entire TLS project aims at raising the question whether Yugoslav "identity" and Yugoslav "reality" are merely the "passing forms" (forms of passing) in which the originally unstable and inconsistent sur-reality is cast. What complicates matters in this respect, however, is that because of TLS's taking the truthfulness of their Yugoslav identity for granted, it seems equally possible to pose the same question in reverse: is it, perhaps, the authentic Yugoslav reality that the group actually wishes to present as somehow sur-real? As a consequence of this simultaneity, the distinction is blurred between "Yugoslav" and "surreal"-as pertaining, respectively, to some fixed identity and the absence of such fixity. Furthermore, differences between the "authentic" and the "passing" identities of the diegetic characters prove

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impossible to establish, much less to maintain, in the world of TLS. Characters seem to merely want to enact their properly Yugoslav "being," yet as they evoke various familiar national stereotypes, they behave in ways for which these stereotypes cannot possibly account. This refusal to renounce either one of the two subject positions in favor of the other is emblematic of the specific way in which TLS engages the dynamics of passing. One might call this type of performance tautological passing. One possible way to theorize passing is to understand it as an act taking place under the scrutiny of another's (a "nonpasser's") gaze. The concept of "veiling" then becomes central to the act: in order to pass successfully, that is, unbeknownst to the other, the subject has to assume, and then maintain, a "veil" of some sort. Tautological passing, however, depends not on the unproblematic maintenance of this veil but rather on the full assertion of its existence. It is such a performance in which, contrary to the viewers'/audiences' expectations, the subject is both exposed as passing-as someone/something other than what she or he initially seemed to be (A is not simply, or merely, A; the subject is, in fact, passing for A)-and, at the same time, remains precisely what she or he was before the unveiling (A still is A; exposure of the passing act brings about tautological confirmation of one's identity). As a performative act, tautological passing, then, renders identity as an essentially self-contradicting category: in relation to itself it is always already a form of passing. In this light, to say that "A is A" is to acknowledge A's self-identity as "selfdifference": A as an imperfect, deficient, copy of itself It is exactly on this principle-introduction of tautology into the passing act-that TLS's characters operate. Starting out as "authentic" Yugoslavs, in the name of that very Yugoslav identity (supposedly familiar and codified), they soon reveal themselves as possessing a surplus, which turns them into inconsistent, "surreal" figures. And while this surplus differentiates them, as already mentioned, from any existing image of "the Yugoslav," at the same time, its inconsistent nature makes it impossible to even conceive of, much less assign, any other stable form of identity to these characters. What is thus emphasized is the insufficiency and the incompleteness inherent to all the seemingly fixed, but essentially arbitrary, forms of national identity possibly assumed by the subject. As understood by TLS, Yugoslav identity (and all identity for

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that matter) is the fetish of representation: an identity that is always, inevitably, a form of passing, a "fiction of identity" (to use the popular phrase) concealing its own not only inaccessible, but practically impossible, authenticity. The surplus of identity that distinguishes TLS's characters brings about, then, no less than the certainty of the following conclusion: Yugoslavs are actually surreal figures; these surreal figures cannot be thought of as anything other than Yugoslavs; that is, Yugoslavs are ... Yugoslavs, insofar as the "authentic" Yugoslav being is to be found only in excess of any and every form of codified national identity asserted at any given point in time. "Yugoslav-ness" is, in other words, to be thought of as a kind of (Lacanian) nullibiquite-located at the crossroads of "nowhere" and "everywhere," at that place where, because of their arbitrary nature, the "stable," reined categories of national identity begin to signify their own inability to totalize the disheveled ("surreal") multiethnic spirit, which they, nonetheless, through this very inability, evoke. 24

It is appropriate at this point to address some of the central features of the TLS-prescribed treatment of Yugoslav reality in a more detailed manner. Doing so entails, first of all, establishing a relationship between the group's televisual/performative discourse and the Yugoslav sociopolitical context at the time. For that purpose the psychoanalytic critique of ideology, developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s by Slavoj Zizek, Rastko Mocnik, Renata Salecl, and other so-called Ljubljana Lacanians, can be particularly helpful as a mediating theoretical framework (for a substantial portion of this critique was also elaborated from within, and with common references to, the politically unstable historical framework encompassing the last period of the federative Yugoslavia and the first decade of the post-Yugoslav experience). New Primitivism came into existence within years ofTito's death. The position that The Top List of the Surrealists came to occupy on the national cultural scene was, therefore, inevitably articulated within the earlier outlined context of the whole of the country's defining its coordinates in relation to the legacy of the late president-for-life. Like more or less every significant youth subcultural formation of the day,

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the New Primitivs did their share of challenging the notion of Tiro's unprecedented authority. His death was, for instance, alluded to in one ofZabranjeno pusenje's hit songs as "The Sunday when Hase Left." Also, during one of their concerts in the Croatian town ofRijeka, singer Nele Karajlic announced that the band was interrupting its performance because "the Marshall has died." This equivocal reference to the famous brand of guitar amplifiers ("Marshall") was subsequently blown out of proportion by the press and interpreted as an insulting joke about the president. 25 Despite these and similar incidents, however, the New Primitivs, unlike some other alternative movements of the period, did not really operate as an explicitly politicized group. Around the same time, for instance, the internationally better known Slovenian band Laibach-the musical branch of the art collective called NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst)-continually alarmed the public by turning its rock concerts into totalitarian-like rituals and by provocatively employing the iconography directly evocative of Nazism and Stalinism. 26 For the New Primitivs, however, politics was not, as Ognjen Tvrtkovic observes, a "barrier that had to be transgressed, in order, supposedly, to demonstrate one's political courage, or merely to touch the forbidden fruit. No, politics is here experienced as a realm of the life's givens, as reflected through emotions, as something that determines our everyday existence." 27 Thus, TLS's television treatment of the "hot issue" consisted for the most part in circumventing direct references to the question whether "Tiro's way" was to be further followed after his death. There was, however, a point of strategic significance lurking behind this avoidance of overt political engagement. Perhaps the best way to describe the function of "Tito's way" in the TLS shows is as a certain power of absence-a deliberate exclusion not merely on the level of content but also on the level of form. The group by no means defined itself as supportive of the official political doctrine, which emphasized the need to maintain the course ofTito's politics after his death. But neither did the group openly and unproblematically endorse the growing appositional efforts to criticize, and thus undermine, the personality cult of Josip Broz. Instead, it critically approached the Yugoslav reality from a position that foreclosed the ideological functioning of the "Name of the Father" (as Lacanian theory would have it). 28 By suspending "Tiro's

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way" as an ideological point of reference-by preventing the Father of the Nation from being succeeded by the posthumous authority of his Name-TLS cast the life of the entire country as a "psychotic" state of existence. 29 Without this ideological master perspective, the present as well as the future orientation of Yugoslavia no longer seemed fixed-all the sociopolitical inconsistencies in the country, all its internal contradictions and paradoxes, became open to full view. Of course, for such an ideologically uncodified gaze to be sustained, it was necessary that an additional requirement be met. It was necessary that TLS's portrayal of various social and cultural practices not be subsumed under any other ideological framework either. No alternative master perspective was to occupy the symbolic place previously granted to "Tito's way." No single, seemingly consistent and uniform ideological position was to function as the new ground from which to contemplate the Yugoslav reality. From today's perspective it is not difficult to recognize the historically validated significance of TLS's resolve to structure representations of the country's life around the irrevocable absence of the ideological master signifier. During the 1990s and into the new millennium the flames of hatred spread over the former Yugoslavia, bringing nothing but the fantasies of ethnic divinity and salvation and the reality of gruesome killing and destruction. Carrying this torch of hatred were precisely those who, on the one hand, strongly criticized the authoritarianism of the transnational socialist regime in general, and of Josip Broz in particular, while on the other hand, they fully embraced the new national leaders and their phobic promises of ethnic purity, as the substitutes for the disintegrating socialist order. By contrast, TLS's unusual performative strategy consisted in engaging all the existing ethnophobic stereotypes about Bosnians but from a distinctly antinationalist and multiculturalist perspective. Enacting an almost masochistic identification with these stereotypes, the group sought to publicly elevate to the pedestal of transethnic "Yugoslavism"-to heroicize, one could even say-such bizarre figures as the proverbial "dumb" Bosnian Muslims Mujo and Suljo, whom the countless and widely told ethnic jokes never ceased to ridicule. It is for this reason exactly that TLS's intentionally muddled perspective on national identity may be described as "Yugoslavism without limit."

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"Sucking the Wooden Pole" A closer look at a typical number by TLS, chosen from the group's third television season (1991), will help illustrate the above. A reporter, exploring the rich cultural heritage of Yugoslavia, visits a village where presumably an ancient initiation ritual has been preserved. The ritual, for which this patriarchal microcommunity has become famous, is omleiivanje, popularly known as "sucking the wooden pole." 30 It consists of a number of random and nonsensical actions, performed exclusively by the male members of the community, including the one being "initiated": hanging upside-down on a house door (fig. 2.7), tickling each other's torsos with tree branches, "wearing" a pumpkin on one's head, and, in the end, collectively sucking a bunch of wooden poles. In a manner typical for TLS, omleiivanje is presented as a practice involving members of all three major religions in the multinational Yugoslavia-Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam. (Eventually, even the reporter turns from a passive observer into an active participant in the sucking of the wooden pole, thus confirming his own identity as an Everyday Yugoslav.) But the sociocultural (dis)order in which this "old" ritual unfolds is also distinguished by the "malfunctioning" of the Name of the

FIGURE 2.7

The Top List ofthe Surrealists (TV series,

1991)

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Father. Although the village community seems to rest on a rigidly patriarchal structure, it is actually a community in which the father (whose son is being initiated) does not at all come across as the authority figure and the agent of social law. Far from possessing the attributes traditionally (conventionally) associated with masculinity, he is distinguished by a dumb smile and reductive, almost inarticulate, speech. He is a figure whose only true mastery is that of sucking wood! One might say that TLS's father figure bursts with uncoordinated, but liberating, jouissance, which contaminates the entire community and finds the most striking locus of its embodiment in the wooden pole-the New Primitivist equivalent of the Lacanian "unveiled phallus."31 Bespeaking not the socially prescribed renunciation and lack but the overflow of enjoyment, the wooden pole qua phallic presence gives rise, in the patriarchal eyes, to what Lacan describes as the "demon of shame."32 Made available to everyone and "up for grabs," the (unveiled) phallus now signifies not the maintenance but the dissolution of the Father's law. "It ... becomes the bar [the wooden bar?] which, at the hands of this demon, strikes the signified marking it as the bastard offspring of this signifying concatenation"33 (fig. 2.8). As TLS continues to explore "sucking the wooden pole" as an exemplary transnational Yugoslav cultural practice, action moves from the

FIGURE 2.8

The Top List ofthe Surrealists (TV series, 1991)

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village (appropriately named Cheerville) to the television studio, where the same reporter is now interviewing three distinct political figures about their views on the ritual. The three figures-Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and Alija lzetbegovic (the news footage of each is dubbed and intercut with the original footage of the reporter)-were at the time (1991) presidents of three of the six Yugoslav republics: Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Soon they would all become widely known as the leading political protagonists in the war drama that marked the breakup of the country. Each of the three presidents employs pretentious political phraseology to say something positive about the sucking of the wooden pole. Each seeks to inscribe this libidinally invested act-the truly nonideological point of all Yugoslavs' identification-inside his own, ethnically biased political platform. 34 And if Cheerville, in which one finds overflowing jouissance in place of the social/father's law, can be interpreted as an allegory for the post-Titoist Yugoslavia, where the figure of Josip Broz has not been succeeded by the posthumous rule of his name, then Milosevic, Tudjman, and Izetbegovic are clearly exposed as the new Masters-in-becoming, the new national Fathers whose political competition consists in finding the most convincing way to assign exclusive ethnic roots (Serb, Croat, or Muslim) to omleCivanje, so that those who happily hang upsidedown on their front doors (unburdened by the "impurities" of their identity) can (once again) be turned into "normalized" subjects of ideology. Finally, before concluding this case study on omleCivanje, it might be of interest to propose a possible genealogy of the wooden pole, so eagerly sucked on by the New Primitivs. Since it is a youth cultural movement that is at stake here, it seems reasonable to trace the origin of this pole back to one of the Yugoslav national holidays: May 25, the Day of Youth. On this date, symbolically proclaimed to be Tiro's birthday, grandiose, typically socialist stadium spectacles used to take place every year. These demonstrations of willingness and determination to further follow in Broz's footsteps would always culminate in the arrival at the stadium of the Baton of Youth, previously carried across the entire country by the young men and women of Yugoslavia (fig.2.9). In a splendid instance of surrealist perspectival shifting-somewhat reminiscent of Breton's own example of transforming, by the sheer power of the look, "a man lean-

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ing out a window" into "a man cut in two by the window"-the New Primitivs may be said to have recast this major socialist ritual as a de-reified autoerotic experience. In Cheerville, objectchoice relations (idolatry of the political totem that is the Baton of Youth) have been suspended FIGURE 2.9 May 25: Baton of Youth in favor of the free-flow of the component instincts and pleasure of oral (wood-sucking) type. This antonymic link between TLS's wooden pole and the socialist Baton of Youth becomes even more interesting if related to the sexualpolitical lessons of WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Could not the red plaster cast of Jim Buckley's erect penis in Makavejev's film be seen as yet another-still differently designed-"baton of youth"? Juxtaposed, by way of montage, with an image of Joseph Stalin, it functions as a blatantly sacrilegious illustration of the foremost icon of state-socialist dictatorship. But the relationship between the two images (the phallic plaster-cast and Stalin) may also be understood as proceeding in the opposite direction, in reverse: Stalin may be viewed as himself a "commentary" of sorts, as the symbolic value-dogmatism, oppressiveness, totalitarianism-added to the image of the erect male member. From this perspective it is the inability of the sculpted phallus to function like an ideologically noninterpellated part-object that is asserted through montage. Charged with the meaning of the Father's (Stalin's) Law, the "pre-Oedipal" baton of youth is transformed into the Baton of Youth as the phallic signifier-as "the fetish of itself" (:Zizek), a substitute for the absence or inaccessibility of itself as the source of jouissance. 35

From the War-Torn Sarajevo As one watches the early, mid-1980s, episodes of The Top List ofthe Surrealists on the small screen, sketches depicting the group's hilariously chaotic vision of life in the (now former) Yugoslav federation unfold

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interspersed with the full-length music videos of"neo-folk" singers-the authentic stars of a distinctly local form of low-brow mass entertainment. This paradox of parodically exposing the layers of kitsch and vulgarity in a national culture-of systematically making fun of everything in it that is not sophisticated-while simultaneously providing the viewer with his or her daily dose of cultural trash, represents the cornerstone of the New Primitivist reliance on the strategy of tautological passing to exert what Rohy calls "a betrayal of 'identity' that offers one way of reading the production of the dominant culture's own identifications." 36 Unfortunately, by the late 1980s and the early 1990s-those critical years when socialism was clearly losing its ground and ethnonationalist euphorias were taking the upper hand-this and other (even less unorthodox) visions of inclusive and polyvalent Yugoslavism ran against the rapidly rising wall ofignorance and opposition. With too many discovering the pleasures of ethnocentrism and finding comfort in various myths of ethnic purity, the idea of national identity as an identity grounded in diversity came to be interpreted in terms diametrically opposed to those favored by TLS. The multiethnic, multicultural Yugoslav federation was proclaimed by the new nationalist leaderships to have always been forcefully implemented and artificially maintained. The idea of solidarity among its constitutive peoples acquired the label of a mere "socialist ideological lie" and was replaced by a number of "proper" ethnoexclusivist identities. Amid this changing political and cultural climate the status and functions of neo-folk music, a favorite source of inspiration for the Sarajevan surrealists, also underwent some significant modifications. "That faithful companion of the so-called 'ordinary man,'" explains Dubravka Ugrdic, quickly adapted to the political changes and was transformed into a political propaganda, war industry. Like a powerful transformer, [neo-folk music) turned the political ideas of the national leaders into sung synopses accessible to the "ordinary man." The mutual permeation of the political and the popular has reached its legitimate height today: the mass cultural stage has become the loudest, and therefore also the most potent means for sending political (war) messages, and political life exactly resembles a stage. 37 Appropriated by the nationalist leaderships, the ritualistic practice

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of omleCivanje continued into the 1990s-this time, however, involving rifles rather than wooden poles. Instead of freely and openly manifesting itself in the Yugoslav sur-reality, the sexuality of the freshly designed ethnic warriors was repressively directed toward the "weapons-fetish." 38 But the transnational "spirit ofValter"-to the cultural visibility of which the New Primitivs made a more than valuable contribution-did not simply vanish with the onset of the armed conflict in Bosnia. The brutal siege of Sarajevo by the Serb nationalist forces, led by Radovan Karadzic and general Ratko Mladic, itself took place not as a consequence of the betrayal of this ideal but precisely as a means intended to "persuade" the city's inhabitants that their ethnic coexistence and solidarity were no longer possible. The Top List of the Surrealists continued to work during the difficult times of the siege. By 1994, with the team of performers having undergone some visible changes, the "war edition" of the show was completed. It included a number of dark-humored sketches that informed of various invented "sports" (such as racing in the "sniper alley"), presented parodies of popular songs (in one sketch, Sarajevan John Lennon and Yoko Ono "imagine" what life would look like if electricity and running water were restored and the streetcar was working again), and depicted bizarre competitive social games ("casting one's look high in the air"-a discipline claimed to be especially popular in the UN "safe havens" in Bosnia, where the local population had an opportunity to train itself to perfection while desperately awaiting the arrival of the planes carrying food and bare essentials). The most interesting sketch in this series, and the first one to be videotaped during the war (the fact itself indicative of just how little the Sarajevan surrealists' antinationalist position had changed over time), bears the title "Under Mohammed's Flag." It depicts an auto mechanic lying under a "Flag 101," a popular and commonly driven brand of Yugoslav car. While repairing the car, the mechanic addresses its owner: "With this money, Mohammed, you could have bought yourself a Golf [Volkswagen]!" In the times characterized by obsessive, violent assertion of collective identities, the times permeated by ethnic stereotypes of the worst kind, instead of a "Muslim fundamentalist"-fanatically devoted to the fight for an Islamic Bosnia- TLS chose to portray a Muslim who is merely an ordinary man having difficulties with his broken car (the

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"Flag"). But the cultural ideologues and the increasingly infl.uential, ethnoreligiously "concerned" circles of Bosnian intelligentsia did not show much sympathy for this sketch. "Under Mohammed's Flag" and a few other "controversial" segments of the series were declared insulting to Muslim believers, and an "unofficial ban" was imposed upon them. 39 In 1995 the cultural politics of the Bosnian authorities exhibited a higher degree of investment in nurturing the regressive values of ethnic nationalism than in demonstrating, as Boro Kontic (an early producer of TLS) put it, "that a sovereign spirit, self-conscious and ironic-ironic, like all that is mature, first and foremost in relation to itself-is being preserved. That, at the end of the twentieth century, one European city is maintaining its superiority. Those segments stored in the safe of [Bosnian] Television, ... are especially functional as an effective and superior answer to the newly emerging negative theses about this region." 40

3 Aesthetics of Nationalist Pleasure Every day, in every respect, we are making more progress. Do You Remember, Dolly Bell?

THE FILM AESTHETIC of the Sarajevo-born director Emir Kusturica has strong links with New Primitivism. Lying at the core ofKusturica's cinema is the scene that stages the eruption of enjoyment into the social sphere. From the energetic wedding celebrations that put on display all sorts of emotional extremes (When Father Was Away on Business, Time of the Gypsies, Underground) to the sleepwalkers in whose steps the line between the rational and the irrational, the real and the fantasized, turns into a blur (When Father Was Away on Business [fig. p]); from the seemingly inexhaustible alcohol-induced states of collective trance (Underground) to the individual visions, instances of levitation, telekinesis (Time of the Gypsies), or people simply ... flying. By definition, as it were, this enjoyment constituting the foundation of Kusturica's approach to filmmaking is an excessive one: difficult to contain, often destructive, even murderous; but it is also liberating-expressive of an unbound spirit and its unconditional freedom. Already in his first feature, Do You Remember, Dolly Bell? (1980)-a coming-of-age story set in the late 1950s Sarajevo suburbs-Kusturica clearly demonstrated a thematic proximity to New Primitivism. The film's emotionally charged, seriocomic, and condescension-free treatment of the ordinary Bosnian folk is directly in line with the movement's aspiration to depict the everyday lives of the "little people" from their

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FIGURE 3.1

When Father Was Away on Business (Emir Kusturica, 1985)

own, autonomous perspective. Dino, the film's adolescent protagonist, his working-class family (living in a crammed, run-down apartment), and his friends, the Sarajevan brats (some of them children of the killed Partisans), represent some of the most accomplished cinematic renditions of the character prototypes after which the exaggerated New Primitivist heroes and stars were modeled. In his second film, When Father Was Away on Business (1985), the director began to develop a cinematic equivalent of the New Primitivist engagement with the "surreal": a stylistic orientation that the critics-encouraged by Kusturica's frequent references to Federico Fellini as one of his foremost influences, as well as his admiration for Gabriel Garda Marquez (especially the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude)have identified as "magic realist." 1 Like 7he Top List of the Surrealists, Kusturica strives (to borrow Fredric Jameson's words) for "a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself ... a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived." 2 However, much more lyrical in his transfiguration of Yugoslav reality than TLS ever was, the filmmaker exchanges the acerbic "Bataillean" sociocultural critique found in the group's surrealist performances for a vision of the Yugoslav nation as enchanted. In this vision the use of magical reality as the site of an opposition to the various forms of social and political reification does not automatically preclude its potential to also serve as the subject matter for

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a national panegyric. As will be seen, the latter tendency has in fact become quite explicit-a function, essentially, of ethnonational collectivist self-indulgence-in Kusturica's cinema of the 1990s, more specifically, in his epic work Underground. In When Father Was Away on Business, however, it is still subdued and soberly held in check.

