Emir Kusturica

Giorgio Bertellini

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780252080449, 9780252038891
• eBook ISBN: 9780252096853
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Emir Kusturica is one of Eastern Europe's most celebrated and influential filmmakers. Over the course of a thirty-year career, Kusturica has navigated a series of geopolitical fault lines to produce subversive, playful, often satiric works. On the way he won acclaim and widespread popularity while showing a genius for adjusting his poetic pitch--shifting from romantic realist to controversial satirist to sentimental jester.
 
Leading scholar-critic Giorgio Bertellini divides Kusturica's career into three stages--dissention, disconnection, and dissonance--to reflect both the historic and cultural changes going on around him and the changes his cinema has undergone. He uses Kusturica's Palme d'Or winning Underground (1995)--the famously inflammatory take on Yugoslav history after World War II--as the pivot between the tone of romantic, yet pungent critique of the director's early works and later journeys into Balkanist farce marked by slapstick and a self-conscious primitivism.
 
Eschewing the one-sided polemics Kusturica's work often provokes, Bertellini employs balanced discussion and critical analysis to offer a fascinating and up-to-date consideration of a major figure in world cinema.

The Art of a Romantic Trickster

Quand je pense à la Yougoslavie, c’est la Bosnie qui est dans mon coeur.

—Emir Kusturica, “L’acacia de Saraevo”

The end of the cold war and of the dichotomous framework of East versus West radically altered the geopolitical landscape of Europe. This change resonated vigorously east of the Iron Curtain. Facing enormous institutional and civic challenges, former Communist regimes began to transition to democratic and quasi-democratic statehood, while cultural productions, including art and popular cinema, had to articulate new categories of aesthetic legitimacy and relevance.

Before 1989, several Eastern European filmmakers had gained fame and appreciation at home, abroad, and then back again at home, in the context of what in the West were known as New Waves. The expressions conveyed radical and self-reflexive poetic revisions in the context of a new aesthetic commitment. The application of the New Wave category to the East added an overt political dimension, one relying on ideas of opposition, freedom of expression, and personal vision, which often translated into anti-authoritarian dissidence—whether in the form of biting Czech humor, Polish moral commitment, or Hungarian artistic ambition. In the 1990s, as film production in Eastern Europe declined sharply, this aesthetic charter became obsolete. In the last two decades, not only have new kinds of films emerged, but their selective circulation in the West has also promoted a fresh critical platform. For instance, a whole new generation of filmmakers from Romania (Christi Puiu, Christian Mungiu, and Radu Muntean) and the Czech Republic (Jan Hrebejk, Jan Sverak, and David Ondricek) have become known for their uncompromising revisionist narratives and the blunt realism of their treatment of daily life, amid the vicious inertia of state corruption, new criminal violence, and the devastating effects of an imported neoliberal economy. If the cinema of the Second World had been characterized by acrobatic moves between ideological officialdom and personal expression—regularly admired and romanticized in the West by the likes of the Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight and Sound, and Cineforum, among others—post-1989 cinema in Eastern Europe has often revealed the emergence of a new palette of aesthetic colors, ranging from realist aesthetics to irreverent Balkan poetics, to cite two polar opposites. The same new palette implies different authorial positions.

If a poetics of realism often postulates the notion of the engaged author—namely, that of the responsible and visionary chronicler of modern social ills—the Balkan mantle is far more complicated and perhaps not easily, or solely, conducive to the idea of personal expression. It impinges upon notions of geopolitical and anthropological alterity that the West has endorsed and cultivated for decades before World War II (and even before the emergence of motion pictures) and that reemerged with dramatic and renewed cogency during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Absorbed and processed within the Balkan borders, over the years such alterity has found translation into a range of (self-)othering audiovisual and narrative strategies whose radical and even experimental fabric has hovered over that of individual, spontaneous authorship.

Generationally and critically, Emir Kusturica (b. 1954) is the most renowned filmmaker associated both with the old cold war’s divide and its post-1989 aftermath. His work emerged out of a context that proved to be resiliently unlike any other within the Eastern European bloc. For decades during the cold war, the Yugoslav Federation held a sort of progressive primacy in the eyes of eastern and western observers due to its peculiar history of anti-Stalinism and loose travel policy, unique among Communist countries. In the 1990s, the Yugoslav exception turned horrific with the country’s explosive disintegration, prompting the return of the term “balkanization” from the political vocabulary of the early twentieth century, and, most dramatically, with the campaigns of ethnic cleansing—unprecedented since World War II.

