NEVENA DAKOVIC

Assoc. prof. of Film Theory

Dept. of Theory and History

University of Arts

Belgrade

Yugoslavia

 

 

 

 

 

 

YUGOSLAV WARS: BETWEEN MYTH AND REALITY

 

The concern of this paper is the analysis of the cinematic representations of the Yugoslav wars in three films chosen as the case studies: Pretty Village Pretty Flame (Lepa sela lepo gore, d. Srdjan Dragojevic, 1996, Yugoslavia), Savior (d. Predrag Antonijevic, 1998, USA) and Beautiful People (d. Jasmin Dizdar, 1999, UK). The films made in successive years, in different countries[1] deal with the same topic - Bosnian war taken as the paradigm of the Balkan situation and string of Yugoslav conflicts. The emphasis is on the examination of the cross-cultural imaginings (and explanations) of the war that unravel within different cinematic, cultural and ideological contexts; and involve the processes of the imagining of the (antagonist) Other as different national entity or allegorical figure of Destiny. Thus, first I would particularly investigate the ways the war interpretational concepts depend on the imagining of the Other; how they are influenced by the centuries of the othering of the Balkans by the various communities.[2] Second the paper would explore the dialectics of creating of the visions of own nationhood and national identity and that of the other, different - enemy. The cinematic othering is thus built upon diversity of the Balkan/ex-Yugoslav[3] national entities, their tense relations observed by the rest of the world (outsider/insider controversy narratively structures Beautiful People and Savior..) or as seen by the Balkan countries themselves (interBalkan case as in Beautiful People or even othering between different representatives of one nation as in Pretty Village..). However the hostile Other is not defined exclusively through national differences, but also through whole array of additional shifting identities (gender, class, education, temperament etc.) that move the explanations of war into the domains of myth, psychoanalysis, morality play etc.. For the purpose of this paper the range of interpretational discourses is provisionally defined through binarism reality vs. myth or specifically but clumsy reality of nations vs. myth of Destiny.[4]

 

 

 

Ethnic Realism

In the media promoted, popular and simplified perception- that tended to dominate in the real social framework - the Balkan conflicts are explained as the revival of the eternal, atavistic ethnic strains that escalate into the raging wars. The ultimate aim of ex Yugoslav conflicts is the formation of new /old nation states built upon past tradition and recognition of the insurmountable differences artificially erased during the firm rule of Josip Broz Tito. Trying to assemble the cause-effect chain that lead to Yugoslav break- up the governments place an extreme emphasis on the national history. Justifying the latest Balkan butchery analysts and politicians revive and reinterpret the past that explains the wars; serves as a model for the future and inspiration for the present. Reaching for power, nation states seek to authenticate new old tradition of the nation 'within evolutionary ethnic framework' (Smith:48) i.e. to build the multifaceted myth of nationhood and national identity revealed to be the spiritus movens of the whole thing. The nationalist, belligerent politics is supported by the instrumentalised, politicized versions of history, culture, arts. Constantly mobilized arguments about geographical heterogeneity (II Yugoslavia encompass republics situated both on the Balkans and in central Europe), existence of five nations, numerous minorities, three religions, tradition of six sovereign entities, four languages, two alphabets all confirm profound differences suppressed during II Yugoslavia. The death of II Yugoslavia is, thus, the prerequisite for the return to historical democratic independence of the nation-states, while the ethnic wars are imposed as the unfortunate way of achieving that.

 

Widely accepted nationalist framework is also the front that masks other equally truthful reasons of conflict: the will for power and economic autonomy of the local leaders. The complex paradigm of the Balkan clashes is described in terms of the battle for autonomy, identity and power; conflict accompanied by a growing awareness of national identity. Thus there was any number of reasons to expect the clear conversion of ethic into ethnic in cinema as well as in all other medias. In fact, we should witness, as many times before representations of different nations as warring parties, as positive vs. negative characters.[5] Fortunately this did not happen since film directors felt it impossible to take sides, nobly refusing to join in the shallow propaganda of nationalist hysteria which became a self-inflicted trap for the mass media.