The Father With Dusan Kovacevic and Bozidar NikoliC's bitter comedy 7he Balkan Spy (1984), and Stole Popov's ominously intoned Happy New Year, I949 (1986), Kusturica's When Father \%s Away is a key Yugoslav film centered around president Tito's historic "No" to Stalin, which marked the country's 1948 proclamation of its political independence from the Soviet Union and the establishment of its "autonomous road to socialism." The film critically examines the controversial topic of the anti-Stalinist purges that took place in the wake of this proclamation and Yugoslavia's subsequent expulsion from the Cominform. When Father Was Away couples a profound feeling for cinematic naturalism with a fascination for the irrational, the psychomystical, resulting in a lyrical roller-coaster ride between the subjective and the objective, wakefulness and dream. Kusturica is here unambiguously practicing what Jameson describes as a specifically magic realist position: "not a realism to be transfigured by the 'supplement' of a magical perspective but a reality which is already in and of itself magical or fantastic." 3 As we have seen, the 198os Yugoslav context, prominently marked by President Tito's absence, was translated by the Top List of the Surrealists into a situation of the "foreclosed" Name of the Father, which, in turn, structurally grounded the group's surrealist performances. In Kusturica's film the same context is now diegetically thematized and historically displaced into the late 1940s. While Mda, the father of the depicted Bosnian family, is "away on business"-that is, doing time in an anti-Stalinist work camp-his son Malik, the film's child-narrator, sleepwalks in the streets and across the bridges of Sarajevo. Ultimately, at the film's end, he even lifts himself off the ground, into the air. This "removal" of the paterfamilias, as the narrative catalyst for stepping beyond the limits of"healthy" reason, was to some extent already evident in Do You Remember, Dolly Bell? Here, the teenage protagonist, Dino

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(a cinematic predecessor of Father's Malik), develops an obsession with hypnosis, the merits of which he defends in verbal duels with his father, a proponent of the "Marxist science." After numerous failed attempts, Oino finally succeeds in hypnotizing his pet rabbit (fig. 3.2) bur only at the point when his father, dying of an incurable illness, is leaving home for the hospital. It would be a mistake, however, to simply equate these departures ofKusturica's father-characters with the foreclosure of the Name of the Father, as utilized by TLS. The latter emphasized the suspension of Tito's posthumous Law-the symbolic (abstracted and transpersonal) framework assigning (ideological) consistency to the social reality that it governs. In Dolly Bell and When Father Was Away, on the other hand, it is the actual father (Dino's and Malik's, respectively) who "goes away" but only after he has been sufficiently depicted as a complex, living subject. In both films the father is portrayed not as a detached and rigid authoritarian figure bur rather as a charismatic, generally good-natured, and loving authority. "In both cases," explains film theorist Bozidar Zecevic, the father does not possess a single trait of the mythological paradigm that is Dis Pater; he does not fulfill the function which lies at the core of the patriarchal syndrome: he is neither brutal, nor uncompromising, he does not win his battles at the expense of those close to him. He is neither a Zeus, nor a Creon. Nor is he a vicious Vodan. He is not a mythical, victorious king, the classical hypostasis of the male principle. . . . Quite the contrary, he loses his battles, he is gentle, full of compromises, he overlooks his [family's] destiny, but all the while he is also a man made of flesh and blood, equally given to virtues as well as vice. He is the Protector, not the tyrant. He is not the patriarchal father from the occidental anthropological schemas, but an autochthonous element of a different tradition, the tradition of the pagan ancestor, typical of the Slavic, or more precisely, of the South Slavic legacy. 4 A discrepancy manifests itself in the two films, between such an empirical father-an essentially imperfect, "only human" individualand Father as the omnipotent ruler of his Name. This is particularly dear in the case of When Father Was Away on Business, for the moment of Me5a's departure to the prison is also the moment of Malik's initial encounter with this paternal "shortcoming": in front of his son's eyes, Me5a ceases to function as the invincible, all-powerful authority (which the

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FIGURE 3.2

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Do You Remember, Dolly Bell?(Emir Kusturica, 1980)

child believed him to be) and becomes, instead, the vulnerable subject of the Law. It is Malik's uncle (his mother's brother), Zijo-the local Communist Party official and the man who supervises Mda's consignment-who, on the other hand, emerges at this point as the agent of the Law's uninterrupted functioning (even Mda's mistress, Ankica- directly implicated in his imprisonment-now becomes Zijo's girlfriend). All the subsequent "magic excesses" in the narrative, revolving around Malik's tendency to sleepwalk, may thus be understood as symptomatic of the boy's refusal to accept the truth of which he has recently been made aware: that his father is not the Father, that Mda does not live up to his son's vision of him as the infallible authority. Toward the end of the film, however, Mda, having returned from the prison, revenges himself on Ankica by forcing her to have sex with him one more time. An accidental witness to this scene, Malik now begins to perceive Mda in a different light, and the initially troubling discord between the father's idealized image and the actual, far-from-immaculate reality of his being acquires a new significance. The film's conclusion stages the boy's liberation

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from the mythos about the Father's unchallenged superiority: Malik literally transcends it in his final sleepwalking episode, by lifting himself off the ground and heading toward the sky. With this magic realist event par excellence, the spirit of freedom and sovereignty is also, retroactively, asserted as the value inscribed (implicitly, at least) in all other "enchanted" moments in the film. Of course, it is in this cessation of submission to the paternal metaphor that the crucial (extradiegetic) political implication of the film resides as well. When Father Was Away on Business is ultimately an emotionally charged lesson on political maturation: on the necessity of the Yugoslavs dismantling and leaving behind the myth of the omnipotent Tito (who, not unlike Mda, widely enjoyed the status of a loving patriarch, of a powerful and at times strict protector, but not a tyrant).

An Aesthetic of the Genitofugal Libido Starting with his third film, Time ofthe Gypsies (1989)-a mythopoeic saga about the life of the contemporary Roma-an essential component ofKusturica's cinematic "choreographies of enjoyment" begins to acquire an ever-greater prominence: enjoyment that is at stake, that underlies the filmmaker's entire aesthetic, increasingly foregrounds its "purity" -its nature as an unproductive, self-sufficient expenditure of libidinal energy. As Zecevic perceptively put it in his analysis of the film, the director's tendency toward deep focus shots, layered perspectives, color dramaturgy, and dense tonal compositions, sometimes culminates in a series of true explosions. Toward the middle of the film this already creates a certain saturation .... As soon as each fantastic image is formulated, its artificiality, its full charge, and a desperate call for a rest, already begin to disturb. Virtue or shortcoming? In any case, Time ofthe Gypsies is a massive rock of meanings, an open metaphor, one gigantic, disconnected sign. There is too much ofeverything. . . . A rich baroque film, spilling over on all sides. 5 Practically the same general description of Kusturica's visual form is applicable to Underground-his controversial epic about the history ofYugoslavia from World War Two to the present-with its endless trancelike festivities, marked by the never-stopping Gypsy brass music, perpetual intoxication, exaggeration, and erotization of gestura! and verbal expression.

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Underground functions like a cinematic vehicle for representing what JeanFranyois Lyotard describes as "sterile consumption of energies in jouissance."6 Given the high frequency and the extended length of the film's set pieces of "libidinal exuberance" (as they may be called), it seems plausible to argue that the highest aesthetic accomplishments of Underground are to be sought in those moments that invite the spectator to suspend, however temporarily, all narrative/diegetic concerns, in the name of a heightened scopic gratification. No longer functioning merely as "representations which imitate pleasure,"7 these "libidinal choreographies" thus establish themselves as, before all else, autonomous dynamic systems that, through an orchestration of the kinetic forces of various magnitudes, generateproduce, rather than reproduce-the effect of dissipation of energy. What is particularly interesting in this enactment of dissipation on the level of film form is the "centrifugal effect," employed in Underground on a number of occasions and accomplished by organizing the energetic/libidinal centers of the film's mise-en-scene-its ecstatic bodies-into the patterns of circular and rotational movement. The two most notable gyrate formations of this sort are (a) the extreme low-angle medium-dose shot that depicts the film's principals-Marko, Blacky, and Natalija-singing the song "Moonshine" directly into the camera, as their interlocking bodies begin to spin around the axis extending from the camera to the characters' plane of action (fig. 3-3); and (b) an actual spinning wheel, built by the inhabitants of the underground, kept in their cellar, and used ·for festivities and celebrations such as weddings (the wedding of Blacky's son Jovan to a girl named Jelena, for instance). On these occasions all the musicians play sitting on the wheel, which spins ever faster until their bodies become a visual blur (fig.3.4).

Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)

FIGURE 3.3

Underground(Emir Kusturica, 1995)

FIGURE 3.4

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Common to these and other rotating patterns found in the film is that they create a strong impression of an efferent force at work-a force that tends to pull the exuberant enjoyment away from its corporeal "containers," into an expanded (social) field. 8 Intense pleasure permeating the intersubjective reality is a constant in Kusturica's cinema. And, like When Father Was Away on Business did before it, Underground, in its explicit concern with Yugoslav history and politics, establishes the sign of equality between this overflowing enjoyment and the notion, the idea-or rather, the Ideal-of "Yugoslavness," ofYugoslav national identity.9 In both films a strong libidinal investment is seen as the essence of Yugoslav culture, of its disheveled and polymorphous spirit. Not only is the entire human body (explicitly and implicitly) eroticized, made ecstatic, overwhelmed by pleasure. The whole of Yugoslav national culture is seen in these two films, to use Herbert Marcuse's words, as "evolving from and sustained by free libidinal relations."10 Thus it seems productive to think of Kusturica's aesthetic-at least as far as When Father Was Away on Business and Underground are concerned-as grounded in what has been theorized (initially by Sandor Ferenczi) as the notion of the "genitofugallibido": libido that is directed "away from genital supremacy toward the erotization of the entire organism."11 Not only are the two films stylistically indebted, as it were, to such a "recathecting of the whole organism with libido," but both reflect an aesthetic equivalent of what-expanding on Ferenczi's original insights-Geza R6heim and Marcuse after him, have assumed to be "a genitofugal 'libido trend to the development of culture'-in other words an inherent trend in the libido itself toward 'cultural' expression, without external repressive modification." 12 This view of "nonrepressive sublimation" 13 as the proper foundation of culture is certainly capable of accounting for the level of meaning in When Father Was Away generated by the film's status as a historically displaced allegory about the Yugoslav sociopolitical reality at the time of its making (mid-198os). To the extent to which Mda's absence parallels Tito's absence from the life of his country after his death, the film's "magical reality" of intense emotions and liberated fantasies-with its locus of articulation in Malik's subjectivity-may be seen as representative of an ideologically unbound "Yugoslavism," of a vision of national

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identity grounded in the libidinal flow liberated from the constraints of a reified political mythos and a widespread personality cult. What is at stake is, in other words, an identity that-much like that construed by TLS-resists all concrete forms of sociopolitical appropriation, consolidation, and canonization, an identity that is a priori irreconcilable with ideological prescription of use value as such. Marcuse would explain: "Where repressive sublimation prevails and determines the culture, nonrepressive sublimation must manifest itself in contradiction t~ the entire sphere ofsocial usefulness; viewed from this sphere, it is the negation of all accepted productivity and performance." 14 Underground carries on-or rather purports to be carrying onwith the above position of "Yugoslavism without limit," which conceives of Yugoslav identity as a critical ideal and an essentially anti-ideological corrective for the ideology-soaked reality. The film's historical narrative consists of three parts: "War," "Cold War," and again "War." Part I, "War," takes place in Belgrade during the Second World War, and it depicts best friends Marko and Blacky fighting against Germans on the side of the communist resistance but above all else being interested in machismo showmanship, excessive drunken parrying, and Natalija, a pretty, flirtatious actress whom they are both trying to seduce. The key scene in part I takes place during a German air raid, when Marko orchestrates the massive retreat of his friends and relatives into a secret cellar. Part 2, "Cold War," covers the time between the end of the Second World War and the I990s, and it depicts events taking place both inside and outside the cellar. The people hiding in the cellar, including Blacky, are continually tricked by Marko (who never remained inside) into believing that the war is still raging outside, and they, therefore, keep producing weapons to help the fight of the communist-led resistance movement. In the meantime, aboveground, in the postwar socialist Yugoslavia, Marko has established himself as a poet and a high-ranking politician. He is now married to Natalija and is celebrated, together with Blacky (who, according to the mythos Marko generated, bravely died in the fight for freedom), as a "peoples' hero." Toward the end of the "Cold War" section Marko and Natalija descend into the cellar to attend the wedding of Blacky's son Jovan (born and raised in the "underground"). During the wedding a drunken, chaotic fight erupts and

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the entire cellar eventually collapses, revealing itself to be part of a larger network of underground tunnels, linking East to West. Part 3 of Underground's narrative-once again called simply "War"takes place during the 1990s bloodshed in the formerly Yugoslav lands. Unbeknownst to each other, both Blacky and Marko now find themselves in the war zone (not specified as either Croatian or Bosnian). Blacky, devastated by the loss of his son (Jovan drowned soon after he and his father escaped the cellar), is a merciless army commander, while the unscrupulous Marko, bound to the wheelchair with Natalija by his side, trades in arms. After they are captured by Blacky's soldiers, the two traders, Marko and Natalija, are summarily executed. Blacky, in fact, orders the execution, not knowing the identity of the arms dealers. This dark and pessimistic vision ends, however, on a "brighter" note. In the film's spectacular concluding scene all protagonists-living and deceased, those who have passionately loved, fought, and killed each other-come together for one final frenetic celebration, as the ground on which they are dancing separates itself from the mainland and floats away on the waters of the Danube (fig. 3.5). Marko's brother lvan (who committed suicide earlier in the film, unable to come to terms with the interethnic slaughterhouse that his beloved Yugoslavia has become) addresses the camera directly: Here we built new houses, with red roofs and chimneys, where storks will nest. With wide open doors for dear guests. We'll thank the soil for feeding us, and the sun for warming us. And the fields for reminding us of the green grass of home. With pain, sorrow, and joy, we shall remember our country, as we tell our children stories that begin like fairy-tales: "Once upon a time, there was a country ... "

This celebration of the pure, uncompromised Yugoslav Ideal-the film's concluding "choreography of enjoyment" (stylistically somewhat reminiscent of Andrzej Wajda's treatment of the "Polish question" in his 1972 film Wedding)-is envisioned as opposed to, and reaching beyond, the contemporary ethnonationalist hatreds among the South Slavs. As such, it demands that it by no means be confused with what the film, on the other hand, presents as the continuous historical practice of the Yugoslav Ideal's ideological distortion and contamination, and its political enslavement, in the aftermath ofWorld War Two, by Tito's socialist

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FIGURE 3.5

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Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)

regime. As Peter Krasztev wrote of the film's final scene: "This is the island of happiness, the 'Yugoslavia of ideas' as opposed to the 'shadow' (underground) Yugoslavia, which is false and full of pretense. It is that 'real thing' which every mortal down below craves. For this to come to pass, it was necessary to become detached from the external world." 15 On the one hand, then, there is the national Ideal, and, on the other hand, the history of its deformation in practice. The latter is clearly the meaning of the film's central metaphor of the underground. The exodus into the cellar is intended to symbolize the political repression exercised against such "grassroots" revolutionaries as Blacky, as well as against all the ordinary people, gathered around him, who sincerely and naively believed in the authentic Yugoslav values. In other words, the story of the Yugoslav project is, according to Underground, a history of its successive betrayals at the hands of various opportunists, dictators, liars, thievesBalkan "amoralists of all sorts" 16 (represented most clearly, of course, in the character of Marko, a bon vivant and a careerist-revolutionary, whose cunning, unscrupulous ways secure him the status of a high-ranking political official in Tito's regime). Scenes such as the above-mentioned final festivity, or the beginning of Jovan's wedding in the cellar-with its "classical" magic-realist episode of the bride flying above the wedding guests17-stage the manifestations of an exuberant libido under

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nonrepressive conditions (the former) or the conditions of a temporarily neutralized repression (the latter). As such, these scenes-representative, broadly speaking, of what Marcuse called the "cultural sublimation" tendency-are contrasted with the decadent, dark, and fatalistic atmosphere that permeates, in one form or another, practically all other set pieces of enjoyment in the film. These include Marko and Blacky's brass musicaccompanied, drunken fight with other members of their Communist Party cell (part 1); the extended self-torturing orgy, which the wedding in the cellar eventually becomes for Marko, Natalija, and Blacky (part 2); the dead bodies ofMarko and Natalija set aflame, ceaselessly spinning in circles on Marko's motor-powered wheelchair, amidst the mayhem of the contemporary Yugoslav war (part 3). It is the destructive consequences of the genitofugallibido's compounding with greed, political profiteerism, and power struggle that receive exposure in all of these. Yugoslavism with (Ethnocentric) Reserve

Undergrounds presentation of the historico-political "compromising" of the Yugoslav project deserves particular attention. What it clearly reveals on closer inspection is the extent to which the film's conception of the national Ideal is in fact removed from the transnational purity and the lack of ethnic bias that are being claimed by it. In Do You Remember, Dolly Bell? the Muslim ethnicity of the depicted Bosnian family was, practically speaking, the matter of contingency, given the family's internationalist, communist persuasions. In When Father Was Away on Business the Muslim ethnicity of Malik's family was less important per se than the overall multicultural picture of Bosnia that was being painted. Thus, Mda's lover, and his brother-in-law's wife, Ankica, was a Croat, while Mda's first neighbors were Serbs, whose son, Serjoza, was Malik's best friend. By contrast, the comic book-like protagonists of Underground are construed as Serb national stereotypes who, even when they are mocked, still fulfill the role of the exclusive pillars of an ethnocentrically imagined "Yugoslavism." As one reviewer observed: "Underground seeks to promote a supranationalist Yugoslav citizen above the national groupings contained within Yugoslavia's political boundaries." Yet "[t]his supranationalist agenda, albeit admirable, is compromised

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and undermined through the liberal application of iconography ascribed to a Serbian culture ... [such as] slivovitz (plum-brandy), religious Orthodox motifs, et al." 18 In addition, this iconography is coupled with the always negative references to other South Slavs, consistently presented as having anti-Serb, anti-Yugoslav, and even inherently fascistic leanings. A number of scenes in the film purport to establish, in unambiguous terms, that ethnic inequality and animosity were the paramount forces at work in the former Yugoslavia. First, there are the montage sequences, consisting entirely of appropriated documentary footage and serving as historical reference points within the narrative. Particularly significant among those are the two sequences that (although placed at different points in ·the story) are directly related to each other through the choice of music used to accompany the images: in both cases it is the German song "Lili Marlene." The first of the two sequences uses World War Two footage of German troops entering Maribor, Slovenia, and Zagreb, Croatia, to show the crowds cheering and greeting the occupying force. These shots of the Nazis being welcomed in Maribor and Zagreb establish a clear contrast both with an earlier documentary sequence depicting Belgrade, Serbia, heavily destroyed by the German bombs, and with the subsequent footage of the German army entering the city: there are no people to greet them here, there is no one in the streets save for the heavily armed, weary occupier. The "message" embedded within this sequence could not possibly have been missed by "domestic" audiences-whether in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, or Bosnia. Its primary function is to cinematically empower the discourse on "Serb victimhood"-one of the pillars of Serb nationalist resentment ever since the late 198os-while discrediting other Yugoslav nations. The warm welcome of the Nazis in Croatia and Slovenia serves not only as explicit evidence of an anti-Yugoslav tendency, absent in Serbia, but also directly evokes the horrific ethnic extermination of the Serbs during the Second World War, in the Ustasha-ruled Nazi satellite, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). 19 And while the historical accuracy of the Ustasha crimes is by no means in question, the film all too easily identifies entire ethnic groups-Croats, Slovenes-with the genocidal policies of these radical nationalists and their supporters. For, in the context of the 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines-

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in the immediate aftermath of the conflict in Croatia, with the war in Bosnia still raging-Underground's documentary "reminder" about the ordinary, everyday Croats greeting the Nazis could hardly be seen as having any other effect but that of suggesting, as Stanko Cerovic notes, "a continuum of Croat fascism from World WarTwo to the present day" and, by extension, a continuum of the Serb national victimhood. 20 "I was against selective humanism," Kusturica said, explaining his unfavorable representation of the Croats in the film. "I cannot stand the ethnic cleansing by the Bosnian Serbs, bur neither can I stand the ethnic cleansing by the Croats." 21 Nonetheless, one would be hard-pressed to find any evidence in Underground-certainly not in the form of documentary footage-of the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbs to which Kusturica refers. Rather, as Cerovic has observed, as if in response to the filmmaker: "When dealing with the present war ... Kusturica refuses to use documentary footage-which might show, for example, the bombardment of Vukovar, or the three-year-long destruction of his native city by the Serbian army. Just so, he refuses to show pictures of the triumphalist farewell given in Belgrade to the Yugoslav army and its tanks as they went to wage war in Croatia and Bosnia against the literally unarmed people." 22 So much for Underground as a cinematic contribution to the critical discourse on selective humanism. The second montage sequence using "Lili Marlene" as its musical accompaniment relies on the song itself to transpose not only the emotional bur also the ideational core of the above-described sequence into a new diegetic context. The documentary footage now used is from 1980, the time of Josip Broz's death. Once again crowds are shown gathered in, the streets ofLjubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade, this time, however, not to greet anyone but to pay a last tribute to the deceased president. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of the formal strategies commonly employed by the 1960s New Film auteurs (notably Dusan Makavejev), the sequence juxtaposes sound and image: a song with Nazi resonances and visuals directly related to the foremost icon of Yugoslav socialism-Tito himself. The immediate associational effect thus produced is that of the "death of a dictator," but the musically established intratextuallink with the earlier sequence evocative of the past ethnic conflicts also aligns the Yugoslav "dictator" with the "anti-Serb coalition" led by the Croats and Slovenes.