As one of few directors capable of thriving before and after 1989 (and between East and West), Kusturica appears to have adjusted his poetic pitch multiple times—from romantic revisionist to daring satirist and, finally, “obscene” and sentimental jester—just as critics on both sides of the Iron Curtain have felt compelled to reassess their judgment about his work. In reality, as this volume seeks to show, his productions and activities have revolved around a poetic core that, in a dialogue with pressing historical occurrences, has undergone an expansion in terms of public political engagement and intermedial reach without altering itself. His poetic imprints reveal what I would term an untimeliness or unmodernity—a penchant for characters eloquently out of sync and out of place with their native cultural environment and with western modernity, operating against the dogmas of historical determinism, and in intimate relationship with nature and themselves. Formally, Kusturica has articulated such poetics of existential dissidence and exile, beginning with his professional upbringing away from home at the FAMU film school in Prague, through a constant engagement with rather experimental, and originally subversive, aesthetic models, drawn from his reception of Hollywood and European art cinema, Yugoslav nihilistic filmmaking (Black or Novi cinema), and a distinctly Bosnian performative tradition that, while indebted to avant-garde practices, also pervaded popular music shows as well as radio and television broadcasting. The result has been a proclivity for provocative political revisionism, a resilient ambivalence toward western modernity, and a devotion to the condition of the cultural expatriate, infused with romanticism and Bakhtinian humor, but also a good dose of poetic solipsism.

Within this critical hypothesis, I would concede that history has certainly affected Kusturica’s cinema and more broadly his multidimensional authorship in terms of thematic concerns and audiovisual approach—particularly in terms of his use of slapstick comedy, Balkan music, and surreal lyrics. Yet, I would also emphasize the productive critical stance of reading changes as stemming from, and thus readable through, his poetic imprint and not directly caused by historical occurrences. The result is that his oeuvre speaks to resilient questions of art and popular cinema in an epoch of massive geopolitical transitions and related critical recastings.

The obvious test of any broad interpretation of Kusturica’s work is the controversial film Underground (1995), released during the Bosnian war. In the polarizing context of the Balkan conflicts, Kusturica’s stunning and inflammatory take on Yugoslav history since World War II provoked a poisonous domestic and international controversy, particularly after the film received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Infuriated detractors alleged that in its perverse historiographical interpretation, the film irresponsibly disconnected the cause of the recent Yugoslav wars from Slobodan Milosević’s actual actions while shielding them underneath the critical discourse of “Balkanism.” A well-known geopolitical and cultural concept, Balkanism consists of a deviously antihistorical intellectual tradition that before and after the cold war has projected violent instincts, primitivism, joie de vivre, and political irresponsibility onto the Balkan Peninsula and its populations.¹

In very different ways, the film’s boorish and hypereroticized protagonists, a manipulative Serbian and a big-hearted Montenegrin, continue to fight an imaginary Nazi occupation long after the end of World War II—indeed, until the end of the cold war. Marko, the Serbian, does so through vulgar propaganda while holding high office in the party. Blacky continues his fight while hiding underground from what he is led to believe is a prolonged and atrocious German occupation. What they share is a cartoonish and satirized anachronism, which points to the backward-looking foundations of Yugoslavia’s post–World War II national ideology, which lasted for forty years until ethnic divisions erupted. Beyond diegetic illusions and manipulations, the film stirred intense divisions and controversies due to its treatment of Bosnians and Croatians and created an irreparable wedge between the director and his native Sarajevo.

I would argue that the trope of Balkanism, which explained the fascination and horror for the film’s primitive violence and passions, may also apply to the rest of Kusturica’s work. It may cast a light on his earlier films’ appeal, in terms of their ethnic exoticism and Balkanic unmodernity, as well as on his later works and activities, as a conduit for his off-screen performances and engagement with geopolitical questions. Over the course of three decades, and in conjunction with dramatic historical changes, Kusturica’s Balkanist poetics has undergone tonal changes, expanded its reach, and elicited very different types of reception. Yet, I would argue that it has changed more fate than form.

In this volume I thus divide Kusturica’s career into three stages, which I term Dissention, Disconnection, and Dissonance. His unmodernity first appeared suggestive and inspirational as subversive dissention when associated with the fictional lives of defiant children and adolescents raised in Communist Yugoslavia (Do You Remember Dolly Bell? [1981]; When Father Was Away on Business [1985]), of unruly Gypsies attached to their myths and lifestyles (Time of the Gypsies [1989]), and of melancholy Americans refusing to grow up and at odds with the American dream (Arizona Dream [1992]). In the mid-1990s, with the release of Underground during the Yugoslav wars, the hard-to-presume innocence of the Balkanist untimeliness revealed to many an obscene disconnection from reality. Was the film a historical allegory, pointing to and unmasking the manipulations that were at the core of Yugoslav nationalism? Or was it skillful Serbian propaganda, operating through an overidentification with proud Balkan primitivism that supported the Serbian-as-Yugoslav political manipulations? In brief, was the film subversive of nationalism or deviously nationalistic? If with his previous works Kusturica had appeared as a skilled dissenter, for many with Underground he became a defector.