 

 

Mythical concept

In Belgrade, the films refusing to unconditionally accommodate overemphasized war-nation discourse escape into other genres, like comedy or melodrama. If they choose to remain within the genre of war film they offer the mythologized and mythical image of war - as force of destiny or unavoidable evil to come - privileging home-coming stories and global human tragedy. Some of the colloquial references to the war in the region are: War is Balkan Destiny; War as Balkan Curse; tribal clash in the III world corner of the I world; War is like virus says the doctor diagnosing the conflicts as endemic Balkan disease (Before the Rain, d. Milcho Manchevski, 1994). Instead of the historical myth of nationhood, the films provide the cosmopolitan mythology of war as ancient, perennial evil of all multicultural environments (and not only of the threshold of Europe). The Balkans (and Yugoslavia) are like powder keg that regularly explodes every fifty years in a new war which breaks out according to unwritten rules. It is impossible to stop, escape or postpone them. In these wars everyone is victim and there are no winners or losers. The population could be described as 'Unfortunate people in the time of evil' (Selenic) while the films support the stanza of the essential humanism, universal suffering, profound antiwar sentiment. Blame and culpability are placed on many shoulders, those of corrupted and evil politicians, on profiteers and primarily on prewritten destiny. Films as texts of denials and doubt point the finger, tragically and melodramatically, at the spectrum of forces beyond the comprehension or control of the main characters. The enemy is not the other nation but the doomed fate that has many metaphorical appearances (from Saint Nicholas figure (Why Did You Leave me?/Kazi zasto me ostavi, d. Oleg Novkovic, 1993), ghosts of the past, underground and its inhabitants (Underground, d. Emir Kusturica, 1995), 'dogs of war' (Vukovar: Poste Restante/Vukovar-jedna prica, d. Boro Draskovic, 1994), to the final apotheosis of 'no man's land' in the eponymous film of Danis Tanovic (2001) – eternal, entrenched battlefield) inspired by the regional legends, anthropology and ethnography. In Pretty Village the protagonists are ordinary people under the spell of a Destiny that takes many shapes: the ogre from the fairy tales; the media's poisoning influence; the darkness of the tunnel; or of Warlord-Slobo (Petar Bozovic). Monitoring the tragedy from the background, Slobo is a contemporary version of the ogre but unmistakably one that evokes the nickname of the former president, Slobodan Milosevic. The recurrent (perennial) war concept brings into focus war not as the regional or subjective matter but rather as something that 'resonates across historical and cultural boundaries' (Hjort: 106)[6]. The fulfilled aim is relativisation of the firm, typical Bosnian chronotope of the war. The simple substitution of geographical, personal names or time would allow the narrative to be about conflict in any other part of the world in any decade of XXth century. The tragical perspective of growing chronological and geographical mobility allows the story to become universal, deeply human and of widest possible meaning.

 

 

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame

In the serious attempt to confront a subject that was still considered explosive, Dragojevic turned to a delicate and inspiring mixture of reality and myth. The film explores the dialects of reinforcing and breaking the knot between war and nation. The story is based upon the true event from the Bosnian war, about the group of Serbian soldiers trapped in the tunnel in the heart of the enemy's territory. To survive they have to go through hardest of ordeals and only one manages to do that. The scenes of the siege are intercut with the pre war memories, personal pasts and frame story all together carefully delineating four time and narrative layers. The film employs two contrastive representational strategies. The systematic suppression, and deconstruction of the national identities of the warring parties shatter the simplified thesis of ethnic war. On the other hand consequentially decontaminating the war from the label ethnic Dragojevic promotes the universal, mythical concept of war. In Kusturica's Underground, one of the character concludes that, 'there is no war until brother goes against brother', and both characters are Serbs. In Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, the situation seems more complex as the brother-like figures are Serb and Muslim, evidently not 'real' brothers according to 'national' identity. Skillfully introduced strong differences that pull apart members of the same nation prevent Serbs to coalesce into a homogenous unity, to confirm (mother) nation as a common denominator. Simultaneously, the similarities between Serbs and Muslims are emphasized. Enemies belong to the same social strata (Gvozden/Bata Zivojinovic and Muslim fellow officer) use the same stereotypes, believe in same things (Milan/Dragan Bjelogrlic and Halil/Nikola Pejakovic) and are closer than the war buddies on the same side. For Milan, in the end the demonic Other is more Sloba than Halil, while many gaps pull Veljko (Nikola Kojo) and Gvozden apart. In the final confrontation, it is impossible to distinguish Milan and Hail as Serb and Muslim as both are raging warriors in search of vengeance for disappointments and loss.