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Finally, the same anti-Serb conspiracy is also the central concern of the fictional episode depicting a Communist Party cell meeting during the Second World War. A drunken, music-accompanied fight erupts once Blacky and Marko, the film's Serb protagonists, realize that their Communist Party comrades have been stealing the money intended for revolutionary purposes. Staged in openly ethnophobic terms, this betrayal of the common transnational goal is directly attributed to a Muslim and a Croat whose slick, well-groomed appearance and scheming ways give body and soul to the "anti-Serb coalition" seen here at work. In response Blacky and Marko use their fists to teach their "fellow" Yugoslavs a lesson about the repercussions of exploiting the Serbs. An apparent contradiction seems, then, to motivate the film's treatment of the interethnic relations in the former Yugoslavia. While the Serbs are viewed as the historically oppressed national group, 23 at the same time, those ethnicities that constitute the alleged anti-Serb coalition, those who "dominated" the federation-primarily Croatia and Slovenia (with Tito, himself a Croat, at the top)-are implied as in fact anti-Yugoslav in their leanings, as separatists ever ready to betray the common goal.2 4 In other words the practical existence of the Yugoslav state is presented as grounded in the oppression of the ethnic group held to be the only real, sincere proponent ofYugoslavism. The importance of what is at stake here needs to be emphasized. Underground, like When Father Was Away before it, identifies with Yugoslavism as a transethnic category, lying beyond all kinds of particularist interests. But it simultaneously-and this is a new moment in Kusturica's oeuvre-also critically evaluates this national ideal from a position of ethnic resentment. The film thus actually blurs the distinction between the transethnic and ethnocentric perspectives and ultimately renders the former a function of the latter. This "ideological blurring" is not at all unique to Kusturica's film but rather is a major characteristic of the broader sociocultural context in Serbia, within which Underground was produced. 25 Ever since the mid-198os, this seemingly contradictory tendency toward a simultaneous endorsement of Yugoslavism and an investment in ethnoparticularist interests has provided the formal coordinates of the Serb national program. Research of the political activities of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

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(SANU)-the institution most directly responsible for the ethnochauvinist ideas that provided the backbone of Slobodan MiloseviC's authoritarian populist movement-reveals, for example, that the vast majority of the academy's public statements and declarations are symptomatic of its being "torn between the pragmatic need to claim the necessity of the federative Yugoslavia's survival, and the primary desire to define its understanding of the Serb national interests." 26 Thus, in the academy's open letter to its Croatian counterpart (HAZU), produced in December of 1991, one reads that "Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia, have primarily negative, mostly tragic experiences from their common life with Croatia." In the same letter one also reads that Serbia "has advocated and still advocates the further existence and democratic transformation of the federative Yugoslav state, in which all national groups would, as before, live together. ... But this is precisely what Croatia and Slovenia do not want." 27 Similarly, the academy's infamous "Memorandum"-produced as early as 1986 and generally considered the single most important document that spawned the emergence of ethnonationalism as the dominant public discourse in Serbia-is characterized, in the words of political historian Olivera Milosavljevic, by the "contradictory explanations supposed to reconcile the two irreconcilable motifs-to explain the inefficiency and failures of the whole [Titoist] political system which, as such, must have oppressed all ofYugoslavia's national groups ... , and at the same time to prove the deadliness of such a system for the Serbs and Serbia only." 28 Milosavljevic points to a most telling illustration of this coexistence in the "Memorandum" of the two mutually exclusive tendencies. As an alternative to the Yugoslav political system in crisis, the academy proposes what it describes as a "democratic integrative federalism in which the principle of autonomous parts is reconciled with the principle of integration of parts into a unified whole ... [in which] decisionmaking is determined by the free, rational, public dialogue, and not by the opaque, 'top secret' combinatory of the self-proclaimed and autonomous protectors of the separate national interests." 29 At the same time, however, instituting the full national and cultural integrity for the Serbs, regardless of what republic or province they are in, is their historic and democratic right.

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Both the equality of rights, and the independent development have a deeper historical meaning for the Serbs .... If it is to count with its future in the family of the cultured and civilized peoples of the world, the Serb people must be given an opportunity to re-discover itself and become a historical subject, to acquire anew a consciousness of its historical and spiritual being, to clearly realize its economic and cultural interests, to establish a contemporary social and national program that will inspire the present and the future generations. 30 The academy's views of the Yugoslav national question are invoked here in order to point out to what extent Kusturica's Underground intersects with the mainstream nationalist ideological climate in Serbia during MiloseviC's reign. One of the peculiarities of this climate was that the official policies of the regime and its institutions were usually carried out in the name of this or that "Yugoslav" interest. Since, as Renata Salecl put it, "Yugoslavia" as such has always "functioned as a floating signifier, which each of its constitutive nations incorporated into their own political discourses in different ways," 31 it was possible for the national elite in Serbia to employ "Yugoslavia" as a facade for its ethnoexpansionist aspirations. What lay underneath-and as such held together-the variously articulated, and often seemingly contradictory, "Yugoslav" objectives contained within the Serb national program of the 1980s and 1990s (the surmise, as Salecl would have it, of this allegedly pro-Yugoslav ideological discourse, its "unspoken meaning ... which the addressee has to decipher from what has been said")3 2 was the ethnocentric phantasm of the Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, what in popular parlance became known as "Serbo-slavia." Precisely as such, this same ethnocentric perspective operates in Underground, where it serves as the fantasmatic support behind the film's own dissatisfaction with "weak Serbia'' as the historical condition of"strong Yugoslavia'' and its opposition to the "anti-Yugoslav" tendencies of other constitutive nations in the federation.

The Question of Responsibility In light of the above analysis it is also worth examining in some detail the way in which "Yugoslavism" qua pure, critical Ideal functions in the film as a referential point for the discourse on war responsibility. This

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Ideal is to be located-as already noted apropos the final scene of an island breaking away from the mainland-outside and above the ethnic hatreds that led to the violent breakup of the Yugoslav federation. From this detached and unbiased position an awareness can supposedly be gained that all parties involved in the contemporary Balkan wars (in Croatia and Bosnia) are to be held equally responsible for the ethnic crimes that have been committed. The function, for instance, ofBlacky's appearance in the 1990s as an army commander somewhere in the war zone is precisely to illustrate this point. When asked by a puzzled "blue helmet" (UN soldier) whether he is an Ustasha or a Chetnik (Croatian or Serbian nationalist), he responds that he is neither: he is waging his own war in the name of his homeland (the federative Yugoslavia), and his troops are committed to fighting the nationalist armies of all profiles. By itself-in an abstract sense, that is-this more than obvious insistence on the spirit of ethnic nonalignment is certainly welcome. Once again, however, given the immediate sociopolitical and cultural context in Serbia, the specific ideological function that this nonalignment has "linked" to itself at the time of Underground's release is not that simple after all. And given Kusturica's inclination to interpret Yugoslav history as a history of Serb subordination, it is difficult to see this function as merely a circumstantial by-product. By the mid-1990s the wars in the region had already been raging for three continuous years, and the international community's noninvolvement in the Bosnian slaughterhouse was becoming ever more questionable. This was also the time when just this approach-according to which "truth is always in the middle" and "all sides are guilty"-was increasingly acquiring the status of one of the key tropes of the Milosevic regime's cultural politics. What is more, with the intention of giving credibility to the preposterous claim that "Serbia is not involved in the war," and of affirming itself in the role of the Balkan peacemaker, the regime-above all the Yugoslav United Left (JUL), a highly influential political organization led by Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic-had for some time been strategically inducing and promoting in the arena of mass culture a war-distantiating atmosphere of "Yugo-nostalgia"-nostalgia for the "old," federative Yugoslavia. Hand in hand with the equally increasing insistence on drawing the clear line of separation between Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs (led by Radovan

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Karadiic), this "Yugo-nostalgia" in fact fostered a seemingly impartial relativization of the discourse on war responsibility. The transformation of the discourse on responsibility in 1990s Serbia-to the cultural rooting of which, one could say, Underground made its own, aesthetically impressive contribution-involved, then, a movement from exclusively "blaming the other" (concrete ethnic others, such as Muslims, Croats, Slovenes) to "blaming all"-proclaiming, much more vaguely, that everyone involved in the war should be considered guilty (the claim that, in the final analysis, comes down to the correct, but by itself incomplete and insufficient, statement that "war is a terrible thing"). Such an "evolution" of the question of responsibility within the sociopolitical context of the Milosevic-ruled Serbia, such a straightforward shift from an openly aggressive form of "the ethnic other is guilty" to the more neutral, impersonal, and plural form of"all (parties involved) are guilty" seems, however, structurally possible only through omission or repression of a "middle" stage linking the two: a stage representative of some sort of collectivist experience of one's I "our" own responsibility (moral, of course). 33 As if the impersonal, ambiguous form of "everyone is guilty" has come to serve as a cover for the fact that, through a kind of cultural regression, "the other is guilty" has been overcome by "we"-the subject understood in ethnocollectivist terms-"are guilty." What is at stake here is no mere explication of the "proper" yet excluded form of the discourse on responsibility nor a simplistic attempt to publicly assert, or even impose, guilt as a collective category. Rather, my intention is to emphasize the specific form of simulation of a sociocultural transformation in Serbia: the supposed movement away from the militant ethnochauvinism was achieved by means of an arrogant instant-relativization of war crimes. 34 In other words, by refusing to openly confront responsibility within its own ranks, the Serb national elite-MiloseviC's ruling structure but also its nationalist opposition-in foct made this disavowed sense ofguilt operative as no less than the ultimate libidinal support of ethnonationalist collectivism, its "obscene superego supplement," as Zizek would have it. 35 This is why it is also true that by choosing the path of superficial relativism-by outlining the terms of an entirely evenly distributed, and as such generalized interethnic responsibility for the contemporary

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Yugoslav wars-many a cultural artifact made in Serbia in the latter half of the 1990s had, in fact, contributed (if only indirectly and not deliberately so) to the longevity of the Milosevic regime. The existence of this regime significantly (although not exclusively) depended precisely on maintaining a high level of nonintrospective ethnopatriotism among its subjects. 36 1his certainly is the case with Underground and its implication, as Kusturica himself summarized it, that war is in the Balkans a "natural" phenomenon, like an "earthquake." 37 So, when Kusturica-thinking, doubtless, of his incessant choreographies of libidinal expenditure-describes Underground as staging a "prolonged" or "deferred suicide," 38 one feels like responding that the only suicide that is being deferred here is, in fact, the praiseworthy symbolic suicide of ethnonationalism in Serbia. The film's "Yugoslavism"grounded in excessive, uncontrolled dissipation of energy-is, similarly, a mere perversion ofYugoslavism: a false offering of instinctual freedom from a perspective in line with repressive nationalism; an ideologically productive form of relief (a "never-ending catharsis," Kusturica would claim) 39 from the traumatic experience of ethnocollectivist guilt, increasingly employed in the second half of the 1990s by the Serbian authorities, as the invisible foundation of national coherence. Marcuse once named this type of social dynamic "institutionalized desublimation."40 In this light it further needs to be pointed out that the parallel between Kusturica's conception of Yugoslavism in Underground and the aforementioned work of Mirjana MarkoviC's Yugoslav United Left (JUL) on promoting Yugo-nostalgia, itself also involves a correspondence between the film's visual economy and the function performed by MarkoviC's organization within the political economy of her husband's regime. What the two have in common is precisely the principle of excessive, antirational expenditure. Just as one may speak of Kusturica's free, uncontrolled dissipation of energy in the realm of cinematic form, so, too, one may speak, as political anthropologist Ivan Colovic does, of that aspect of Slobodan MiloseviC's rule that involves "spending political property" in a manner that is "by its nature non-productive"-spending political capital "without a return, for the sake of spending only." "If such a pleasurable, spending-oriented 'use' of political power is kept in mind," asserts Colovic, "it becomes possible to understand MarkoviC's

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numerous extravagant political, literary, socio-cultural, etc., activities as the key forms of non-productive, wasteful, yet, from the owner's perspective, highly satisfying expenditure of political wealth. . . . The president of Serbia obviously derived pleasure from watching his wife spend his political property."41 This link between the two kinds of nonproductive expenditure allows one to draw some conclusions about the relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the work of Emir Kusturica. In the 1980s the death ofTito provided the key contextual stimulus for the director's cinema of uncontrolled libidinal flow. His staging of unbound enjoyment erupting into the social sphere was an artistic reaction against sociopolitical reification and authoritarianism, a progressive call for the expansion of transethnic Yugoslavism along the lines of persistent destabilization of identity. By the 1990s, however, the dominant, even official, use of the "Yugoslavist" ideal in Serbia (where the filmmaker worked during this decade) was as a fa.;:ade for ethnic resentment and hegemonic aspirations of MiloseviC's power structure. Kusturica himself succumbed to such an understanding of Yugoslavism and in the process transformed his aesthetic of the sociopolitically inassimilable energetic outpour into an ethnocentrically motivated, quasi-transgressive aestheticization of collectivist enjoyment. With Underground he thus actually affirmatively responded (even though this response was not a programmatic one) to the tendency ofMiloseviC's regime itself, toward engaging excessive social, cultural, and economic expenditure as a politically useful means of perpetuating the repressive status quo and preventing a cathartic critique of nationalist ecstasy from taking place. The impulse toward radical social liberation, inherent in the aesthetic of the genitofugallibido, was thus exorcised in the name of what in the final instance amounts to the promotion of the self-gratifying tendencies of a centripetally oriented, closed community.

Enjoyment as Danse Macabre In 1993, a couple of years before Kusturica's "magnum opus" would be released, Oleg Novkovic's first feature, Say Why You Left Me, put forth a very different model of comprehending the ideological functions of

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collectivist ecstasy (fig. 3.6). In this film-named after a sad, traditional Serbian song-the alcohol- and drug-induced orgies of music and dance, taking place in Belgrade nightclubs, are directly juxtaposed with an otherwise overwhelmingly depressing, pessimistic, and morbid picture of the Serbian capital. Novkovic depicts group euphoria as a kind of danse macabre, which the film's main protagonist, Pedja-himself a onetime regular at the club parties-can no longer appreciate after having spent some time fighting in Croatia, where he witnessed mass destruction, rape, and death, including that of his close friend, Ljuba. The film's critical stance vis-a-vis collectivist organization of enjoyment unfolds through its portrayal of tension and animosity between Pedja and his other close friend, Marko, who avoided being sent to the war and still regularly spends time in the nightclubs (which seem to have become his natural habitat). Pedja returns from the war an entirely changed man. He does not speak much, except to relate his obsession with Vera, a girl whose raping he had witnessed at the front line and whom he has recently seen again in the city. His lack of interest for his prewar girlfriend (Marko's sister), or for Marko himself, is occasionally transformed into mostly silent, gestura! expressions of near-contempt for his friend's incessant indulgence in mind-numbing entertainment at the time when a few hundred kilometers away a full-blown battle is being waged.

FIGURE 3.6

Say Why You Left Me (Oleg Novkovic, 1993)

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The exact motives behind Pedja's objections are initially left unspecified. Is he being critical of Marko's lack of pacifist awareness/activism or, rather, of his lack of militant patriotism? For his part, Marko is a character without a strong moral grounding. He does not at all believe in the war, but that does not prevent him from getting rich (in some unidentified, although, one assumes, not very honest, way) "while others are rolling in the mud," as he himself puts it. But Marko also knows very well that, despite everything he may be criticized for, one thing he is not: a murderer. At the end of the film, it is precisely this argument that he uses to verbally attack Pedja, before he, ironically, kills him. Marko (to Pedja): "You have no right to look at me that way! What you did there [in the war] was neither good nor noble. You killed people! I did not."

The significance of these words cannot be overlooked. Marko's reply to Pedja makes it clear that the film's critique is aimed both at the armed conflict in Croatia ("Pedja") and the seemingly apolitical forms of collective pleasure seeking ("Marko") taking place in Belgrade/Serbia, the territory outside the immediate war zone and, therefore, supposedly not directly affected by the conflict. For the two, the bloodshed at the front line and the (drunken) dance party in the background are, after all, two sides of the same coin. The latter operates like a cushion, like an anesthetic, for the crimes and the pains induced by the former. By the film's end the two-violence and death, on the one hand, and the irresponsible, escapist pleasure seeking, on the other hand-seem to have symbolically merged into one and the same character: Marko, the partygoer turned murderer of his best friend. Novkovic employs cinema as a mortuary instrument, transforming the urban landscape of Belgrade into a monumental piece of funerary architecture. Substantial portions of Say Why You Left Me take place at a Belgrade graveyard, where rows of crosses and gravestones stretch as far as the eye can see, and funeral processions never seem to end. It is here that the romance begins to develop between Pedja and Vera, a refugee from Croatia. Numerous scenes are also set in the empty, sparsely lit city streets, ominous dark passages, or worn-out buildings. These locations are, in turn, occasionally ornamented with such "accidental" visual details as a dead driver leaning against the wheel of his car in the middle

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of an empty road, a solitary drunkard celebrating the arrival of the New Year, and a senile old lady deliriously singing about the heroic past of the Serb army. The tragic scene depicting the death of Zarko-a soldier whom Pedja befriended in the war-similarly takes place in a cheap bar located in the dirty, dilapidated Karadjordjeva street (not coincidentally, a location also dear to that foremost "poet of the disgusting," Zivojin Pavlovic). It finds the two desperate men, unable to see any further purpose to their existence, playing a dangerous game of billiards with a hand grenade until Zarko, resolved to put an end to his agony, grabs the bomb and, having ordered Pedja to leave, blows himself and the rest of the bar up. On the film's release, Novkovic's diagnosis of the rapidly decaying cultural and ethical fabric in 1990s Serbia went largely unnoticed-it neither attracted the kind of critical attention it deserved, nor did it have a particularly successful run in the movie theaters. It was as if, having painted its ominous picture of Belgrade as a hopelessly sinking place, Say Why You Left Me itself "got lost" amidst the sweeping social anomie it so accurately reflected, somewhere between the ignoble warmongering of the nationalist authorities (who had recently shifted their attention from Croatia to Bosnia) and the seemingly unstoppable, economically devastating hyperinflation caused by the internationally imposed trade embargo against Serbia.

4 Hatred Explained, Hatred Legitimized

and, practically from the outset, tragic events of the 1990s brought about inevitable and substantial changes to the modes of film production in the Yugoslav lands. As a consequence of the federation's falling apart, there emerged in the place of one (albeit decentralized or multicentered) film industry a number of smaller national cinemas (Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, etc.), which were faced with the task of reorganizing their financially frequently troubled systems of film producing, typically stretched between government sponsorship (through the Ministries of Culture or state television) and the developing networks of private media companies. While the 1980s witnessed a significant decline in the production of Partisan films, in the 1990s, as a consequence of the new armed conflicts, the war genre once again came into the spotlight, especially in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Given that the Bosnian war, including the siege of Sarajevo, lasted until 1995, feature films did not really begin to be made in this former Yugoslav republic until the second half of the decade. A number of powerful documentaries, however, were produced during and in the immediate aftermath of the war, including Ademir KenoviC's Confessions ofa Monster (1992), Srdjan VuletiC's I Burnt Legs (1993), Pjer Zalica's Children Like Any Other (1995), Danis TanoviC's L'Aube (1996), and Jasmila Zbanic's After, After (1997). Many of these THE DRASTIC

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were made under the auspices of SAGA (Sarajevo Group of Authors), a collective of filmmakers, artists, and writers committed to creating an extensive chronicle of life under the most inhuman circumstances. Because of the nature of the contemporary Yugoslav conflictsnamely, the fact that they affected, in the most grizzly manner, first and foremost, the civilian population-a relatively small number of films were made that neatly fit the category of war film in the "narrow" sense of the term: combat and action films, properly speaking; these include Srdjan DragojeviC's Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, Muhamed Hadzimehmedovic's television dramas After the Battle and The Shooter, both made in 1997, and Stjepan Sabljak's Surrounded. Rather, like Underground and Say Why You Left Me, the vast majority of the 1990s war films from the region tend to mix a certain amount of combat scenes with lengthy depictions of civilian suffering. Such is the case, for instance, with works as diverse as Zivojin PavloviC's Dostoevsky-inspired, Deserter (1992)-one of the earliest films made on the subject of the Croatian war and also the last work completed by this veteran of the 1960s black wave; Boro Draskovic's Vukovar poste restante (1994) and Branko Schmidt's Vukovar Comes Home (1994)-two films-one Serbian, the other Croatian-with ideologically opposed perspectives on the horrific destruction of this Croatian town; and GorCin StojanoviC's Premeditated Murder (1995), which views Yugoslav wars in terms of the rather problematic opposition between urban pacifism and rural intolerance and warmongering. The theme of the returning soldiers' war traumas, and their difficulties in readjusting to civilian life, has also been explored by a number of filmmakers. Besides NovkoviC's already discussed Say Why You Left Me, Zrinko Ogresta's Red Dust (1999) skillfully addressed this topic, as did Jelena RajkoviC's A Night for Listening (1995). Rajkovic is significant as one of the central figures of the Young Croatian Film, a refreshing tendency developed in the mid-1990s by the newly emerging generation of filmmakers, including Go ran Dukic (Mirta Is Studying Statistics, 1991), Lukas Nola (Russian Meat, 1997), Hrvoje Hribar (A Rifle for Sleeping, 1997), and Vinko Brdan (How the War Started on My Island, 1996). What brought these young authors together (at the time many of them were still film students at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts) was their shared eagerness to rescue Croatian cinema from its pronounced

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involvement with the narrow propagandist interests of the state. As film historian Ivo Skrabalo points out, Lukas Nola's words-that his is the generation that "had its war stolen"-are frequently cited as capturing the gist of the group's overall critical attitude toward the sociocultural leadership of their elders.' Since 1996, an independent documentary filmmakers' cooperative has also been active in Croatia: the FACTUM film project. Led by Nenad Puhovski, a veteran of (formerly) Yugoslav documentary cinema, FACTUM brought together representatives of different generations of socially engaged directors interested in issues of cultural and political anthropology, human rights, and ethnic relations and reconciliation: from Sasa Podgorelec (EBB, 1998) to Rajko Grlic (Drinking Water and Freedom, 1999; Croatia 2000: A Winter to Remember, codirected, in 2001, with Igor Mirkovic), to Zvonimir Juric Uuric: Fortress, 1999). In Serbia, during the 1990s' reign of Slobodan Milosevic, Radio B-92-a Bel gradebased media network-established itself as a prolific appositional cultural center. B-92 produced many short, medium, even feature-length video works, both fictional and documentary, including Zelimir Zilnik's Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time (1994) and Marble Ass (1995), and Janko Baljak's 1he Crime 1hat Changed Serbia (1995), a prime work of cinematic urban anthropology, concerned with the preponderance of organized crime in Serbia. 2 Finally, among the "Prague school" filmmakers who, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, were central in defining the spirit of modern Yugoslav cinema, by far the most prolific in the 1990s was Goran PaskaljeviC with four films: 1he Time ofMiracles (1990), Tango Argentina (1992), Someone Else's America (1995), and Cabaret Balkan (1998). In 1992 Goran Markovic made Tito and I, a humorous reflection on the 1950s, notable for the filmmaker's ability to parody the personality cult ofJosip Broz Tito, without engaging the, by this time prevalent, vulgarly anticommunist rhetoric of ethnic nationalism. In 1993 Lordan Zafranovic made Testament: Decline ofthe Century, an epic-length documentary employing vast amounts of archival footage, in which he undertook the ambitious task of simultaneously critically analyzing Croatian history and tracing his own artistic and intellectual evolution. Strongly condemning the World War Two-era genocidal policies of the fascist Independent

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State of Croatia/NDH (the film includes some authentic footage from the 1986 trial of Andrija Artukovic, a war criminal and a former NDH minister), Testament appeared at the time when the upsurge of Croatian nationalism and the popularity of the idea of national "reconciliation"-widely promoted by president Franjo Tudjman-prohibited its critical voice from being openly heard in the country for a number of years. The film was publicly screened for the first time only after the rule of Tudjman's party, the Croatian Democratic Union (CDU), had (temporarily) ended. 3

"Inevitable Wars" Stupidity is always contemporary.