In the third, post-Underground phase of his film career, Kusturica has continued to show exceptional cinematic imagination, but he also has become many other things—musician and city planner, to name a few—mostly by fully embracing the dissonant poetics of Homo Balkanicus. This, in retrospect, has defied his own claim of having allegorically deployed a Balkanist aesthetic in Underground against his detractors’ charge of overidentification with it. In his later productions he naturalizes his Balkanist poetics by presenting ethnicized narratives, musical motifs, and costumes as if their representation were situated outside any political sphere and perspective. He has begun what I would term a “Balkanist drift” by furthering two interrelated cinematic strategies already deployed in his earlier works: broad comedy and ethnic music. His post-1995 feature-length films, Black Cat, White Cat (1998), Life Is a Miracle (2004), and Promise Me This (2007), as well as his shorter works Super 8 Stories (2001) and Maradona by Kusturica (2008), have made ample and irreverent use of slapstick humor and horseplay, including mockery and tricksterism, and a wide range of both original and rearranged Balkan songs. His films have continued to win awards but, with one exception, not the most prestigious ones. Black Cat, White Cat won, among other prizes, a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, but his other films have not garnered awards comparable to the ones collected until the mid-1990s. Kusturica has expanded his presence in the media beyond film production, however: he has increased his acting roles, especially in Italian, Russian, and French films; he has entered into film production and city planning; and, most succesfully, he has begun a musical career as a performer and, at times, even a songwriter.²

The director’s Balkan poetics has even assumed demiurgic traits. One of Kusturica’s most important enterprises has been the planning and construction of a village known as Drvengrad (Wooden Village) or Küstendorf (Coastal Village), which was erected almost from nothing on the hills of Mokra Gora in Mećavnik, Western Serbia, near the border with Bosnia. The village emerged out of the set of Life Is a Miracle, which tells the story of an idealistic engineer who is building a railroad that will link Bosnia with Serbia and is often seen playing with a scale model of the local countryside that he obviously adores. As a brick-and-mortar reification of the film’s fictional universe and, more broadly, of Kusturica’s poetic stance, Küstendorf tells of an authorial expansion so conflating of art and life that in 2005, in a long profile in the New York Times Magazine, Kusturica described the village as “the best film he has ever made.”³ From Küstendorf have originated a series of holistic initiatives (preservation of artisanal, culinary, and musical traditions) and diverse manifestations with didactic and promotional aims, including a film school and an international film and music festival.

When read through Hans Georg Gadamer’s notion of the “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte), according to which the cultural density of the present determines the perception of past phenomena, these later developments may stimulate us to revise, without disproving, earlier readings of Kusturica’s work.⁴ Particularly cogent is the question of Kusturica’s expanded authorship, beginning with his complex relationship with music and music performance, which paradoxically brings us back to the beginning, to the dissenting culture of 1980s Sarajevo.

Music, and sound in general, is not an addendum to Kusturica’s film poetics and, more broadly, authorial cipher. Rather than mere accompaniment, music and music performances have informed the texture of the films themselves, and later they have extended the life of his cinema onto actual stages. As a continuation of his films by other, often more daring means, music has actually defined his poetics—locally, nationally (until Yugoslavia existed), and internationally, to the point that it is possible to tell the story of his career by focusing on the score he has chosen and the musicians that he has elected to surround himself with.

Up until Underground, Kusturica had collaborated with the Sarajevo-born musician Goran Bregović, the former leader of one of the most celebrated Yugoslav groups, the Bijelo Dugme (White Button), widely known for his unique talent in blending Bosnian ballads (sevdah) with Macedonian and Hungarian melodies, Gypsy music, and techno-rock. Popularized by Kusturica’s films, a few of these songs became soccer anthems and thus acquired unyielding ethnic and national currency. After a public falling-out with Bregović in 1995, Kusturica became much more invested in the scoring of his films and joined the Belgrade-based band the No Smoking Orchestra (originally from Sarajevo) as a guitarist. Not only has Kusturica worked with the No Smoking Orchestra on the soundtrack of all his post-1995 films, he has led the band on world tours (Side Effects in 1999; Collateral Damages in 2000; Life Is a Miracle Tour in 2004) and played in more than a hundred concerts, which he later documented in the film Super 8 Stories and in the DVD Live Is a Miracle in Buenos Aires (2005). In 2007 he staged the opera Time of the Gypsies at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, with the No Smoking Orchestra providing the music.

His affiliation with the No Smoking Orchestra has affected his poetics and revealed ex post facto the appeal of his earlier films. The fact that the band achieved a most visible prominence in his cinema after Underground should not be taken as a sign of a later influence. Kusturica’s poetics of unmodernity and untimeliness is markedly indebted to a group of vanguard artists called New Primitives from which the No Smoking Orchestra originated.

After the death of Tito in 1980, certain sectors of the Bosnian youth culture developed a poetics of ironic rebellion, alteratively juvenile and eloquent; they also adopted a primitivism of customs and street language as a preferred performative strategy. All this was done in an inventive way, mixing familiar avant-garde experimentations with the multicultural localism of Sarajevo and the Bosnian dialect (both of which had for decades been regarded in Yugoslavia as signs of backwardness and provincialism), used as a vehicle of Balkan irreverence. From this environment emerged a movement of artists, playwrights, singers, performers, and musicians known as the New Primitives (also spelled “Primitivs”). Initially interested in experimental narration and in a derisory automystification through rock music, the “primitives” also turned to poetry and to video art. The New Primitives and Kusturica shared the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Art of A Romantic Trickster
• Interviews With Emir Kusturica: A Montage
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index