 

War as mythical Balkan rule is explicitly focused on in the prologue and metadiegetic epilogue, the mock newsreel footage. In the brief shot of newsreel credits, we see the false date, the year marked as XYZ and the number of the issue as the devil's number 666. Its main topic is the opening of the tunnel of 'Brotherhood and Unity' named after the motto of multiethnic ex-Yugoslavia, but successfully signifying the ideals of the past and testifying to the futile political investment. An accident during the opening ceremony marks the tunnel as the space for the future tragedy. Symmetrically, the end of the film shows news about the rebuilt tunnel, announcing its destruction in the new, ritualistic war that would/has come. The war, initiated by a chain of misunderstanding and vengeance, comes full circle due to the ogre who has burned down the shop and killed the mother, putting the blame on someone else. The 'brotherhood' based upon friendship, childhood, memories is destroyed by fatal, inevitably drive for war and destruction and only distantly by nationalism.

 

 

The Savior

The Savior is the clear case of intercultural thematisation, one that 'uses contrastive cultural elements'[7] (Hjort:113) for the representation of the Balkan chaos. The central figure is a foreigner whose bewildered and confused gaze follows the conflict's development. As the outsider, unable to grasp the essence or discover the roots in his explanation (or rather rationalization) the war is recognized as mythical a fatality. This change achieves three things. First it helps the subsumption of the unfamiliar ethnic within deethnicised discourses of an essentialist humanism; second it underlines the similarities of the war experiences around the world interlocking 'Balkanization of the world' and 'mondialisation of the Balkans'; third, it opens the space for the multifaceted war representations.

 

A classical narrative formula is made of the set of familiar clichés otherwise known from the political thrillers about Third World crises, including The Year of Living Dangerously (d. Peter Weir, 1983), Under Fire (d. Roger Spottiswood, 1983), and Killing Fields (d. Roland Joffe, 1984). It portrays the cathartic experience of a foreigner who finally overcomes his personal crises and finds new meaning of life in the war-torn country. The inherited model is fully appropriated to the Yugoslav situation in two Miss Saigon like stories: Welcome to Sarajevo (d. Michael Winterbottom, 1997), and Savior – dealing, respectively, with the self discoveries of the journalist and intelligent officer. Savior is directed by ex Yugoslav Gaga Antonijevic, made after the American script (Robert Orr) and produced by Oliver Stone known for his leftist taste. The international authorial crew signs the war discourse in which habitual ethnic brutalities are balanced by the philosophy of equality, humanism and cosmopolitanism. Wisely chosen genre formula of melodrama - precisely winning combination of maternal and religious melodrama- talks about Serbian girl Vera (Natasa Ninkovic) raped in the Muslim camp and released in time to give birth to the unwanted child. In Paris, on the other end of Europe, after his personal tragedy, the American officer (Dennis Quaid) decides to join the military forces in Bosnia. Their paths cross and the narrative develops as the road movie - set of episodes along the way toward safe territory. The external, real, spatial journey is neatly paralleled by the internal, psychological one - the growing up to maturity consisting of the gradated acts of sacrifices. Sacrifice - the mother's sacrifice for the baby; or the American's officer restored faith in humanism as he accepts to take care of the little survivor – is the ultimate prove of eternal love, final salvation and redemption. The accurately maintained economy of exchange of sacrifice, redemption and salvation (the sacrifice confirms the redemption and leads to salvation) drives the narrative. In the pathetic, religiously imbued end (Dennis Quaid with the baby in the arms, by the seaside at the dawn of the new day) audience is left to wonder who is savior- the child, the man or the woman. In the frenzied, aggressive world we are all saviors waiting to be saved.