Gyorgy Konrad The natural is never an attribute of physical Nature; it is the alibi paraded by a social majority: the natural is a legality.

Roland Barthes

As an expression of the causes behind the reality of ethnic hatred in the former Yugoslavia, Kusturica's earlier discussed, morbidly poetic version of "balkanism" 4-his vision of the region as susceptible to frequent sociotectonic disasters-is but one among the many similarly teleological explanations offered throughout the 1990s by the culture industries in the region. Approaching the Yugoslav fratricide from a variety of angles, these explanations range from the most vulgar, quasi-scientific ones (the Serb extremist thesis that Croats are "genetically genocidal" or, its Croat counterpart, that Serbs are "collectively frustrated" and "committed to killing") to the mythomanic ones (the conflict in the Balkans is a transtemporal struggle of mythic proportions, grounded in the irrationality of the people inhabiting the region) to the historicist-determinist ones (Serbs and Croats, Serbs and Albanians, etc., have always fought against each other and they always will-the current wars are just the latest installment of a never-ending process). With often strikingly different levels of aesthetic sophistication, many of these "historiographies" have also been given a distinctly cine-

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matic form. Thus, on the one hand, in the visually lavish, internationally acclaimed Macedonian production Before the Rain (1994), director Milco Mancevski finds ethnic tensions between Albanians and Macedonians to be (not unlike in Kusturica's work) almost transhistorical, driven by the ancient Balkan passions. As the filmmaker himself put it: "If you take out the machine guns, the leather jackets, the Nike shoes, and the Adidas shirts, this same clash could be taking place 200 years ago." 5 The film particularly foregrounds the mythical dimension of the conflict it depicts through its circular narrative structure and through the juxtaposition it establishes between the secluded, traditional village life in the hills of Macedonia and the economically developed and safe, but dull and emotionally unfulfilling, Western world. On the other hand, Neven Hitrec's Virgin Mary (1999), a work coming out of the wave ofYoung Croatian Film, offers a collective portrait of the entire Serb ethnos as drunken wild beasts who, under favorable conditions, do not fail to turn to their primal desire to slaughter and rape. In a similar vein Bogdan ZiZiC's 1he Price ofLife (1994) opts for a semiexplicit condemnation of ethnic miscegenation. The protagonist, Ivan-a Croat escaped from a Serb work camp in the vicinity of the town of Vukovar (the town became the foremost symbol of senseless destruction during the Croatian war)-kills the sadistic Serb paramilitary whose Croat wife has helped him in hiding. Ivan also becomes the surrogate father to the woman's son, thus securing the "proper" paternal authority for the child of a mixed-and, therefore, "troublesome"-ethnic origin (Croat mother, Serb father). Two films, one Serbian and one Croatian, stand out among the lot in their particularly blatant promotion of ethnophobia and their most explicit investment in nationalist hatred as a natural and justifiable phenomenon. Offering clear, unmistakable evidence of the extremely retrograde cultural and ethical values that ethnic chauvinism is capable of generating, the two are worthy of a somewhat lengthier consideration. Despite the fact that they come from the diametrically opposed ends of the nationalist ideological spectrum, Miroslav LekiC's Knife and Jakov Sedlar's Four by Four have a number of traits in common. Both are expensive, state-sponsored films made in 1999, during the final or the near-final stages of two authoritarian regimes: Slobodan MiloseviC's in

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Serbia and Franjo Tudjman's in Croatia. Both are also based on novels of dubious literary but undisputable nationalist-propagandistic "value": Knife, by Vuk Draskovic, a longtime populist oppositionalleader who, at the time when the status of his work as a "classic" of Serbian literature was being cemented by its adaptation for the big screen, was also reaching the peak of his political career as a parliamentary official inside the Milosevic establishment; and Four by Four, by lvan Aralica, whose rise as a great Croatian man of letters was purely the function of his shameless promotion of ethnic hatred (especially toward the Muslims) and his tasteless eulogies for President Tudjman and his ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Union. 6 Most important, both LekiC's and Sedlar's works are, each in its own way, revisionist films. DraskoviC's novel, published in 1982 to much controversy, is replete with Serb chauvinist ideas and fictional events that openly provoke hatred toward other South Slavs, Bosnian Muslims in particular. It opens in 1942, with a bestial Muslim massacre of a Serb family, all of whom are programmatically depicted as saintly, self-sacrificing people. The book repeatedly makes the claim that the Serb victims of the interethnic slaughter that took place during World War Two have not been properly avenged and, in a blatantly offensive manner, assigns paramount importance to the notion that, regardless of their present cultural and religious identity, all Bosnian Muslims are, in fact, fundamentally Serbs-Islamicized Serbs and their descendants? In adapting DraskoviC's novel to the screen, Lekic was, in his own words, entirely aware of all the labels it has acquired over time: that, having fueled an enormous amount of negative passions, this writing was almost considered to have caused the war in Bosnia; that it was even qualified as one of the guilty parties in it. Reading it anew, after all that has happened to us, I was captured, instantaneously, by its strongly foregrounded anti-war message .... It is really consternating that in 1982, when the book was published, we could neither see nor hear, intuit if not recognize, what Knift was already then clearly announcing as inevitable. 8 Revisionism of Lekic's Knife stems from its author's decision to act on this "recognition." He cinematically acquits Dra5kovic's prose of the earlier charge of being hatred-provoking and instead reevaluates it as some-

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how prophetic. To emphasize its "visionary" foretelling of the contemporary bloodshed, the director and his coscreenwriter lgor Bojovic modified, with Dra5koviC's consent, the novel's original ending. The film concludes in 1993, in war-torn Herzegovina, with one of the central protagonists, Sikter Efendy-the voice of wisdom throughout the narrative----cursing at Muslims and Serbs for continuing with their eternal fighting. A paramount example of the 198os wave of Serbian nationalist-populist literature, a novel that initially helped create the ethnophobic anti-Yugoslav cultural atmosphere, was thus reinterpreted in the late 1990s as having, in fact, wisely forewarned of the grim reality that lay underneath the blinding "illusion" of multiethnic happiness. Jakov Sedlar's Four by Four (fig. 4.1) has, on the other hand, been described by its critics as "the first film depicting the Second World War from the perspective of the Axis powers, in which positive characters are members of the quisling forces, while the negative ones, the ' bad guys,' are members of the Allied armies, the cynical representatives of the Anglo-American plutocracy, the savage Russo-Asian Huns, or the Balkan slaughterers and rapists." 9 1he film is an epic about the May 1945 bloody finale of the fascist NDH regime, during which not only hundreds of Ustasha and Croatian Home Army soldiers, but also civilians,

FIGURE 4.1 Fou r

by Four (Jakov Sedlar, 1999)

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were executed by the Partisans at the Bleiburg Field while attempting to flee to Austria. Funded by Tudjman's regime, Sedlar produced a grotesque piece of political propaganda in which he set out not only to rescue the Bleiburg massacre from the oblivion into which it was pushed by the Yugoslav socialist historiography but also to interpret the past in such a way that, after years of what in populist national discourse came to be known as the "Croatian silence," the epilogue to a vicious fascist regime could be reinstated as a major collective tragedy of the entire ethnos, the Croatian "way of the cross." Thus, Sedlar cinematically tells a story about "ustashism with a human face." 10 The vast majority of those who died at Bleiburg are presented as ordinary civilians unable to escape the Serbo-Communist menace. Only some among them are the militantly nationalist Ustashas, and of those, even fewer are war criminals. Everyone is, however, equally patriotic, in love with the nation and proud of its independence. Unlike these well-cultured, elegant, and sophisticated Croats, the bloodthirsty Partisans are, on the other hand, portrayed as primitive, dirty, ugly, and, for the most part, psychologically disturbed. Not surprisingly, they are mostly Serbs from the various regions of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, who sadistically and systematically torture their captives. When the men brutally rape some beautiful Croatian girls, the sexually frustrated Partisan women gun the girls down out of sheer jealousy. All in all, Four by Four stands as one of the most explicit cultural symptoms of a troublesome sociopolitical initiative in Croatia-encouraged by the Tudjman regime-through which, as Dubravka Ugre5ic put it, the right to reclaim their confiscated memory was extended to those who lost the Second World War, the ageing political emigres, the Ustashas, collaborators with the Pavelic regime [NDH], the occasional guard in Croatian concentration camps, the occasional minister in PaveliC's government .... The new authorities are rapidly working on the design of the new Croatian state. By all accounts they intend to shape Croatia into a state of interrupted historical continuity (that famous historical continuity was, presumably, interrupted by the communists and the Serbs). Hence the connection with the four-year fascist Independent State of Croatia is presumably felt to be more natural than the lengthy connection with communist Yugoslavia. 11

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The appearance of Four by Four, however, also gave rise to some strong negative reactions: bricks were thrown at the director's house, and, citing the Croatian constitution, another filmmaker allegedly sought to sue Sedlar for spreading racial hatred and intolerance. 12 As a consequence, the two-installment television premiere of this three-and-a-halfhour-long epic-scheduled, in an unheard of manner, only two weeks after the film had opened in theaters (as a boost to the CDU's election campaign)-was aborted halfway.

War Veteran as Filmmaker Despite numerous differences in content, style, and perspective, in the majority of the above-mentioned films one discerns a tendency to succumb to "political hysteria'' and to assert ethnic strife as something inevitable-something that could not but have taken place. 13 In so doing, these films either downplay, deliberately obfuscate, or at the very least overlook one key aspect of the contemporary nationalism's ontogenesis. As Dennison Rusinow put it in an essay suggestively entitled "The Avoidable Catastrophe": "[T]he magnitude of hatreds released and the inhuman brutality of the violence are comprehensible only as the results of deliberate incitement and exploitation, by the ... politicians, of historical or personal memories of ancient and recent wrongs and stereotypes that a Bosnian Serb, speaking for her own nation, calls 'things [that] slumbered in the hearts of many Serbs, but it took an industry of hate to revive them.'" 14 What the majority of attempts to cinematically examine the sources of phobic ethnoessentialism in the region fail to take into account is, then, the extent to which the 1980s and I99os nationalism originated as an instrument of power in the hands of the political and cultural elites: as an ideological-discursive framework introduced into the everyday reality of the peoples whose lives it then began to govern. In other words, the proper causes of the widespread ethnic hatred in the formerly Yugoslav lands lie, above all else, in successful naturalization and legitimation (accomplished, among other things, by recourse to various teleological historicist explanations and mythic narratives of origin) of the political artifact that

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this hatred initially was. Perhaps no one has expressed this line of thinking about the collapse of the federation in terms more straightforward (yet painfully accurate) than UgrdiC: War is an organized, collective criminal activity waged by chieftains, leaders, and warriors for very tangible things: for political power, for territory, for this or that kind of profit.... And since the crazed majority cannot be condemned, the criminality of war is wrapped in a package of reasons, causes and arguments, into something "comprehensible" to all. ... Thus the criminal madness of the minority, which passed skill fully through the so-called institutions of the will ofthe people, becomes as a result our "common destiny," "the destiny of the people," an "historic moment" and so onY In light of the above, one of the most peculiar cinematic treatments of the ideological mechanisms operative behind the ethnic warfare among the South Slavs is found in Stjepan Sabljak's 1999 work Surrounded. Properly speaking, this amateur video production-made for a mere ten thousand German marks by an entirely nonprofessional crew and cast, comprising veterans of the Croatian war (a number of them, including Sabljak himself, also invalids)-is in fact characterized by a complete absence of interest in the causes of ethnic hatred. Surrounded tells the story of four Croat soldiers, prisoners of war, who escape from the Serb work camp "Pjdcara'' and fight their way through enemy territory. It is a combat film concerned only with fulfilling its generic responsibility: that of being, as its advertising slogan put it, "the first Croatian amateur action film!" So deep is its investment in the numerous combat sequences that, despite its clear allegiance with the protagonists-whereas their Serb opponents are presented (literally) as bloodthirsty imbeciles-the film's rudimentary, underdeveloped narrative seems at times entirely content with the "enlightened" nationalist vulgarism: just as for the Croats, the terms Serbs and Chetniks (Serb nationalist paramilitaries) are practically interchangeable, so, too, for the Serbs, all Croats probably seem like Ustashas (Croat nationalist extremists). Unlike Before the Rain or Underground or even Virgin Mary, all of which-in their own, different ways-find relevance in hinting, at the very least, at the causes of ethnic hatred in the region, Surrounded adopts this hatred as an unquestionable, natural fact, as something that is, quite simply, a contemporary given.

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What complicates matters in this respect, however, and ultimately delegitimizes the film's axiomatic endorsement of nationalist intolerance, is its self-acknowledged amateurism ( which did not prevent it from receiving the Croatian film critics' "Oktavijan" award). 16 This amateurism, both technical and aesthetic, has as its major consequence the film's hilariously comical inability to conceal the evidence of its own production process (fig. 4-2). Costumes and makeup are overexaggerated (for the trademark long, unkempt hair, Chetnik characters wear what are unmistakably cheap wigs), characters are one-dimensional, and performances by the nonprofessional cast are painfully self-conscious and unnatural. Dialogues sound artificial, and their primary function is to clarify the characters' often incoherent actions to the viewer. Most interestingly, performers deliver their lines as if they need to explain their own decisions and actions to themselves as well. In short, far from being self-effacing, Surrounded's narrational mode is so obviously dilettantish that it cannot hide the traces of its own construction and is thus unable to naturalize its diegesis about the escaped Croat soldiers. Instead, it enriches the film with a dimension of reflexivity. A fictional narrative about the battles between the Croats and the Serbs, Surrounded is simultaneously a "documentary" about the making, about the cominginto-being, of its own diegesis. In other words, the film's reflexive turn consists in persistently making the viewer aware that the story does not merely evolve "by itself" but only because someone-namely, the film's performers/characters-has taken it upon themselves to make this story happen, to realize it. In this sense it can even be said that Surrounded articulates a unique cinematic equivalent of the theoretical insight described by Ziiek: "Whatever we do, we always situate it in a larger symbolic context which is charged with conferring meaning upon our acts." However, "such narratives are always retroactive reconstructions for which we are in a FIGURE 4.2 Surrounded (Stjepan Sabljak, way responsible; they are never 1999)

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simple given facts: we can never refer to them as a found condition, context, or presupposition of our activity. Precisely as presuppositions, such narratives are always-already 'posited' by us." 17 This reflexive insight also has a profound impact on the way the film's nationalist ideology comes across on the screen. Insofar as ethnic hatred is a crucial component of Surrounded's diegetic world, when passed through the film's prism of reflexivity, it, paradoxically, reveals itself as an aspect of the content premeditated, and then performed, enacted, by the very protagonists/performers who are themselves also part of this content. In other words, what was initially conceived by Sabljak's film as an unquestionable, preexisting social framework, a "law" of intolerance between Croats and Serbs, has-in the process of its imperfect/amateur cinematic realization-been led to yield a valuable critical by-product. For an ideology (ethnonationalist, or any other for that matter) to be operative, it has to conceal the fact that, as Alenka ZupanCic succinctly put it, "the law is not always-already there, waiting for the subject to submit herself to it: it is this very submission ... which constitutes the law." 18 Yet it is exactly this constitution-through-submission of nationalist ideology, that various ethnoearthquakes, historico-genetically determined national types, and other retroactively discovered "preexisting causes" of the Yugoslav breakup tend to obliterate. In contrast to those films in which such explanations are found, and despite, or rather precisely because of, its shamelessly ethnophobic attitude, Surrounded incites one to contemplate the contemporary outbreak of nationalism in the region in different terms: perhaps there is no agency behind these conflicts other than the ideologicalforce ofnationalism itself-other than nationalism as a present-day sociopolitical event orchestrated and lived by its perpetrators, propagators, actors, executioners, and fellow travelers.

Collective Belief An essential component of the 1990s ethnocollectivism in the formerly Yugoslav lands is what sociology terms "profane religiosity"described by Stjepan Gredelj as "religious in form, but profane in content."19 The object of adoration that is at stake here may be "the heroic

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past, history, tradition, culture, state, class, nation, the leader, the race, family, . . . but also the more mundane public idols from the, after all, benign world of mass entertainment." Profane religiosity is, this author further explains, "uniquely generated ... amidst certain irregular activities, dramatic events, crises, which request that they be overcome, whereas the individual is neither capable of using rational means to reflect upon those nor to resolve them. Participation in collective rituals and ceremonies, the (ir)rational substitutes for rational reflection and effective action, acquires a socializing and integrative function because it involves states soaked in the mystical dreams about the all-encompassing One." 20 The central structuring function that an intersubjectively shared belief performs in the collectivist sociocultural rituals of this type needs to be emphasized. Rastko Mocnik explains this dynamic by recourse to the theoretical category of the "subject supposed to believe." Derived from the Lacanian notion of the subject supposed to know (in the psychoanalytic situation, the analyst, whose presumed knowledge of the truth of the analysand's desire grants consistency and meaning to the latter's discourse), the "subject supposed to believe" is defined as an abstract subject whose presupposed belief-in the "national thing," for instance-makes possible all other subjects' belief in that "thing." "In nationally constituted societies," writes Mocnik, "communicational identification with the subject supposed to believe is mediated by 'national identity,' an abstract indicator of the 'social position' of those who are communicating, and of the general matrix of their conceptual schemas." 21 With respect to the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav societies, the functioning of the "subject supposed to believe" may be illustrated with a few examples. By the early 1990s, anti-Titoist sentiments were definitely no longer considered anathema in the region. This, however, does not necessarily mean that the aura of his authority-insofar as it involves some point of symbolic identification, from which this authority is perceived almost as a physical property ofTito himself-thereby entirely ceased to exercise an effect on its (former) subjects. This point is clearly illustrated by Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time, an unusual documentary made in 1994 by Zelimir Zilnik. In the film an actor posing as Tito walks the streets of Belgrade, initiates discussion with the random passers-by, and in the process elicits

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the most diverse reactions from them (fig. 4.3). One woman tells "Tito": "I cried after you [died], and now I regret it bitterly." A man says: "You know what, Comrade Tito? You're a Croat, I'm a Serb, but I always respected you the most." Then he also adds: "You made a mistake by not choosing Milosevic to replace you." Another man sadly concludes: "You died too early. Too early." But still another angrily proclaims: "We should have hung you." An older man refuses to talk to "Tito" because "this is all your fault," but another recalls that "I built a house during Tiro's rule. Now I cannot build a pigsty." One passer-by even accuses Tito of being a Freemason, who made arrangements with the Pope (for the Vatican is the supposed center of Freemasonry) for where and how he should be buried (" ... and why is there no star engraved on your tomb?"). Commenting on this diversity of opinions evident in the film (as "Tito" himself concludes in the end: "The people are not united!"), art critic Dejan Sretenovic emphasizes the following: "When the actor imitating Josip Broz in Zelimir Zilnik's film Tito for the Second Time Among the Serbs appears on the streets of Belgrade wearing the Marshall's uniform, we realize by the reactions of the people that Titoism has not yet been politically or emotionally worn out to such an extent as to no longer participate in the structuring of the Yugoslav reality." 22 And what is

FIGURE 4.3

Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time (Zelimir Zilnik, 1994)

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particularly interesting in this regard is the fact that all those whom the fake Tito encounters during his walk around Belgrade treat him-the actor posing as Tito-as ifhe were indeed Tito himself In other words, it is the accidental street "audiences" who themselves make it possible for the performer to successfully pass for Josip Broz. The crucial implication of such a performative dynamic between "the ruler and his subjects" (to put it abstractly) concerns specific mechanisms ofideological interpellation. By the early 1990s, Tito may have been demoted from the foremost, untouchable national idol to the status of heavily criticized and/or hated authoritarian-that is, from a "good" to a "bad" object. Yet what is revealed by his (staged) appearance in just this changed context (permeated by criticism, bitterness, and hatred aimed at his figure) is that Tito's authority never really was exclusively the product of an "external imposition." Besides being built "from the outside" as it were, by the apparatus of the socialist state, this authority also included a strong "internal dimension"-its effectiveness was to a significant extent enhanced by its subjects' self-submission to it. If this were not the case, after his "fall from grace" would Tito, while intermingling with the "ordinary folk"-his former subjects-still be treated by so many of them as if he still possessed the kind of "symbolic power" he had commanded in the past, when he was considered the all-powerful One? Now the fact that one may never have willingly granted Tito his authority, that one may never have really believed in his absolute superiority, does not change a thing in this respect. Likewise, nothing is changed by the fact that, among the passers-by in Zilnik's film-those who behave as if they did encounter the real Josip Broz-it is highly unlikely that anyone actually believes this to be the case. From the standpoint of ideological interpellation, the only truly decisive factor here is the existence-beyond the variety of possible individual, "private" perspectives-of a willingness to "participate in the social game," so to speak: the game in which the abstraction that is the "subject supposed to believe" provides the point of identification for all the actual, empirical subjects. 23 1t is just this identificatory tendency, captured in the film, that has made possible some four decades, since the Second World War, of strong social integration, coded in the vocabulary of the Yugoslav socialist mythology and the personality cult of Josip Broz.

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Furthermore, the same identificatory impulse is still operative today, in the postsocialist/post-Yugoslav context. Now, however, identification with the "subject supposed to believe" is no longer mediated by the communist/revolutionary but rather by the ethnonationalist rhetoric. Such is the case, for instance, with the Serb nationalist discourse of the "Heavenly Nation," which left a strong stamp on Serbian society in the 1990s. This discourse-(the roots of which lie in Saint Savaism, the conservative clero-political dogma originated in the 1930s) establishes a direct link between the terrestrial and the celestial spheres, between the profane/political and the sacred/spiritual, and it ultimately confers holy status on the nation in its entirety. Speeches, prayers, and essays by Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic-a militant Orthodox theologian from the first half of the twentieth century-offer some of the most manifest and condensed expressions of this extremist doctrine that, although never made official in the Milosevic-ruled Serbia, was, nonetheless, popularized to the point of becoming a prominent aspect of the cultural zeitgeist. 24 For instance: "Be holy because I am holy, said God the Creator. And our Saint Sava had a program, to make the Serb people a holy people.... He wanted not only the holy church, but also the holy school, holy culture, holy dynasty, holy authorities, holy army, holy state, holy people." 25 This supposed holiness of the entire nation is founded purely on a desire for it: on the ethnic subjects' collective identification with an abstract, fictive, "believing subject," the accuracy of whose belief is, in turn, guaranteed by the One subject who (again supposedly) not only believes but in fact knows-in this case, Saint Sava himself (or rather a highly distorted, mythologized image of this historical figure). Thus, in VelimiroviC's own words again: "In the book of faith it is foretold that the last kingdom in the world would be the kingdom of God's Saints. The deep meaning of holiness in our [Serb] people is their faith in this foretelling. And the most elevated ideal of our people is the holy man." 26 And further: "If somebody asked what the ideal of the mass of our working people is, he could be given a dependable answer right away: Holiness. With all their heart the people want a holy church, holy school, [etc.)." 27 A similar psychosocial dynamic is also at work in the practice of assigning maternal attributes to the Nation: one loves Mother Croatia, Mother Serbia, and so forth; "she" gives birth to the sons of the Nation;

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the sons must, in turn, be ever ready to protect the Mother Nation. Some years ago in Croatia, the conservative nationalist forces-headed by the Croatian Populationist Movement of Don Ante Bakovic (partially sponsored by the Tudjman government)-made their investment in such mythology apparent by particularly aggressively intensifying their fight against abortion. (To different degrees, ethnonationalist pro-life movements of this sort have also been active in other parts of the former Yugoslavia-in Slovenia since the late 1980s, in Serbia since the midI990S, etc.) As Renata Salecl explains in her insightful analysis of this phenomenon, Croatian (and other ethnic) extremists view abortion as a threat not so much to life bur to the Nation itself: "The idea that the fetus is a human being who is being 'murdered' during abortion is, in the case of [a] post-socialist moral majority, linked to the image of the 'death of the nation.' Behind this is the idea of the importance of national identification: the life of a human being has special meaning because he or she belongs to a national community." 28 Paradoxically, however, it seems that the national communitythe nationalist collective, rather-is in this case reproduced precisely through the continuation of the "abortionist threat" and that each fetus mourned by the nationalists may, in fact, be said to represent a fantasized materialization (materialization through fantasy) of the abstract structural function that is a "subject supposed to believe." For only an unborn/absent being, "unspoiled" as it were, by its terrestrial properties and existence, can be imagined to function, strictly and absolutely, as a lost piece of the pure Nation, a fragment of the Ethnic Body par excellence. And only a subject so imagined can, in turn, serve as the guarantor of faith in the Nation as, above all, a unified procreative organism. 29 This is also why it may further be suggested that properly assessing the status of the antiabortionist conviction within the ethnonationalist discursive economy entails approaching it as an essentially inverted form of yet another, better known and even more influential, nationalist commandment: be ready to sacrifice yourself, your life, your body, at the altar of the Nation, for it is only through this (collectivist) sacrifice that the Nation regenerates itself. Wish for the death of the living, but mourn those who were never born! The common ground behind both of these imperatives is the morbid premise of nationalist mythology, according to

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which "dead soldiers and other victims of war [including the 'carelessly,' 'un-patriotically' aborted fetuses] comprise the bigger portion of the active national collective." 30 Here it is important to note the ultimately intangible, ephemeral nature of the category of"national collective," evident in its simultaneous dependence on and grounding of the structuring function of the "subject supposed to believe." As an "imagined community," to use Benedict Anderson's well-known phrase, the Nation maintains its existence only by persistently negotiating the discrepancy between the conditions of the actual, living reality and the projection/fantasy of the national Ideal. Such a state of affairs leads Mocnik to further suggest that [t]he historical impossibility of the national project and of the state that would be identical to (national) culture is, then, not a chance product of the international politics' empirical wanderings, or of the geopolitical power distribution, etc.-it is rather a structural necessity. A national project exists so that it can not be realized. Nowadays, as always before, its non-realization is precisely that which produces its structural consequences, and reproduces the "national" community. 11

The national or ethnic Ideal may, then, be described as an impossibility but an impossibility that does exist in the form of the collectivist mythos, as an intersubjectively shared belief in it, and a commitment to it. This Ideal-an entirely homogenous, self-enclosed society-manifests itself, to borrow the words of Radomir Konstantinovic, "only in the spirit which is opposed, in its primordial way [sic], to openness, and which strives to realize this opposition, to find it in a world perfectly harmonious with itself." 32 Such a world is nowhere to be found in empirical reality; frequently, in fact, the empirical correlative of the "pure ethnic spirit" is the state of socioeconomic anomie. Yet precisely and only because this is so, the faith in the (fantasized) Ethnic Ideal can sustain itself. This is why-to further evoke KonstantinoviC's formulations (which, although insufficiently imbued with a sense of antiessentializing political contextualization, do, nonetheless, seem useful when accounting for the social phenomena dominated by a quasi-mystical resistance to the rationalizations of language, and the "earthly reductivism" of the word)-the aspiration of the national spirit toward a higher, elevated, even transhistorical, state of things also manifests itself as an "anti-utopian

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utopianism": utopianism that "does not wish to use dream in order to abdicate the historical damage, the 'injustice' which history has left it as the basic inspirational matter, but, on the contrary, wishes to elevate just that 'injustice,' that 'damage,' as its permanent principle, and all this in an attempt to reach, by means of the literal acceptance of one's own misfortune, a new hope which it has sensed in it." 33 In the language of psychoanalysis, the ethnonational spirit functions as a sort of negative manifestation of the impossible jouissance, which can never be fully symbolized, never properly assumed and mastered by the subject. It bespeaks a purely ideological claim to have appropriated that which cannot be appropriated but only endlessly sought after, desired. It deceives one into believing that the excessive jouissance-the "beyond" of the realm of finite sociosymbolic reality-can be simply transformed into enjoyment as ethnocollective property. In this precise sense the "spirit of the ethnos" represents (to use that half-forgotten formulation by Herbert Marcuse) a delusional expression of the "conquest of transcendence" sought by "the one-dimensional society." 34

Croats as Serb Extremists Stjepan Sabljak, the director of Surrounded, has related an anecdote, from the production history of his film, that landed him on the "Greatest Shits of the Year 1998" list compiled by the progressive antinationalist Croatian newspaper Feral Tribune. He said, "It is interesting that all actors wanted to play Chetniks, and no one wanted to play our [Croatian] guardists. Probably because it is easier to portray Chetniks, since there are no limits here in expressing spite and evil." 35 What Sabljak is here being all too honest about concerns one of the standard hatred-provoking discursive tropes, regularly employed for the purpose of stimulating and maintaining phobic forms of national identification: the Nation is presented as the Victim, bleeding in the hands of the Executioner, the vicious ethnic enemy. This representational logic always involves a twofold operation. On the one hand, there is the imaginary identification with one's nation as a suffering body. Oiegetically, this type of identification is commonly accomplished through characters:

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"here are the sons and daughters of the Homeland, being (passive tense) killed, tortured, raped." On the other hand, there is also the symbolic identification with the perspective from which one would derive ideological satisfaction in viewing the Nation as a slaughtered-or about-to-beslaughtered-innocent. In the "best" tradition of ethnophobic narratives it is, of course, the ethnic antagonist qua Executioner that typically embodies such a perspective. The anecdote from the shooting of Surrounded reveals precisely this set of identificatory dynamics at work behind the standard modes of textual construction of victimhood. As an instance of imaginary identification, Sabljak's performers' wish to portray Chetniks, to "be" Chetniks (if only for an hour or so), betrays their simultaneous investment in the perspective that assigns their own Croatian nation the status of the mere "butchering material," practically desiring to be mortified, turned into a corpse. And the lesson to be learned here concerns, of course, the extent to which in all other films similarly grounded in such kitsch values of nationalist slaughter-films like LekiC's Knife and Hitrec's Virgin Mary, both of which have much less trouble than Surrounded with cinematically naturalizing their diegetic worlds-patriotism is just as much the measure of these works' textual ability to skillfully, which is to say as aggressively as possible, murder one's own nation by proxy, "with" (or "by recourse to") the ethnic enemy's hands. In other words, patriotism is in such films measured by the heights of ethnic self-cadaverization they are capable of attaining and the intensity of national necrophilia they manage to generate. As an old proverb, approvingly quoted by none other than Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic, summarily puts it: "Mourn me not when I am dead, but while I am alive." Offurther interest here is the fact that the above-mentioned anecdote is almost made literal in the conclusion of Sabljak's film. After numerous ambushes and battles against the Chetniks, only one of the four escaped Croatian soldiers remains alive. As he, too, is being killed by the enemy fire, he screams, only to wake up and realize that he is still in the Serb-held work camp and that the entire escape was merely a dream. Relating its content to other camp inmates, the soldier recalls that, in this dream many of the Chetniks kept returning to life (he killed some of them three or four times) and were actually "portrayed" by his fellow Croat fighters!

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It is, then, possible to be born as a Croat and subscribe to the Serb nationalist views, and vice versa: one can be a Serb who believes in the Croat nationalist agenda. One's ethnicity does not define a priori one's ideological persuasions. It does not (it should not, in any case) automatically determine one's belonging to a particular side in a given conflict. It is precisely this freedom of choice, however, that all collectivist nationalist ideologies want to deny their subjects. By concluding its narrative with an unambiguous reassertion of ethnicity as the criterion of identity in the "waking reality," Surrounded leaves one with the unmistakable final impression that such a positioning of the individual above the ethnic is not, after all, something it wishes to pursue .. Nonetheless, in the end there really seems to be no reason, no evidence other than one's willingness to believe that "things must be thus," to indicate that Sabljak's original plot twist about Croats playing Chetniks ("ideological Serbs" is the term that seems appropriate here) should indeed seem all that fantastical or delusional. (The same would, of course, equally apply to its logical complement: Serbs playing Ustashas, "ideological Croats.") After all, is anything about it more fantastical or delusional than the supposedly "natural" and "expected" identification of Serbs and Croats with their respective nations, at the time when these nations are being represented by the cultural elites eager to resurrect the ethnochauvinist legacy of the World War Two Chetnik commander Drah Mihajlovic or to reevaluate, in the name of national reconciliation, the "accomplishments" of the Ustasha-ruled Nazi satellite, the Independent State of Croatia?

Transvestites, Punks, and (Once Again) New Primitivs Although dominated by rampaging ethnic euphorias, the 1990s also gave rise to a number of rationally founded cinematic analyses of the widespread social, economic, and cultural deterioration in the region. In Tattooing (1991), a foremost Macedonian director, Stole Popov, explores the institutional breakdown of the Yugoslav socialist system through a veristic depiction of the hardships of prison life. Large-scale corruption

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and legalization of economic crime are exposed in Zrinko Ogresta's Red Dust, a film concerned with the Croatian phenomenon of "tycoonization"-appropriation of the formerly national- and state-owned businesses and industrial plants by the war profiteers and gangsters. In Land ofTruth, Love, and Freedom (2ooo), a low-budget production set in 1999, during NATO's "humanitarian" bombardment of Serbia (triggered by the Milosevic regime's policies of brutal oppression against the Kosovo Albanians and presented in the mainstream Western media as a sanitized televisual spectacle), director Milutin Petrovic allegorically comments on the troubled "state of the Nation" by using a mental institution as the central site of diegetic action. And, in a manner rarely seen in films from the region, Zelimir Zilnik's Marble Ass (1995) deconstructs the established homophobic paradigms of the Serb "national being" by viewing it through the prism of gender and sexuality. Freely mixing video-documentary and "trash" aesthetics, Zilnik depicts the daily adventures of two actual transvestite prostitutes, Merlyn and Sanela, two Serbs who do not conform to the prevailing patriarchal ideal of the macho male but who, nonetheless, emerge as the sole guardians of sanity, humanity, and sensitivity-in short, normalcy-in the sea of lawlessness, violence, and severe economic frustration. A refreshingly sober approach to interethnic relations and tensions is found in Andrej Kosak's The Outsider (1996), the most popular Slovenian film of the 1990s. At its center is an aspect of the Yugoslav "southern question": the problem of ethnic and class elitism, of cultural (and sometimes physical) violence leveled against the Bosnian migrants in Slovenia (the topic perceptively dealt with a decade earlier by another talented filmmaker, Filip Robar-Dorin; his 1985 documentary-like production Rams and Mammoths even featured some "Sartrean" observations, such as "If there were no Bosnians we [Slovenes] would have to invent them.") The Outsider tells the story of Sead, a Bosnian youth whose family moves to the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, in the early 198os (his father is an officer in the Yugoslav People's Army). Kosak criticizes both the statepropagated forms of Yugoslav "brotherhood and unity"-which by the late 1970s have deteriorated into dogmatic ideological cliches-and the actual aberrations from adhering to this ideal of interethnic amity in the practice of everyday living. Seeking to preserve the ideal, The Outsider

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relocates it-in a move strikingly reminiscent of the New Primitivs' own approach to the same issue some years earlier-in the realm of youth subculture. There, unaffected by the official ideological "rules of conduct," transethnic solidarity acquires a new vitality and flourishes in the most spontaneous fashion. New and alone in Ljubljana, Sead-the child from a mixed marriage (Slovene mother and Muslim father) and the film's principal "outsider"-immediately finds friendship and understanding among the local punk rockers, whose expressions of teenage angst include shouting curses and singing protest songs about the Yugoslav People's Army and the Communist Party (fig. 4.4). The manner in which Kosak asserts the supranational character of this underground youth scene, of which Sead becomes a member, is truly original. Besides elements of the punk movement- which has developed a strong, long-lasting tradition in Slovenia-the Ljubljana countercultural scene, as envisioned by the film, also includes elements of the distinctly Bosnian 1980s youth subculture. The music for The Outsider was, for instance, composed by Sasa Losic, a Bosnian pop musician whose band, the Blue Orchestra, is associated with New Primitivism. A number of the film's musical motifs are, in fact, clearly recognizable as slightly modified versions of some old, popular tunes by the Blue Orchestra. But the most direct reference to New Primitivism comes in the key protest song performed by Sead and his band: ''Anarchy All Over Slovenia." This punk tune (diegetically imagined as a local equivalent of the Sex Pistols' anthem "Anarchy in the U.K.") represents an open paraphrase of Zabranjeno pusenje's earlier discussed New Primitivist hit "Anarchy All Over Bascarsija"- a paraphrase so functionally incorporated into the film's narrative that even the song's refrain-"Sejo feels great today!"- seems perfectly logical within the context of Sead's story (for "Sejo," as the film also makes clear, is the nickname commonly used for Sead). Yhe Outsider ends tragiFIGURE 4.4 The Outsider (Andrej Kosak, cally. Unable to cope any longer 1996)

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with his father's strict, armylike disciplinary methods, faced with the deterioration of his amorous relationship with Metka, a Slovenian girl, and with the prospect of having to once again move to a different town (his father is being relocated to a new garrison), Sead commits suicide. Significantly, his final act takes place on May 4, 1980, at the very moment when the television anchor is announcing the passing of president Tito. With this symbolic link established between the death of Sead, an ethnic Yugoslav, and the death of the supreme representative of the country's socialist system, The Outsider makes it clear that, even as it endorses resistance to Titoist ideological dogmatism and authoritarianism, in the final assessment it views the ending of Broz's era not as the beginning of the collapse of the Yugoslav "prison-house of nations" but rather as the prequel to the savage murder of the authentic interethnic fraternity among its peoples.

Joke, and Its Relation to War Extremes of ethnic self-indulgence are the object of scrutiny in Vinko Brdan's war comedy How the \%r Started on My Island (1996), one of the most interesting representatives of the Young Croatian Film spirit. Criticized byTudjman's regime (as well as by Stjepan Sabljak!) for daring to make fun of the 1991 Croatian "homeland war," Brdan's work (the most popular Croatian film of the 1990s) still proved itself sufficiently patriotic to be, in the words of film critic Marcel Stefancic, "devoured" by its audiences "with nationalist enthusiasm" and to serve as "a kind of general cathartic experience." 36 The film's narrative is a fictionalized account of the actual events that took place in Croatia in the autumn of 1991, when the newly elected Croatian Democratic Union authorities organized mass gatherings of citizens outside the Yugoslav People's Army barracks, requesting that its soldiers leave Croatia. How the War Started leaves no doubt about its unfavorable view of the army, which, under the pretext of defending the unity of Yugoslavia, put itself in the service of Slobodan MiloseviC's hegemonic project (which, in turn, claimed the "necessity" of defending the Serb interests outside Serbia). The biggest portion of the film's parodic humor is, nonetheless, directed at the new Croatian leadership,

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which it depicts as highly incompetent, laughable political opportunists. The power of this leadership, Bre5an asserts, rests solely on its endless staging of a grotesque spectacle intended to stir Croatian nationalist sentiments (what one critic summarized as its incessant "emotional appeals to Croatian nationhood, emphasizing its special historical and exclusive character"). 37 Everyone-including various folk and pop musicians, poets, bodybuilders, and local buffoons-is given an opportunity to serve the nation on the small stage improvised outside the army barracks. This parodic rendering of the ethnonational madness concludes on an appropriately somber note: while delivering verses about "Croatia on the gallows," the local poet, "Dante," is accidentally killed by a misdirected bullet. But what compromises the film's critical stance toward the staging of the nationalist spectacle is its readiness to simultaneously try itself out in producing some ethnophobic jokes of its own. The case in point is the narrative episode, difficult to overlook, in which two Croats enter the Yugoslav army barracks, pretending to be a Serb officer and his Slovene assistant. The latter entertains some soldiers with fictional stories about his womanizing and even persuades a couple of them, a Montenegrin and an Albanian, to "reenact" his sexual escapades (fig. 4.5). The result is an "offstage" comic performance that seems to have sprung straight out

FIGURE 4.5

How the War Started on My Island (Vinko Brdan, 1996)

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of the enormously rich South Slavic tradition of vulgar ethnic jokes: "a Croat, passing for a Slovene, makes an Albanian fuck a Montenegrin." What is particularly interesting about this joke is not so much its obviously ethnohomophobic content per se but the modality of its inscription into the film's narrative. During the times of Yugoslavia's existence ethnic humor of this sort was, as mentioned earlier, quite widespread but never acknowledged as an official aspect of the national culture. As such, it regularly served as a sort of background complement to the purity of the ideology of"brotherhood and unity," its imaginary transgression. The ethnic joke in Bre$an's film, however, offers evidence of what is a different, albeit related, class of cultural organization of enjoyment. lhis joke's status in (diegetic) reality is much more overt: it is explicitly acted out in the center of the tense events surrounding the political-military standoff between the Yugoslav army and the new Croatian authorities. As a mininarrative about "our ethnic representative humiliating his ethnic others (formerly, 'ethnic brothers')," the joke is thus symptomatic of the large-scale sociocultural process taking place across Yugoslavia in the early 1990s (the time in which the film's story is set): the process of legitimation of ethnophobic sentiments, which served as the backbone of the federation's demise. Furthermore, Bre$an's lack of interest in qualifying his own, uncritical authorial endorsement of this mininarrative as a source of comedy may be seen as itself symptomatic of the film's limit in thinking what a proper distance from nationalist ideology entails. This would require not just an opposition to the official and, indeed, often bizarre rituals of ethnic self-glorification staged by the power-elite but also an awareness ofhow numerous and varied are the mechanisms of(self-)submission-a submission that need not be either willing or forced-to this system of phobic cultural values. There must be a realization of how dangerously far-reaching the consequences of ethnic essentialism may ultimately turn out to be. For in one sense it is possible to see the atrocities committed in Croatia and Bosnia, and later in Kosovo, as extreme manifestations not of the nationalist humor per se but of what may begin to happen once this humor is culturally sanctified "just a bit" too much. 38

5 Of Ethnic Enemy as Acousmetre Indeed, there is something whose absence can always be observed in a picture. Jacques Lacan

TRIGGERED BY THE MUNICIPAL ELECTORAL THEFT on part of Slobodan MiloseviC's ruling Socialist Party, massive, months-long demonstrations took place on the streets of Belgrade (as well as other Serbian towns) in the winter of 1996-97. 1 The people, joined by and receiving crucial support from the students, were expressing their dissatisfaction not only with the regime's unwillingness to recognize their democratically expressed will-its shameless falsification of electoral results-but also with the country's chaotic social and economic situation and isolation from virtually the entire international community, all of which came about as consequences of the ruling elite's politics with respect to the breakup of the federative Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The central characteristic of the street protest was, as urban sociologist Sreten Vujovic points out, its "carnivalization." 2 That winter, notable examples of the protesters' carnivalesque debasement of the regime's political symbols included displaying a sponge effigy of Slobodan Milosevic, dressed in a prison uniform; throwing eggs at the Belgrade City Assembly, state-run daily newspapers, and Radio Television Serbia; playing soccer and chess, taking pictures, or organizing an "open-air discotheque" in front of police cordons; washing (symbolically cleansing) the building of the Belgrade University rectorate, "so that only the rector (who did not support the protests) would remain dirty." 3

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Politics and Noise A prominent aspect of the protest, and a popular way of expressing opposition to MiloseviC's rule, was also the demonstrators' widespread participation in what would become known as the "production of noise." "Noise is fashionable," read a popular slogan from the protest, and every night between ]:30 and 8:oo (the running time of the prime-time television news) all available means were engaged, everything and anything at hand, to generate noise and thus voice opposition to the preposterous distortions and fabrications of truth by the state-run television, RTS. The patently false nature of these official media reports was humorously summarized by another protest banner: "I wish I lived in the land depicted by the RTS." In that fictive land life seemed like the exact opposite of the grim Serbian reality of the day: there, harmony and unity ruled among the people, the economy was permanently on the rise, and, given the democratic ways of the government, no electoral theft was ever even remotely possible. Reacting to these and similar acts of media manipulation, the protesters turned to the brute art of"noise-making," collectively banging on their cooking pans, old boilers, and garbage containers and blowing whistles of all sorts. For months, as soon as the prime-time television news intruded into the people's living rooms, the noise began to spread across the city streets. Then, in the spring of 1997 the street protests ended, under the impression of a significant political victory for the opposition parties in Serbia: the regime seemed to accept, after all, its loss at the disputed local elections. With the demonstrations brought to a halt, the street noise also dissolved, while critical evaluations of the winter events gradually began to appear. Two questions are particularly important for the proper understanding of the functions of noise in these protests: 1.

What did the "production of noise" across Serbia effectively accomplish that winter?

2.

What was the ideological backdrop (if any) of this noise?

While in the short run the 1996-97 carnival-protest in general and the production of noise in particular seem to have resulted in a victory for the democratic forces in Serbia, in the longer run it also became 1.

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clear that in some sense they actually helped extend the rule of the established political apparatus. On one level the noise that was incessantly being produced condensed the resistance of many not only to the recent blatant electoral theft but to the Milosevic regime's authoritarian rule and disastrous policies in general. In other words the noise represented a delayed response, in the form of a creative outburst, to the many primarily socioeconomic hardships that had been accumulating over the course of the previous decade (but this, of course, is also true of many other carnivalesque activities taking place that winter). Although in this respect the street noise did, indeed, perform an appositional role vis-a-vis the political authorities, as the demonstrations went on, and as the regime increasingly refrained not only from using brute force on the protesters but from interrupting their activities at all, another, potentially "counteroppositional" effect of this sound performance also began to manifest itself. 4 1t is the (earlier evoked) effect of what Marcuse termed "institutionalized" or "repressive" desublimation: of providing the regime itself with the room to grant the protesters a form of relief from the very pressures it imposed on them; to turn the "subversive arts" of banging and whistling to the regime's own advantage, by permitting them to run their course (Bakhtinians would call this process "co-aptation of the carnival"). "Noise as transgression" thus became noise as the system's "inherent transgression" CZizek)-noise as a type of resistance reconciled with the existing structure of power, the latter (paradoxically) allowing the rebellious demands, the transgressive actions, to take place. 5 One of the clearest symptoms of the Serbian regime's having, in fact, invested in the possibility of manipulating the outcome of the 1996-97 winter protest this way is to be found in the manner in which the results of the disputed local elections were ultimately recognized. With a special act (lex specialis), Milosevic practically single-handedly acknowledged and made legitimate the victory of the opposition. As Mladen Lazic succinctly explains, this maneuver accomplished a number of things: First, it showed that decisions in Serbia are not taken by citizens or courts, or even Parliament, but by Milosevic himself: the decision he took could only be understood as an act of grace by the ruler. . . . Then he underlined that the

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bestowal of this grace was a consequence not of internal, but of external demands [international pressure]. Thereby he underscored the hierarchy of power: a concession was made to those who were more powerful outside the country, meaning that he was still stronger than his domestic opponents. 6 The alignment of "noise production" with the above described mechanisms of repressive desublimation would hardly have been possible were it not for the fact that contentwise, as it were, noise is such an ambiguous sound form that it itself generates more than sufficient room for the possible (though not mandatory) inclusion within such an ideological operation. On this account one arrives at what is surely the single most important point of criticism to be leveled against the 1996-97 protest: despite all the serious resistance to the MiloseviC regime, and all the admirable efforts by the most progressive elements of the opposition, the protest largely remained within the confines of ethnic collectivism and national patriotism. As political and cultural theorist Obrad Savic elaborates: 2.

Despite the democratic rhetoric, urban signs, and "aestheticized political gestures," the Protest did not manage to transcend the existing nationalist framework. Quite the contrary, the radical nationalist option-at the basis of militarism, war, and ethnic conflicts ever since 1991-had acquired a civil tone, and a democratic decor. . . . This democratic masquerade of the nationalists was led by a propaganda interest: "the proponents of democracy" wanted to use the Protest to correct, to make more appealing, the very negative image of Serbia on the international scene. The Serb "intellectual elite," now costumed in the amoral clothing of soft nationalism, took advantage of the "civilian protest" as a suitable stage for the public cleansing of the political biographies. How else could one understand the bizarre democratic happenings in which the leading civil role is played by those same chauvinists who, ever since 1991, have been the key inspirators of nationalist hatred and ethnic cleansing?? Inaugurating a thorough introspective critique of the ethnic euphoria that shook the country during the decade never became a significant objective on the demonstrators' agenda. It was not considered a priority to address the responsibility of the Serbian regime and its institutions, not merely for losing the wars in Croatia and Bosnia (the war in Kosovo and

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the NATO bombing were still to come) but for having fought these wars in the first place, for having systematically organized the unforgivable acts of murder, ethnic extermination, and "culturocide," in the name of national interests. As if the collectivist voyage along the path of hatred and violence, aimed "outward," against ethnic "others" (Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians), was not all along encouraged by-and in turn also helped further promote-the policies of the same leadership that now cheated its subjects in the elections. Ultimately, it is within just this context of the winter protest that the months-long "noise-contamination" of Serbia also needs to be situated. Amidst the ideologically dubious demonstrations, the noise became a particularly suitable and useful form of expression, for what it made possible (and maintained) was the dual situation of, on the one hand, articulating a loud opposition to the existing national authorities, while, on the other hand, simultaneously not having to articulate (or even dis-articulate) clear opposition to the still-prevailing nationalist sentiments. To the extent to which the latter was the case, it in fact seems most appropriate to describe this noise with Michel Chion's term "sonorous haze." 8 Rendering all the properly antinationalist voices-committed to an unscrupulous, systemic transformation of the Serbian society-a priori unintelligible, the noise qua sonorous haze served as an acoustic manifestation of the widely spread ideological stain (in the Lacanian sense of the word): it concealed everything that had to remain unspoken, or at least muted, so that the consistency of the ethnocollectivist ideational framework could be maintained even during the period of social unrest.

Ogre in a Boar's Head One January night during the demonstrations, while videotaping the protesters and the police facing each other at one of Belgrade's central squares, I captured an unusual image in the viewfinder of my camera: in the mass of demonstrators someone was carrying a long stick on top of which was mounted a roasted pig's head. The striking nature of this scene immediately recalled a not-too-different image from Srdjan DragojeviC's Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, a film depicting events from the Bosnian war.

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It is the image of the wild boar's head mounted on top of a Serb army tank (fig. p). The visual link between the two images was, in all likeliness, just a coincidence. Even so, it somehow seemed quite appropriate. Not only was Dragojevic himself a vocal supporter of the demonstrations, but his film-released in 1996, a few months after the internationally monitored Dayton peace agreement brought an end to the fighting in Bosnia-was also one of the most popular films of the decade in Serbia, its aesthetically accomplished portrayal of ethnic animosity attracting almost as many people to the movie theaters as the antigovernment demonstrations would attract to the streets some time later. Then, during that same month of January, an essay appeared in the local feminist periodical Pro Femina, in which the author, Svetlana Slapsak, implied that Pretty Village, Pretty Flame's attitude toward the Bosnian war and the Yugoslav breakup is precisely of the kind that during the preceding few years contributed to the postponement of the serious manifestations of discontent with the Serbian government's policies.9 In other words, Pretty Village reflected the nation's dominant sociopolitical and cultural trends, which never allowed for the damaging effects of ethnic madness to be thoroughly addressed. Under such circumstances, Slapsak argues, the country has had to hit the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in order for the people to take to the streets. And even

FIGURE 5.1

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Srdjan Dragojevic, 1996)

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then, one might add, the squeals of the wild boar of nationalism did not exactly vanish. The boar merely recast itself as a roasted pig!

A war report by the yellow-press journalist Vanja Bulic, published in the openly nationalist Belgrade magazine Duga, provided the basis for the screenplay of Pretty Village. 10 The chronology of the film's central story line--evolving in a fragmentary manner within the flashbacks of a wounded, hospitalized Serb soldier, Milan--can be summarized as follows. First, Milan's platoon storms through Bosnia, burning Muslim villages. Then Milan and six other soldiers, survivors of a surprise night-attack, find themselves trapped inside an abandoned tunnel surrounded by the Bosnian fighters. Thus begins what the promotional material for the film describes as "the ten day long hell ... in which there were no winners-the ones inside the tunnel could not escape, and the ones above it could not enter, or drive the trapped ones out."" In addition to relating this central war narrative, Milan's flashbacks provide a series of insights into his childhood friendship with Halil, a Muslim boy with whom he grew up during the peaceful times of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The tunnel in which the Serb fighters are trapped represents more than just the central site of Pretty Village's diegetic action. In the film's quasi-documentary opening, set in 1971 and reminiscent of the socialist regime-sponsored Film News, this tunnel is inaugurated as a Tunnel of Brotherhood and Unity. Milan, however, recalls that, as children, he and Halil used to be terrified by the tunnel, for an Ogre was said to inhabit it. Fulfilling the role of the central metaphor in the film, the tunnel thus functions as a sort of black hole that, during Yugoslavia's communist years, stored everything that was repressed from the surface of the sociopolitical reality so that the country could maintain its image of the peoples' solidarity. The somehow timeless and transhistorical interethnic animosity (the Ogre) was supposedly also building up underneath the surface of multiethnic happiness, and it erupted in the most violent manner with the collapse of the Yugoslav federation. Thus, as regrettable as the war in Bosnia may have been, in Pretty Village's perspective it also somehow seems to have been ... inevitable.

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Commenting on this metaphoric function of the tunnel in his film, Dragojevic is quite explicit about its intended meaning: I believe that the hatred and intolerance that used to spark below the surface caused the cruelty of the later events. Communism served as a fertile ground for our Balkan intolerance. In the past, whenever I used to go to Bosnia I somehow felt that this would happen to them-I am thinking of all sides and all nationalities-because their main characteristic was some kind of terrible antidemocracy in all areas of social life. I never believed that a multicultural model could be implemented in Bosnia without some kind of repression, whether by the communists, or-as is now the case-by the international community. 12 Arguments, or doubts, of this type-emphasizing not so much the undesirability as the "impossibility" of the different ethnic groups' peaceful coexistence-could be found in the Yugoslav sociocultural context even before the final stages of the country's disintegration began to take place. Such views would at times seek to present themselves as the sobering correctives to what they perceived as a highly idealistic infatuation with the multiculturalist project and would purport to be reflecting the common sense and the healthy pragmatism of the "ordinary folk." By the late 1980s, however, these "differentialist" perspectives also came to serve as a useful background for the emergence and the unhindered existence of other, openly aggressive, kinds of ethnoessentialist sentiments. 13 The case in point is the trajectory of nationalist thought in the work of Dobrica Cosic, one of the most prominent post-World War Two Serbian writers and a spiritual father of the contemporary Serb resentment (in the 1990s, during MiloseviC's reign, he also briefly served as the president of the "rump" Yugoslavia). From a literary advocate of the Partisans' transnational cause (in his 1950 novel Far Away Is the Sun) to a dissident intellectual, uncertain of the validity of the Yugoslav multiethnic project (A Time of Death, published in the late 1970s), Cosic walked the path toward an increasingly extremist position, which culminated in the 1990s with statements such as, "Planned moving and exchanges of the population are most difficult, most painful, but they are possible, and that is still better than living amidst hatred and mutual killing." 14 Let us now pay closer attention to DragojeviC's film itself. Between the moments of fighting, the soldiers inside and outside the tunnel pro-

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voke each other by exchanging nationalist insults. Importantly, like everything else in the narrative, this standstill is presented entirely from the perspective of the Serb fighters. The filmmaker deliberately chose not at all to concern himself with what takes place on the other sidethe "Muslim" side. (The reader should keep in mind, however, that the "Muslim" side in the Bosnian war was, in fact, ethnically less homogeneous-especially in the beginning of the conflict-than is usually recognized by those seeking to interpret this war as "merely" an interethnic struggle between the competing chauvinist visions of pure nation-states. Besides Muslims, the Bosnian side also included a number of Croats, Serbs, and ethnic Yugoslavs). 15 Dragojevic thus opted for a representational strategy inspired by the narrative model found in John Carpenter's 1976 film Assault on Precinct IJ: the model of the invisible enemy. 16 And this reliance on Carpenter's cinematic technique, let it also be noted, involved more than just a random choice of a film model. To some extent it is symptomatic of a peculiarity of Hollywood cinema's popularity not only with the broad Yugoslav audiences but also with many filmmakers and critics. In the 1980s and the early 1990s a significant number of informed and serious Yugoslav filmgoers regarded such 1970s American "genre directors" as John Milius or Waiter Hill as Hollywood's foremost contemporary auteurs. This is certainly, perhaps most of all, true of]ohn Carpenter, whose films (Halloween, 7he Fog, 7he 7hing remake) have acquired a cult status among these cinefiles. 17 Since they are unable to see much of what goes on outside the tunnel, the Serb soldiers' knowledge of the Muslim enemy's presence depends primarily on the voices they hear. More precisely, it depends on the acousmatic voices heard inside the tunnel-voices that, as Chi on would have it, are "heard without [their] ... source being seen," voices that seem to be "wandering along the surface (of the image, or screen), at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle." 18 Although they presumably belong to the Ethnic Enemy outside, these voices are never really embodied but rather seem sourceless as they echo across the tunnel and as they are heard on the trapped soldiers' walkie-talkies. Even in those rare instances in the film when it seems that these spectral voices will finally be visually identified-connected, that is, to their physical sources-instead of the enemy's bodily presence, the viewer is offered

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the fast-moving and disappearing shadows, the visually desaturated apparition-like figures. 19 Potentially, there is something quite subversive about such a construction of the Ethnic Enemy as acousmetre, 20 for it seems to suggest the possibility of a misalignment between the voice assigned to the ethnic other and the symbolic reality of the "actually existing" ethnic groups (Muslims, Serbs, etc.). The voice of the Enemy might eventually connect with its source in the intersubjective physical reality, but it also might not. Equivocation seems to resonate where one would expect to find confirmation of a standard genre assumption about combat films: that both sides involved in the depicted conflict exist as fully constituted in the external material reality. There is no guarantee that the point of origin of the acousmatic voices heard inside the tunnel is not, say, in the Serb soldiers themselves rather than in those apparitions presumably waiting outside the tunnel. Whatever the case may be, this hermeneutic uncertaintf 1 pertaining to the acousmatic voice seems to imply that, ultimately, the only assurance that the acousmetre does have a positive existence-that his voice does have a source identifiable in the symbolic reality-lies, as Chion would have it, in one's desire to believe that this is so, in one's "voluntary blindness" 22 for the acousmatic properties of a voice. It lies in what amounts to the film auditor's/viewer's self-imposed, self-accomplished "de-acousmatization." 23 In other words it is once again the "subject supposed to believe" or, more precisely, the "spectator supposed to believe" in the acousmetre's positive existence, that is required as an active contributor to the production of the film's meaning, if Pretty Village's signification of the threatening ethnic otherness is to be prevented from functioning as an expose of the mechanisms underlying nationalist ideological interpellation, and asserted instead as a form of mimesis of the external, experiential reality. Here it is particularly interesting to note that, according to Dragojevic himself, around the time of Pretty Village's release a significant number of Serb soldiers who actually fought in the Bosnian war found the film to be very "realistic" (in the sense of accurately corresponding to their own experiences of the war). 24 Th is seems to suggest that an empirical, historical subject who does (already) believe in the "ethnic thing"-a subject interpellated by ethnonationalism-is perfectly predisposed to

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assume the place of the film's model "spectator supposed to believe." Moreover, these soldiers' reaction to the film also points to the extent to which, in a certain way (and for some of those involved in it), the entire Bosnian war in fact represented materialization-through-enactment of its own underlying fundamental fantasy about the threatening ethnic otherness: a fantasy already involving, as its structural function, the subject who, like Pretty Village's model spectator, is "supposed to believe" in the conflict between the Serbs and the Muslims as a conflict between the tangible and visually accessible Ethnic Bodies. Playing a key role in initially triggering this ideological fantasy of ethnic animosity were, of course, the mass-media-those primary weapons of the prewar, late 1980s nationalist offensive in Yugoslavia. Publicist Petar Lukovic put it succinctly: I think you have to start with the idea that all the evils in this country now [1993]-the millions [sic] of refugees, the millions [sic] getting killed ... -all this evil started six years ago ... as a state project, as an ideological project. You should understand that everything we are witnessing today we have tested before in softer, smaller ways, through television, through media wars, political wars, all kinds of discussions and dialogues-simulations without arms-before the [actual] wars. So we were prepared for this kind of war.... It's obvious we are talking about a propaganda plan that starred in 1987 when Milosevic started his nationalist campaign here. 25

Although it never really problematizes the fundamental objective of nationalist propaganda in the former Yugoslavia-the entirely unjustifiable murder of transethnic solidarity in the name of phobic, ethnoessentialist identity politics-Pretry Village, Pretry Flame does, nonetheless, criticize the primitive, debased wartime rhetoric of the Milosevic-controlled television and print media. This is most clearly evident in one of the film's flashbacks, which sarcastically depicts the naivete (if not the stupidity) of one soldier who volunteers to fight in Bosnia after watching the hatred-provoking news broadcast by Radio Television Serbia. In another scene, however, this critique of the media for disseminating ethnic hatred leads to a problematic, factually unsubstantiated, claim: the biggest Sarajevo daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje, is implicated as a mouthpiece of Muslim extremism. And while there is no doubt that the Bosnian political leadership, headed by

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president Alija Izetbegovic, did nurture its own version of ethnic nationalism, as far as Oslobodjenje itself is concerned, rather than advocating Muslim fundamentalism of any sort, deep into the war the editorial politics of the newspaper remained such that, if anything, it actually sought to maintain the course of its traditionally multiethnic and secular orientation. 26 Perhaps the most important aspect of Pretty Village's representational ideology is its persistent exclusion, from both the visual and the audio registers, of the most disturbing effects of the Serb army's campaign in Bosnia: the massive killing of civiliansY Until the point when its protagonists-the soldiers trapped inside the tunnel-begin to get killed, the film hardly addresses death at all as the principal outcome of war. As destruction ofBosnia is depicted through the violent rampage of these soldiers, villages are burnt, property is stolen, but no killing seems to take place, and no one seems to die. Although one is led to assume that death abounds wherever the soldiers go, it in fact remains invisible. Thus, Pretty Village selectively imposes the taboo on the representation of both killing and the dead body. According to Georges Bataille, "[t]he taboo which lays hold on the others at the sight of a corpse is the distance they put between themselves and violence, by which they cut themselves off from violence." 28 The absence of the dead strengthens the illusion that war is an activity that, despite all the disorder it produces, still somehow belongs within the domain of "normal," even productive, work. Furthermore, absence of the dead diminishes the responsibility of those characters whom the film implies are taking part in the deadly acts. Since it is never explicitly revealed whether they indeed do kill, it is hard to define the soldiers as murderers, and the burden of responsibility on their shoulders is made lightweight, so to speak. Therefore, although the spectator is offered a realization that they partake in destruction, the soldiers remain characters with whom one is led to identify relatively unproblematically, precisely because their most negative traits are never fully revealed. Death, the ultimate consequence of the soldiers' apocalyptic endeavor, is kept away, distanced: the characters are construed as (potential) killers without actual victims. Yet there are two noteworthy scenes in Pretty Village that-in contrast to the rest of the narrative depicting the Serb soldiers on their destructive mission-do, each in its own way, transgress the film's prohi-

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bition on representing killing and the dead. The earlier of the two scenes has significant implications for the way the entire film can be interpreted, and it will, therefore, be discussed here second and at some length. I. As Milan enters one of the houses in a village his platoon has just pillaged, he approaches a wooden closet damaged by the machine-gun fire. A pile of hanging clothes hides its interior from Milan's investigative look. At the bottom of the closet, he observes a thin line of blood. The scene concludes with a shot from inside the closet, a point of view piercing through the clothes (figs. p, 5.3). Had it been placed only moments before the machine gun aimed its fire at the closet, this last shot could have easily been attributed to a person hiding inside. As it stands, however, the brief "point of view" seems to be aligned with the dead: it is almost as if Death itself is looking back at the living world. However, since the actual presence of a body inside the closet is never visually confirmed, properly speaking, the status of this shot cannot, in fact, be that of a dead person's look either. The point of view from inside the closet represents no less than an autonomous, bodiless gaze (in the precise Lacanian sense: what a picture, or a scopic field, "returns" to the looking subject from that point in it at which the looker "sees nothing"). It is a self-sustaining, uncanny "presence that makes us feel gazed at when nothing is there." 29 Neither truly subjective (the gaze seems sourceless or, rather, its own source) nor truly objective (the thin line of blood noticeable at the bottom of the closet suggests an elusive agency behind it), the "closet-gaze" introduces persecutory anxiety in the place of scopic certainty, thus destabilizing the visual field of the character, Milan, with whom the film's spectator was initially aligned. In other

FIGURE 5 . 2

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame

(Srdjan Dragojevic, 1996)

FIGURE 5 . 3

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame

(Srdjan Dragojevic, 1996)

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words it is something even more disturbing than a dead body that is staring back at Milan: a radically undeterminable entity that, by its very presence within the film's visual register, undermines those conditions productive of a numb acceptance of the dead body's absence from that register. 2. The very first time when the film's protagonists storm into a Muslim village, they enter an empty destroyed house. The phone rings, and one of the soldiers answers. A desperate, frightened woman wants to speak to Camil. Now another soldier takes the phone receiver. He looks around. Through the frame of a broken window he sees a man's dead body, presumably Camil's, lying outside the house. The shot quickly goes out of focus, or rather, refocuses on the soldier, as the camera turns back to him (figs. 5.4, 5.5). This brief exposure of Camil's body constitutes the sole violation of the film's self-imposed taboo on representing the dead ethnic other during the course of the Serb army's assault. As such, this singular case of transgression points precisely to that which otherwise, as a consequence of the imposed prohibition, remains the film's "missing content": the killing performed by its protagonists. In other words in this scene one encounters what may be understood as the textual explication of the ideological stain ofnationalism in its optical manifestation-the unveiling of the visual equivalent of the earlier discussed "sonorous haze," generated during the 1996-97 street protest. When the shot depicting the man's dead body goes out of focus, it calls attention to the very procedure whereby the deadly excess of the soldiers' behavior is concealed: the visual blurring, the "staining," of the image ensures that this compromising surplus is repressed and that the stability, the "normality," of the soldiers' reality is maintained.

FIGURE 5.4

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame

(Srdjan Dragojevic, 1996)

FIGURE 5.5

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame

(Srdjan Dragojevic, 1996)

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In this explication of the visual stain resides the crucial textual cue, the key instance of the film itself inviting the spectator to produce an interpretation different from the one evolving around his or her willingness to "de-acousmatize" the Ethnic Enemy's voice; an interpretation that would thematize the subversive potential inherent in the use of the sourceless voice as a representational trope. The unveiling of the stain in the visual register affects (or has the potential to affect) the status of the Ethnic Enemy's voice in a manner that emphasizes its acousmatic properties. It is as if, in Zizek's words, "the image renders present the failure of the voice" 30 by problematizing the positive, bodily existence of the voice's source. For, based on Milan's flashback, which provides this "uncensored" (although very brief) glimpse into his and his comrades' ethnically motivated rampage, could one not perhaps suppose that the spectral voices, as well as the apparition-like figures, perceived as the Ethnic Enemy outside the tunnel, actually belong to the dead inhabitants of the burning villages-those whom the cinematic apparatus has buried before they were killed, that is, before their deaths were represented and/or acknowledged in the film? Could it not be that they came to blame the soldiers for their murderous acts and for their refusal to confront the true nature of their deeds? (In support of this view let it be noted that the first time the acousmatic voice is heard inside the tunnel, it introduces itself as belonging to Camil!) "In some traditions," writes Chion, "ghosts are those who are unburied or improperly buried. Precisely the same applies to the acousmetre, when we speak of a yet-unseen voice, one that can neither enter the image to attach itself to a visible body, nor occupy the removed position of the image presenter. The voice is condemned to wander the surface." 31 Clearly, an interpretation of Pretty Village along those lines entails abandoning the proper limits of the war film genre and entering instead the zone of fantasy and/or horror. It is, however, crucial to note that such a generic slippage can, once again, take place only as the consequence of the spectator's own participation in the production of the film's meaning. It is the specific way in which the spectator positions him- or herself in relation to the mechanisms of nationalist interpellation that makes it possible for Pretty Village no longer to function as a war movie, in the narrow sense of the term, and to acquire instead the characteristics of a

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generic hybrid: to depict the Bosnian war by recourse to the supernatural. This time, though, what is activated is not the spectator's "desire to believe" that the source of the voices heard inside the tunnel is the Muslim enemy with "positive properties" in reality but the very opposite of this desire. To argue for Pretty Village as a supernatural film of sorts is to assert in genre-specific terms the antinationalist insight that the attribution of the "wandering voice" to the Ethnic Enemy is a function of the psychological (subjective and intersubjective) mechanism, by means of which what is imagined (or fantasized) as the immediate threat from the ethnic other comes to conceal what is the actual damage done to the ethnic other. From this perspective the acousmetre qua Ethnic Enemy signifies the transposition of the soldiers' excessive and murderous behavior-of their own overflowing enjoyment, as psychoanalysis would have it-onto the other, so that this out-of-control enjoyment can be misperceived as a threat external to their community. 32 What I have attempted to outline thus far are, then, two reading strategies applicable to DragojeviC's film: one that endorses the viewer's uncritical identification with the characters on ethnopatriotic grounds and one that resists exactly this mechanism of nationalist ideology's textual dissemination. There still remains, however, one last-but equally significant-point to be made about Pretty Village. Despite the plurality of voices (as that famous phrase goes) evident in it, in the end the film does unambiguously take sides. It does clearly endorse one of the two models of reading as the "correct" one. In two steps the narrative resolution of the film effectively undercuts all the potential dilemmas about the origin and the nature of the trapped Serb soldiers' Ethnic Enemy: this enemy, the film ultimately asserts, is very tangible, and the threat he poses is very real. Step 1: The film's central protagonist, Milan, is not the sole Serb survivor of the conflict in the tunnel, but he is the only one to remain conscious until the drama is fully resolved. On exiting the tunnel, he witnesses and experiences the enemy's appearance as fully constituted in the symbolic reality: Milan's former best friend, Halil, now a commander in the Bosnian army, is standing atop the tunnel. Halil, a Muslim, is the embodiment of the ethnic antagonist whose presence was felt and heard all the time but who was never "anthropomorphically vali-

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dated," much less individualized. Until Halil appears, the effectiveness of the film's signification of this threatening ethnic otherness has been, as already suggested, largely dependent on the spectator him- or herself: the spectator who, like the film's characters, believes him- or herself to exist in the intersubjective reality that is objectively defined by (unsurpassable) ethnic differences and who, for that reason, can "overlook" the hermeneutic uncertainty pertaining to the Ethnic Enemy's acousmatic voice. With Halil on ~op of the tunnel, however, the film itself visualizes this acousmetre-it assigns body to the enemy's voice-and thus confirms the actual existence of the evil ethnic other. (In this light one might further suggest that DragojeviC's refusal throughout the film to depict, to visually assign some agency, to the Serb soldiers' enemy, is not what needs to be questioned; rather, one ought to strongly emphasize the fact that, with Halil atop the tunnel, the film has already visually identified too much of the, thus far exclusively chimeric, ethnic antagonist.) Step 2: Even as it establishes the Ethnic Enemy's objective existence in reality, Halil's appearance atop the tunnel seems also capable of challenging, perhaps even dissolving, the hatred ascribed to the other's disembodied voice. Chion explains: Everything hangs on whether or not the acousmetre has been seen. In the case where it remains not-yet-seen, even an insignificant acousmatic voice becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image .... The not-yet-seen voice ... possesses a sort of virginity, derived from the simple fact that the body that's supposed to emit it has not yet been inscribed in the visual field. Its de-acousmatization, which results from finally showing the person speaking, is always like a de/lowering. For at that point the voice loses its virginal-acousmatic powers, and re-enters the realm of human beings. 33

The potential loss of the frightening powers of the Ethnic Enemy's voice is further stressed by the fact that Halil is not just any individual whose body de-acousmatizes this voice but Milan's former best friend. During the entire course of its narrative, the film has evoked (by way of Milan's flashbacks) scenes of this exemplary friendship. It has also implied a symmetry between the Serbs' depicted war deeds and the mostly

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nonrepresented, but suggested, activities of their enemy. Halil's appearance marks the two friends' first encounter during the war, and a brief scopic and verbal exchange between them establishes that neither did Halil kill Milan's mother (as the latter had been led to believe by Slobo, a nationalist instigator whose name is a clear reference to Slobodan Milosevic), 34 nor did Milan burn Halil's store (an earlier flashback has already informed the viewer that the opposite is, in fact, the case-he tried to protect the store from the unrestrained soldiers who set it on fire). The purity of their friendship is thus preserved, and the possibility arises-with Halil's body allocated to the acousmetre-that this solidarity might override the recently instated ethnic enmity. Nevertheless, the film soon undermines this possibility, as well, by concluding the two friends' brief encounter with an explosion near the tunnel, which kills Halil. Thus death itself has intervened, deus ex machina, in order to seal off Milan's and Halil's friendship and to confirm the primacy of the unbridgeable ethnic gap between a Serb and a Muslim. 35 For what is asserted by means ofHalil's death is the continued functioning of the acousmatic threat posed by the Ethnic Enemy. If this enemy cannot be construed as the "complete acousmetre" 36-the one who is never visually identified-because this might give rise to the question whether he at all exists in reality, neither can he be fully de-acousmatized and his (singular) body successfully brought into the light, for then he might forever lose the terrifying powers he possesses as the bodiless voice. The Ethnic Enemy, therefore, has to be simultaneously an already visualized acousmetre and a to be visualized acousmetre: an acousmetre whose omnipotence remains unaffected by the continuous attempts at revealing his (multiple) bodily appearances because these revelations are always a priori condemned to remain incomplete and insufficient. In light of Pretty Village, Pretty Flame's "national economy," it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to suggest that Halil died so that Milan's animosity toward the ethnic other (more precisely, toward the sourceless voice of ethnic otherness) could continue. And it is precisely this ethnophobic "resolution" of the conflict in the tunnel that makes one question the effectiveness of the film's ultimate condemnation of nationalist madness, in the visually and dramaturgically accomplished final scene, set in the Belgrade hospital to which the few survivors of the siege have been

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transported. As Milan, overwhelmed by his hatred of Muslims, crawls across the floor determined to murder an enemy fighter lying in the same hospital, the film makes it clear that only in a violent nationalist delirium can this wounded soldier-helpless and harmless rather than threatening-appear as an incarnation of the evil ethnic antagonist. 37 Ultimately, Milan himself seems to realize this, and he gives up on his murderous intentions, thus setting the tone of pathos for the symbolic high-angle tracking shot in which the countless dead bodies covering the floor of the tunnel are observed by Milan and Halil as young boys. War brings madness! War is death! Certainly, but (as Dragojevic was himself the first to point out) the validity of this general humanist point notwithstanding, it also easily turns into a comfortably depoliticized truism, the universal appeal of which sidesteps all the issues that potentially may compromise or contradict one's ideological persuasions. 38 Thus, for instance, critique of excessive, murderous manifestations of nationalism-those manifestations that usually reach their peak in times of war-is often successfully utilized by nationalism itselfas a means of rescuing and recuperating its "pure" or more "moderate" incarnations. Nationalist thought is certainly conducive to that "perverse situation," described by Salecl, "in which a force presents itself as total horror, evil, and ... organizes the struggle against this image of evil, so that it can itself appear as the force which saved the nation from itself." 39 The discourse of responsibility for and in the war (however loosely invoked) is, on the other hand, a whole different matter. In the end, can some Ogre be blamed for all the horrors of the Bosnian carnage? Insofar as one might wish to answer this question affirmatively, one would then also be obliged to ask whether, after all, this Ogre is not merely a "given," objectively insurmountable ethnic antagonism (bound to, sooner or later, run amok) but, rather, the stubborn conviction, the paralyzing belief, in the ethnoessentialist myth of the "objective insurmountability" of national differences. Halil himself seems to voice the film's awareness of this when, outside the tunnel, he sarcastically asks Milan: "And who did [all these evil deeds]? Was it the Ogre from the tunnel, huh? Was it the Ogre, Milan?" Unfortunately, the "stroke offate"-the sudden death that subsequently befalls Halil-remains the sole response the film offers to his disturbing question.

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Contra Essentialism An ethnoe./ferent (as opposed to ethnocentric), purely visual, counterpoint to Pretty Village's sonorous construction of the ethnic other is staged in the finale of Muhamed HadzimehmedoviC's video drama After the Battle, produced in 1997 for Bosnian television. A Muslim and a badly wounded Serb, fighters in the opposed armies and each on the run from his enemy, cross paths somewhere in the hills of Bosnia. Despite their enmity, the Muslim helps the Serb (who is also a deserter). As the two slowly move on together, After the Battle uses parallel editing to show a sniper unit closing in on them, unaware that the Muslim soldier whom they are pursuing now has company. The last scene in the film depicts the Muslim burying his Serb companion, who died along the way, and marking his grave with an improvised cross. At precisely this point, the Serb unit catches up with him: as the sniper observes the soldier through the viewfinder of his gun, he hesitates to shoot him, for he is not certain which side his target belongs to. The soldier's uniform is bloody, making his military identifications impossible to make out. If the soldier is a Muslim, why is he marking the grave with a cross? What the viewer witnesses in this scene is the alignment of the sniper's perspective-visually conveyed by means of the cinematic point of view structure-with the gaze of ethnic hatred directed at the "other" (figs. 5.6, 5.7). And, as the sniper's puzzlement with what he sees suggests, the object of this hatred is first of all a fantasized other-an idea, a notion, mapped across the empirical reality, "superimposed" over the actual individuals existing in it. 40 The economy of ethnic hatred is, in other

FIGURE 5.6 After the Battle (Muhamed Hadzimehmedovic, 1997)

After the Battle (Muhamed Hadzimehmedovic, 1997)

FIGURE 5 .7

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words, grounded in the transferential operation whereby the evil, negative traits for which "we" hate "them" are projected onto, attributed to, the ethnic other. The danger from, and the repulsiveness of, the other's ethnicity represent the excess generated by the very agent casting the look at the other. In this sense the look precedes, and as such qualifies-ideologically colors-its own object. Another illustrative instance of this transferential relationship between the self and the other is also found in Pretty Village, in the scene in which a trapped Serb soldier loads his gun while addressing each individual bullet by a different Muslim name. By means of this naming procedure, the soldier seeks to reassure himself that the acousmatic voices he hears inside the tunnel do indeed originate with the concrete Ethnic Bodies outside. In After the Battle, however, it is the very visibility of the enemy/other, his final appearance and entrapment in the sniper's field of vision, that introduces uncertainty about his identity. And if, on the immediate narrative level, the film's ending leaves unresolved the fate of the Muslim fighter who has just buried his Serb companion-one never finds out if the sniper does or does not shoot him down-then it may be said that on a deeper, conceptual level, even before the trigger on the gun is or isn't pulled, Hadzimehmedovic clarifies another, arguably much more pressing, issue: no sniper, however piercingly accurate and far-reaching, will ever detect with absolute certainty, or properly capture inside its gaze, the evil Ethnic Enemy himself. As the real object of ethnic hatred, obsessively sought out by the sniper, this Enemy resides on the other side of the gun's viewfinder: in the "eye of the beholder." "I MYSELF AM WAR," as Georges Bataille once put it. An ethnoefferent orientation has also left its mark on Ademir KenoviC's 7he Perfect Circle (1997), the first Bosnian postwar feature, which tells the story of Hamza, a poet who refuses to leave the besieged Sarajevo even after his wife and daughter have departed. Rarely does this film point its finger directly at those who have occupied the city for three years, but when it does so, it strives to establish an explicit distinction between, on the one hand, ethnicity as a basically nonqualitative category, and, on the other hand, the excesses of ethnonationalist ideology. When the child refugee, who fled to Sarajevo with his deaf brother and found residence with Hamza, realizes that the poet's next-door neighbor is a

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Serb, the youth is puzzled: how can Hamza be friends with a "Chetnik"? The poet, however, explains to the boy: "The name does not make a Chetnik." "And what does?" asks the child. "The killing," responds Hamza. Except for this and a few other scenes, explicitly critical of NATO and the United Nations for limiting their involvement in Bosnia to the role of mere passive observers, The Perfect Circle is, however, primarily interested in putting forth as depoliticized and historically abstracted as possible a treatment of the human tragedy that Sarajevo was in the 1990s. How was it to be persistently forced to worry about securing enough food and drinking water? Or about finding ways to warm yourself up? Or about protecting yourself from the ever-present snipers? According to Kenovic the film is like "a dramatization of an inner novel that each one of us has lived through. That is why we insisted upon an entirely authentic, simple, human-interest story.... And that is why we avoided factography.... I wanted to make a film that would not be a documentary reconstruction, but perhaps a reconstruction of a certain feeling."41 At The Perfect Circle's Sarajevo premiere Elmedin Leleta-the younger of the film's two children protagonists-put the same point much more bluntly: "This film is for the foreigners to see how we felt [during the war]."42 Ironically, where this strategy of pronounced sociohistorical uprooting of the human interest story leads is not primarily toward offering a fresh insider's perspective on the siege of Sarajevo-an alternative, perhaps, to the Western media (notably CNN's) style of reporting, which frequently tended to deny the Bosnian civilians even a minimal sense of agency. Rather, The Perfect Circle comes across, at best, as a symptom of the fact that, as the siege went on, many inside Sarajevo did, indeed, begin to perceive themselves precisely the way the outside

world and its media tended to look on their existence in the surrounded city. That is, they began to assume the view of themselves as no more than the walking dead-as mere shooting targets made of flesh! The central character, Hamza, is certainly representative in this respect. Aimlessly wondering about the city, he drinks and obsessively fantasizes about hanging himself. The two refugee boys whom he "adopts" help him regain faith in life and find a new sense of purpose, but by the film's tragic ending-with one of the boys killed-faith and sense of purpose prove, once again, difficult to sustain. In an interview, made at

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the time when the scenario for the film had been finished but the shooting had not yet begun, one of The Perfect Circle's screenwriters, a wellknown Bosnian poet and dramaturge, Abdulah Sidran (who also wrote KenoviC's 1989 film Kuduz, as well as Kusturica's early works Dolly Bell and When Father Was Away), offered some remarks that speak precisely to this nihilism of the film's protagonist. The writer, whom Kenovic initially wanted to personally portray the character of the poet, emphasized the following: We are in a camp here, indeed, a unique concentratio~ camp. Those among us who had opportunities to leave and make outside contact with you, can see in your eyes that you feel as if you are talking to the dead. You ask us questions, but when we begin to answer we see that you are not listening, but rather wondering how come the dead can talk. So, we are in a camp, and the state of our spirit is that of resignation towards everything we believed in. A complete resignation: the world does not exist. 43 Eventually, the siege of Sarajevo came to an end, but its traumatic effects did not thereby simply dissolve. A short film by the talented young director Srdjan Vuletic, Hop, Skip, andjump (1999)-a story of an Olympic sharpshooter and her former trainer and lover who, as the war breaks out, find themselves on opposing sides: she among the besiegers of the city, he among the besieged-concludes with a depiction of a peculiarly

FIGURE 5.8

Hop, Skip, and jump (Srdjan Vuletic, 1999)

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disturbing type of situation, not infrequent in the postwar life of the Bosnian capital. After peace has been restored to Sarajevo, the two protagonists recognize each other as passengers on the same bus (fig. 5.8). In the streets of this fairly small city one could, then, occasionally cross paths with some of those whom one knew had been "privileged" during the war to gaze at it from the outside-with the aid of the binoculars or even the viewfinder of a gun. Apparatuses of death as technologies of spectatorship: "For men [and women} at war, the function ofthe weapon is the function of the eye." 44 From the high-angle establishing shots (panoramic vistas) of the city in the valley, to the detailing close-ups-fixed, panning, or tilting-which isolate the specific, discrete actions of the "superfluous" extras, the three-year-long voyeuristic extravaganza must have felt truly cinematic (like an instance of "interactive" or "living" cinema)! When the spectacle was over, some among its viewer-participants-like Hop, Skip, and jump's sharpshooting protagonist-obviously decided to step (back) into the picture itself. As if, otherwise, their inscription inside the picture's content would not have been properly recognized.

Post Scriptum

A NUMBER OF FILMS worthy of careful analysis have remained

outside the framework of this book. Many filmmakers associated with different epochs, currents, and trends have been merely mentioned in passing or not dealt with at all; but writing an exhaustive, all-encompassing history of cinema in the formerly Yugoslav lands never was the driving force behind this project. My objective has been much more modest: to focus on a select group of works in which ideological, sociopolitical, and cultural issues of relevance for the existence and subsequent disintegration of Yugoslavia have acquired pronounced aesthetic expression, a certain tangibility, one could say, in the material immediacy of the audio-visual form. What, then, of the various "regimes of truth," aspired to and generated by the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinematic practice? It is hardly surprising that among the films emerging during and in the immediate aftermath of the bloody fratricide, perspectives on national identity and interethnic relations in the region tend to be by no means unanimous; in fact, they are often radically opposed. When considering these films, however, I have attempted to avoid getting entangled in the delimitative categories of "national" cinemas, as the primary criteria for qualitative differentiation among the chosen works (after all, collaborations between directors, screenwriters, producers, actors, and film critics from

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Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro continued even as the federation fell apart, thus demonstrating the validity of the notion of a shared "South Slavic cultural space"). Instead, much of my analysis has concentrated on assessing the negative and harmful effects of ethnic nationalisms of all sorts, for it is this type of phobic and intolerant ideology that made possible the break up of Yugoslavia in the first place and the decline of its citizens' faith in other, less exclusive, types of identity. And if, in a broader context, the fall of state-socialism seems to have temporarily validated a widely endorsed ideational distrust in a certain ("communist") rhetoric of transnationalism and internationalism, then the new socioeconomic and political reality of the day-rapid globalization under the sign of sweeping, hegemonic multinational corporate expansion-seems, somewhat ironically perhaps, to have once again imposed on progressive thinking (artistic practice included) the necessity of reaching beyond the limits of the category of the "national-particular" as such. What future paths, what specific directions, the cinemas of the formerly Yugoslav lands will pursue remains to be seen. If one is to judge only by the first half of the initial postwar decade, new grounds are being broken fast, and fresh stylistic and thematic tendencies are rapidly emerging in the works of both younger and more seasoned authors (Pjer Zalica, Srdjan Vuletic, Jan Cvitkovic, Milutin PetroviC, Vinko Brdan, Danis Tanovic, Teona Strugar Mitevska, Milos RadivojeviC, Ognjen SviliCic, Damjan Kozole, Oleg NovkoviC, Rajko Grlic, Jasmila ZbaniC, and others). In place of a conclusion let this book, therefore, end with the evocation of an open and indeterminate, a "ground zero" and a "year zero," image, which both literally and figuratively seems to encapsulate the impossibly singular moment of transition from the Yugoslav to the postYugoslav cinema. A filmmaker is standing between the camera and a jarringly empty field. Pointing behind himself, he relates to the audience that the shot they are witnessing should have represented a park filled with trees, that would have stood behind him, if only it hadn't recently been totally transformed, practically erased, as a result of the grim imperatives of life in the times of war (all trees were cut down, and one immediately realizes why: to provide firewood and material to build coffins). 1 Horrific

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effects of mindless destruction are thus miraculously translated into a major cinematographic crisis. The relationship between the eye of the camera and the pro6lmic reality has been thoroughly destabilized. The cinematic referent has become slippery and unreliable. But filmmakers are already at work on reestablishing its coordinates ...

Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction 1. Branka Magas and Ivo Zanic, eds. Rat u Hrvatskoj i Bosni i Hercegovini I99I-I995 (Zagreb, Sarajevo: Naklada Jesenski and Turk/Dani, 1999), 376. 2. Ibid., 391. As Gyorgy Konrad also wrote in 1993: "Ex-Yugoslav and international political communities have accepted that civil rights proceed not from the constitution, but from one's ethno-national belonging. They thus also automatically accepted a systematic negation of the basic human rights. The political community determines its political terms with a common constitution. The nation is comprised of those who agreed on the constitution. Why did the political leaders of the European community accept, at the insistence of the Germans, the idea of an ethnically founded state? They were thus forced to simultaneously accept that, on the territory which it controls, the new national majority may discriminate and exercise repression against the national minorities" (Djerdj Konrad, Identitet i histerija [Novi Sad: Centar za multimedijalne akcije-Apostrof, 1995], 30). 3· The most extreme of these crimes would take place in the summer of 1995, when more than seven thousand Bosnian Muslims were systematically executed over the course of a few days in the vicinity of the town of Srebrenica. 4· Quoted in Boro Konric, "Crk'o nam mar5al," Dani, Feb. 28, 1995, 78. 5· Dubravka Ugrdic, The Culture ofLies (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 68. 6. See Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7· 7· As regards possible analogies between Balkanism and orientalism, it is also worth evoking the broader question of the postcolonial theory's (in-)applicability to the study of the Balkans, in general, and the (formerly) Yugoslav lands in particular. In her book Imagining the Balkans Maria Todorova offers a number of useful insights about this issue: It is not only a predisposition to historical specificity that makes me resistant to the conflation of historically defined, time-specific, and finite categories like colonialism and imperialism with broadly conceived and not historically circumscribed

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Notes to Pages 5-16

notions like power and subordination. For one, the formal difference is crucial in explaining why the Balkans have been left outside the sphere of discussion on orientalism and postcolonialism. But the real question is, even if included, whether the methodological contribution of subaltern and postcolonial studies (as developed for India and expanded and refined for Africa and Latin America) can be meaningfully applied to the Balkans .... To me, this is impossible, since the Balkans are Europe, are part of Europe, although, admittedly, for the past several centuries its provincial part or periphery. Todorova further points our that the relationship between the Balkans and the rest of Europe is an ambivalent one but that it also involves an investment of the Balkan cultures in certain forms of Eurocentrism. She suggests that the category of "semicolonial"-"meaningless as it is as a heuristic notion"-is, nonetheless, "indicative both of the perception and the self-perception of the Balkans insofar as it emphasizes their transitory character.... This in-betweenness of the Balkans [between the East and the West] ... could have made them simply an incomplete other; instead they are constructed not as other but as incomplete self" (Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 16-18). 8. Mihailo Markovic, introduction to Praxis: Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Methodology ofthe Social Sciences, ed. Mihailo Markovic and Gajo PetroviC (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), xii. 9· Slavoj ZiZek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 210-II. 10. Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129. u. Srdja Popovic, Put u varvarstvo (Belgrade: Helsinski odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2000), 222.

Chapter 1 r. For an excellent comparative analysis of the Serb and the Slovene nationalist platforms from the mid-198os, as outlined in the "Memorandum" and the "Contributions to the Slovene National Program," see Olivera Milosavljevic, "Jugoslavija kao zabluda," in Srpska strana rata: Trauma i katarza u istorijskom pamcenju, ed. Neboj5a Popov (Belgrade: Republika, 1996), 60-74. 2. Latinka Perovic, Ljudi, dogadjaji i knjige (Belgrade: Helsinski odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2000), 225-27. 3· Ibid., 9-18. 4· Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 66. 5· Zivojin Pavlovic, "Revolucija kao laz," in Djavolji film (Novi Sad: Prometej, 1996), 147-48.

Notes to Pages 17-29

167

6. As Pavlovic put it: "I think that I am not far from the truth when I claim that social critique was not what initially launched us into the adventure called filmmaking" (Djavolji film, 258-59). 7· For an elaborate discussion of the notion of "open metaphor," frequently employed by the New Film critics and theorists, see Slobodan Novakovic, Vreme otvaranja (Novi Sad: Kulturni centar, 1970). 8. Dusan Stojanovic, Velika avantura jilma (Belgrade: Institut za film, 1998), 84. 9· Ibid., 82. IO. Roy Armes, "Dusan Makavejev: Collage and Compilation," in 1he Ambiguous Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 203. n. Daniel J. Goulding, "Makavejev," in Five Filmmakers, ed. Daniel J. Goulding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 228. 12. Petar Ljubojev, Etika i estetika ekrana (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1997), 45-46. 13. As noted by Ljubojev in ibid., 94· 14. Goulding, "Makavejev," 227. 15. Wilhelm Reich, "The Materialist Discoveries of Psychoanalysis and Some Idealist Deviations," in Wilhelm Reich, Sex-Pol: Essays, I92~I9J4, ed. Lee Baxandall (New York: Random House, 1972), 19-20. 16. Ibid., 26. 17. A trademark of Makavejev's cinema, distinctly polyphonic sound montages can be found already in his early documentary shorts, such as Parade (1962), a behind-thescenes look at the preparations for an official May Day celebration, reminiscent of a mass-scale exercise in physical education. 18. Goulding, "Makavcjcv," 231. In one of the film's many memorable scenes Rcich's daughter, Eva Reich-Moise, sharply criticizes the communist regimes in the Eastern bloc. When Makavejev asks her (from behind the camera) what she thinks of the ''American dream," Reich-Moise swiftly replies: "Oh, the American dream is dead." 19. Goulding, "Makavejev," 232. 20. This is AlienS. Weiss's formulation, from his book Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 65-66. Let it be noted in passing that Makavejev's "antisemiotic" orientation also comes forth in his declared lack of sympathy for the school of film theory represented by the likes of Christian Metz. 21. Phillip Lopate and Bill Zavatsky, ''An Interview with Dusan Makavejev," in Dusan Makavejev, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (New York: Avon Books, 1972), 18. 22. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 239· 23. See ibid., 224-26; and Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 73-75· 24· Herbert Eagle, "Yugoslav Marxist Humanism and the Films ofDu5an Makavejev," in Politics, Art, and Commitment in the East European Cinema, ed. David W. Paul (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), 132.

168

Notes to Pages 29-35

25. Mihailo Markovic, introduction to Praxis, xxviii. 26. Gajo Petrovic, "The Philosophical Concept of Revolution," in Praxis: Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Methodology ofthe Social Sciences, ed. Mihailo Markovic and Gajo Petrovic (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 158. 27. Ljubomir Tadic, "Order and Freedom," in Self-Governing Socialism: A Reader, vol. r, Historical Development-Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Branko Horvat, Mi-

hailo Markovic, and Rudi Supek (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1975), 406. 28. Petrovic, "The Philosophical Concept of Revolution," r6o. 29. Pavlovic, "Revolucija kao laz," 260. Arguing against such an understanding of sociopolitical engagement, sociologist Milan Rankovic declared PavloviC's view of the revolution to be "fundamentally different" from Marx's own. See Milan Rankovic, Druitvena kritika u savremenom jugoslovenskom igranom jilmu (Belgrade: lnstitut za film, 1970), 24. 30. Robert Sitton, James Roy MacBean, Ernest Callenbach, "Fight Power with Spontaneity and Humor: An Interview with Dusan Makavejev," Film Quarterly 25, no. 2 (winter 1971 -72): 9· 31. Ibid., 7-8. 32. James Roy MacBean, "Sex and Politics," Film Quarterly 25, no. 3 (spring 1972): 13. 33· Dusan Makavejev, "Nevinost bez zastite," in JOO cuda (Belgrade: FilmforumSKC, 1988), r69 (emphasis added). 34· Armes, "Dusan Makavejev," 206. 35· Lopate and Zavatsky, "An Interview with Dusan Makavejev," 22 (emphasis added). 36. And re Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. r (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), J6. 37· On this point see Annette Michelson's essay, "Reading Eisenstein Reading Ulysses," Art and Text 34 (spring 1989). 38. Reich himself emphasized that each individual's acceptance of responsibility is the necessary condition of their freedom. See, for instance, Listen, Little Man! (New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974). 39· On this point see also Raymond Durgnat, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 63, 68, 69. 40. In this respect it is interesting to note what, according to Zilnik himself, is a key difference between the protagonists of Early Works-a group of young, dogmatic revolutionary idealists who engage (and ultimately fail) in agitational work in the rural Serbia-and those libertarian characters typically found in the films of his former mentor, Makavejev: "Politics is for Makavejev a biographical complex, a fact from the character's biography, whereas for me politics is a profession and an ambition. Protagonists ofMakavejev's films play with taboos and social symbols; in my film these symbols

Notes to Pages 35-45

169

are the characters' everyday props. They like them, and they use them" (Quoted in Petar Jonch\ Filmski jezik Zelimira Zilnika [Belgrade: SKC, 2002], 50). 41. See Zivojin Pavlovic,jezgro napetosti (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1990), 55, 59· 42· The "trilogy" marked the peak of the first half of PavloviC's prolific career. Between 1963, when 1he Return was shot (held back for release until 1966, for painting "too dark" a picture of the Belgrade crime world), and 1998, when death interrupted the completion of the project entitled The State ofthe Dead (released posthumously in 2003), he made fourteen feature-length films. 43· Arthur Penn is said to have paraphrased this scene in his 1975 film The Missouri Breaks. John Schlesinger, who saw the film in New York, also claimed that it inspired his Midnight Cowboy (1969). 44· Zivojin Pavlovic, "Covek i zivot" and "Antiheroj, rat, moral, seksualna revolucija," both included in Pavlovic, Djavolji film, 226-28, 240-41. 45· Nebojsa PajkiC, jahac na lokomotivi: Razgovori sa Zivojinom Pavlovicem (Belgrade: SKC, 2001), 94· 46. Critics like Pajkic, Nenad Polimac, and Dinko Tucakovic also praised When I Am Dead and Pale as a work that thematically and narratively anticipated the countercultural developments in the New Hollywood cinema. 47· Branislav Dimirrijevic, "Sufrazetkinje, radodajke i lazne trudnice," and Goran Gocic, "Pevac i pevacica: izazov i restauracija poretka," both included in: Kad budem mrtav i beo (Belgrade: Institut za film, 1997). 48. Pavlovic,jezgro napetosti, 51. 49· Srdjan VuCinic, "Barka koja nije Nojeva," in Kad budem mrtav i beo, 75· 50. See Pajkic,jahac na lokomotivi, 94-95. 5L Pavlovic, "Dva surova filma," in Djavoiji film, 82. 52. Pavlovic, "Putevi ma5te," in Djavoiji film, 128. 53· Sergei Eisenstein, "Montage of Attractions," in Eisenstein, The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), 230-33. 54· Pavlovic, "Drasticna filmska slika," in Djavolji film, 8o-8r. 55· Eisenstein, "Montage of Attractions," 231-32. 56. Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 149-50. 57· Pavlovic, "Covek i Zivot," 229. 58. Pavlovic, "Rdija je materijalizacija licnih opsesija," in Djavolji film, 268. 59· Sergei Eisenstein, "The Montage of Film Attractions," in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), 47· 6o. Sasa Radojevic, "Smrt na poslu," in Kad budem mrtav i beo, 55· 6r. Vladimir JoviCic, '"Crni talas' u nasem filmu," Borba, Aug. 3, 1969. For a pronounced critique of the "black wave," which also seeks to distantiate itself from JoviCiC's "na"ive and undocumented" attack, see Milutin Colic, "'Crni film' ili kriza 'autorskog'

170

Notes to Pages 45-51

filma," Filmska kultura 71 (June 1970). 62. Quoted in Pavlovic, Djavolji film, 260. 63. Stojanovie's recent project was a collaboration with Pave! Pawlikowski on the latter's Serbian Epics (1995), a BBC-produced documentary portrait ofRadovan KaradziC, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs. This film includes some footage of anthological value, depicting Karadzic taking a walk in the mountains surrounding Sarajevo and reciting poetry (for, besides being a politician, he is also a poet, as well as a psychiatrist), while his forces maintain their merciless shelling of the city. 64. Lazar Stojanovic, interview by Pavle Levi, New York, March 1996. Similarities between certain Nazi and Communist rituals have also attracted Makavejev. In his 1992 production Gorilla Bathes at Noon he incorporates a sequence from Mikhail Chiaureli's 7he Fall ofBerlin (another well-known Soviet cinematic monument to Stalin) to call attention to this film's resemblance to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph ofthe Will. Both works introduce the Leader-Stalin and Hitler, respectively-as a messianic figure whose descension from the sky (in a plane) is captured by the camera. 65. In Plastic Jesus the cut may be said to frequently function according to Gilles Deleuze's model of the "montage interstice." Reflecting on the film practice ofJean-Luc Godard (a figure of great importance for many New Film authors, including Makavejev, Pavlovic, and Stojanovic), Deleuze writes: [T]he question is no longer that of the association or attraction of images. What counts is on the contrary the interstice between images, between two images .... Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new...." (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: 7he Time-Image [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 179-80) 66. StojanoviC, interview (see note 64 above). 67. Ibid. 68. In 1972 the leading Croatian politician, Savka Dabcevic-Kucar, made it clear that "[t]he difference is that we [Croatian republican authorities] see our full national

affirmation and strengthening of equality only on a platform of self-management socialism and ... in the context of socialist Yugoslavia. They [the extreme nationalists] are outside of that. That is the line of demarcation" (Quoted in Ante Cuvalo, Croatian National Movement [New York: East European Monographs, 1990], 165). See also Miko Tripalo, Hrvatsko proljeee (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), 8-9, 93, 231. 69. Aleksandar Nenadovic, Mirko Tepavac: Seeanja i komentari (Belgrade: Radio B92, 1998), 79· 70. Ibid., 149.

Notes to Pages 52-64

171

71. According to Stojanovic, during the trial the prosecution even claimed that the director had organized people (his production crew) to make a film aimed at overthrowing the Yugoslav regime. 72. On the other hand, Zagreb Praxis-ists mostly proved successful in resisting the contemporary awakening of ethnic nationalism. See Milan Kangrga's book, Sverceri vlastitog iivota (Belgrade, Split: Republika and Feral Tribune, 2001-2002). 73· See Zagorka Golubovic, "Nisu svi oblici socijalizma propali," Republika 14142 (June 1996); Zagorka GoluboviC, Milan Podunavac, Natasa Milojevic, Srecko Mihajlovic, and Nebojsa Popov, "Razborito o levici i socijalizmu," Republika 273 (Nov. 2001); and Nebojsa Popov, ed. Sloboda i nasilje (Belgrade: Res Publica, 2003). See also Miladin Zivotic, Contra bellum (Belgrade: Beogradski krug, AKAPIT, 1997), 35-54, 231-56; Perovic, Ljudi, dogadjaji i knjige, 65, I4o-4I, I56; and Tripalo, Hrvatsko proljeie, 90-9!. 74· Stojanovic, interview (see note 64 above) 75· Ibid. 76. Slavoj ZiZek, The Sublime Object ofIdeology (New York: Verso, 1989), 105. 77· Ibid. Zizek defines symbolic identification as identification with the place, or the point, "from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likable, worthy of love" in the image we assume.

Chapter 2 r. I partially rely here on Daniel Goulding's impressive systematization of the 1980s Yugoslav cinema, developed in his book Liberated Cinema and in the essay "Yugoslav Film in the Post-Tiro Era," included in his edited volume Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 2. Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 145. 3· This point is splendidly developed by Bozidar ZeceviC in Gitanje svetla (Belgrade: Prosveta, Prometej, 1994), 150-53. 4· The original spelling of"New Primitivs" is without an e. 5· "Dr." Karajlic also jokingly points out the existence of the "architectural branch" of the movement: "There are some new primitivs even in architecture, although they are only theorists. Their ideals are such projects that make it explicitly clear where the doors and the windows should be located, so that a person can feel like he/she is living in a house, not in some, god forbid, space shuttle" (Nelle Karajlic, "Neue primitivism us za pocetnike," Lica, Nov. 1987, 8). 6. Nermina Zildzo, "Sjecam se ... ," in Catalogue for the Exhibition "Sarajevo New Primitivs" (Sarajevo: Art Gallery of Bosnia-Herzegovina, March 1990), n.p. 7· Milena Dragicevic-Sdic, "Laibach i Zabranjeno pusenje-dva pola rok alternative," in Dragicevic-Sdic, Umetnost i alternativa (Belgrade: FDU, 1992), 174. 8. Karajlic, "Neue primitivismus za pocernike," 8.

172

Notes to Pages 66-73

9· For a perceptive analysis of the New Primitivist "appropriation" ofKrvavac's cinema see Bogdan Tirnanic, "Das ist Sarajevo," in Catalogue for the Exhibition "Sarajevo New Primitivs," n.p. 10. I draw here on what Fredric Jameson, in his book on Adorno, theorizes as that "fundamental operation whereby the concept can be retained and dereified all at once." And further: "What the concept cannot say must somehow, by its imperfection, be registered within it (just as the monadic work of art must somehow 'include' its outside, its referent, under pain of lapsing into decorative frivolity)" (Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic [London: Verso, 1990], 26, 30). 1r. Zildzo, "Sjecam se ... ," n.p. 12. Ibid. 13. Alma Lazarevska, for example, argues along those lines, pointing out that during the second "surrealist television campaign," it so happened once that a prime-time news anchor announced TLS as next on the program. According to Lazarevska this announcement was symptomatic of the fact that "the former enfants terribles of Radio Sarajevo have become part of the hard-core establishment" (Alma Lazarevska, "Strijelac ... zove kondora," in Catalogue for the Exhibition "Sarajevo New Primitivs," n.p.). 14. Milena Dragicevic-Se5ic, Neofolk kultura (Sremski Karlovci: Izdavacka Knjizarnica Zorana Stojanovica, 1994), 224. 15. Ibid., 185. 16. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 147. 17. Ibid. 18. Georges Bataille, "Surrealism and How It Differs from Existentialism," in lhe Absence ofMyth, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), 64-66. 19. Jacques Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve," in Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Batting and Scott Wilson (Maiden: Blackwell, 1998), 128. 20. Denis Hollier, "Surrealist Precipitates," in October: lhe Second Decade, I985-I996, ed. Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 21. The "reconciliation of the opposites" that is at stake here concerns, of course, the "highest point" of surrealism, defined by Andre Breton as "a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions" (see Andre Breton, "Second Manifesto of Surrealism," in Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972], 13). 21. See Hollier, "Surrealist Precipitates," u. 22. Valerie Rohy, "Displacing Desire: Passing, Nostalgia, and Giovanni's Room," in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 219.

Notes to Pages 73-80

173

23. Elaine K. Ginsberg, "Introduction: The Politics of Passing," in Passing and the Fictions ofIdentity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 4· 24· In its original meaning Lacan's neologism nullibiquite conveys the simultaneous "nonexistence" and "omnipresence" of the phallus. See Marcelle Marini, jacques Lacan: The French Context (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 56-57. 25. I am thankful to Branislav Jakovljevic for reminding me of these New Primitivist "incidents." 26. At one point the New Primitivs even benevolently parodied the explicitly politicized character ofNSK. They published a mock manifesto entitled "Neue Primitivismus" (quoted earlier), reminiscent of NSK's programmatic pamphlets, posters, and speeches. 27. Ognjen Tvrtkovic, "Pet stoljeca novog primitivizma," Lica, Nov. 1987, 12. 28. Jacques Lacan, "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis," in Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 1977), 179-221. See also Renata Salecl, The Spoils ofFreedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 99-104. 29. Franc;:ois Regnault succinctly explains the link between the "Name of the Father" (the Lacanian concept for the "dead" symbolic authority) and psychosis: "It is when such a name or signifier proves to be missing that something is 'our of joint,' to borrow Hamlet's expression. This is why Lacan asserts that the very structure of psychosis is what he calls a foreclosure (an exclusion or elimination) of the Name of the Father. Something does not fit" (see Franc;:ois Regnault, "The Name of the Father," in Reading Seminar XI, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Pink, and Maire Jaanus [Albany: SUNY Press, 1995], 69-70; see also Lacan, "On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis," in Ecrits, 215). 30. As is often the case with the New Primitivist neologisms, the word omleeivanje is entirely meaningless and therefore cannot be translated. 31. In this section I follow ZiZek's discussion ofphallophany-his reading ofLacan's notion of the "unveiled phallus." See Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge, 1992), 124-31. 32. Writes Lacan: "[The phallus] can play its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier. The phallus is the signifier of this Aujhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance. That is why the demon of AtO(J)~ (Scham, shame) arises at the very moment when, in the ancient mysteries, the phallus is unveiled (cf. the famous painting in the Villa di Pompei)" (Jacques Lacan, "The signification of the phallus," in Ecrits, 288). 33· Ibid. 34· As the viewer eventually finds out, the "sucking of the wooden pole" is supposed to be not only a Yugoslav cultural phenomenon but a truly international practice: it is, for instance, suggested at some point in the show that the same ritual is also regularly performed in Paris!

174

Notes to Pages 81-92

35· Slavoj Zizek, "Hegel's 'Logic of Essence,"' in The Zizek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, I999), 245· 36. Rohy, "Displacing Desire," 226-27 (emphasis added). 37· Ugrdic, The Culture ofLies, I36-37. 38. Ivan Colovic, Politika simbola (Belgrade: XX vek, 2000), 70. 39· "No one had asked directly that this material be cut our. However, expectations for the same to be done were 'in the air' all the while. So that the whole operation would seem to have a democratic foresign, it was set up as if the authors' themselves should 'decide' what to show and what not to show to the public. Frankly speaking, the Surrealists were to decide themselves what [materials] to ban!" (Kontic, "Crk'o nam marsal," 79, 82). 40. Ibid., 82.

Chapter 3 I. Benjamin Halligan has recently suggested an interesting connection between Kusturica's cinema and the "naive art" of the former Yugoslavia-a connection that I, unlike Halligan, do not see as irreconcilable with the designation of the filmmaker's oeuvre as "magic realist." See Benjamin Halligan, "An Aesthetic of Chaos," in The Celluloid Tinderbox, ed. Andrew James Horton (Central Europe Review, 2000), 67-70. This online book can be found at http://www.kinoeye.org/o3/ro/celluloidtinderbox.pdf. 2. Fredric Jameson, "On Magic Realism in Film," Critical Inquiry I2, no. I (winter 1986): 30!. 3· Ibid., 3II. 4· Zecevic, Citanje svetla, 159. 5. Ibid., 196. 6. Jean-Fran