 

Religious principles (generally Judeo-Christian) positioned as the highest ethical standards underlay the melodramatic overemotionalism. The triad of terms (sacrifice-salvation-redemption) together with suffering, martyrdom, remorse neatly structure the story as the religious morality play. Encountered graphic Biblical motives - images of Madonna like mother with the baby; near holy family in the straw; female figures (wife (Nastassia Kinsky), Vera, Mother (Ljiljana Krstic), Baby) that stand for the trinity o Love, Faith and Hope, further confirm the analogous ethics of the war present and religious past.

The road to the see is the chance for the exploration of the local warscape, for the detailed depiction of the hypertrophied multiethnic atmosphere. All military gangs - Serbs, Muslims and Croats- are shown to commit awful crimes[8] against innocent civilians. Number of verbal and iconographical references revive the stereotypes of the WW2 (Chetnics, Ustashas ) etc.. In fact, careful and simple superimposition (overlapping) of scenes from two wars (WW2 and wars of the nineties) confirm the Balkan mythical time. Time circle filled with deja vue repetitive events is the one almost perfectly round.[9] In order of rendering the local puzzle understandable for the international audience the authors discretely outline the Bosnian conflict as the pattern variation of the Jewish-Arab Middle East clash. At the beginning, Muslim fundamentalists kill Quaid’s son and the wife (in the bomb attack at the Catholic church). He is left to grieve over them with the golden medal of St. Christopher (emphatically saint savior) as the token of remembrance. He joins the forces in Bosnia to fight (among other things) against Muslims. In the other, quite inconspicuous moment, Quiad reveals his real name to be Joshua. His decision and his real origin spatially and concretely bring together two otherwise widely apart wars making important step in the cosmopolitanisation and denationalization of the Balkan war symptom.

 

 

Beautiful People

The last title brings the model of the multi cultural thematisation to the perfection – confronting finely differentiated various members of many ethnicities in diversity of places, occasions and levels. The film directed by the Bosnian graduate of FAMU deals with the Balkan topic and is financed by the British sponsors. The Short Cut like fragmentary story with twenty five characters, all burdened by the Bosnian past progresses through accidental encounters on thirty different locations: hospital, different parts of London and Srebrenica. The ramified narrative offers rather schematic and predictable statement about ethnic conflict as 'business as usual' regardless of the place and time it develops within.

 

The seriousness of the initial theme is undercut by the film being the borderline case of romantic comedy. Melodramatic coincidences and comic tone as the dominant narrative devices, support the film's bold dismantling of the moralities of national heroism and identity. Crammed in the hospital room the Croat (Faruk Pruti), the Serb (Dado Jehan) and Welsh nationalist (Nicholas McGaughey) discuss and exchange nationalist experiences drawing the tenuous parallel between European wide situations and debalkanising the ethnic war phenomenon. Undeniably, the exotic Balkan spirit infects London finding in the centuries long UK ethnic tensions fertile soil and thus becoming hybridized and deexoticised itself. In the same hospital, unfolds the love story between Pero (Edin Dzandzanovic) and Portia (Charlotte Coleman), ending in marriage that literary and metaphorically unites romance and politics. The complicated relation Balkans/Europe is brought to the traditional melodramatic happy end. As the PS, the audience hear Pero's confessional cry - that he was really war criminal but that he repented and became 'just like you', 'one of you' - that produces twofold effect. It signals the ambivalence of the happy end (in the way of the best Sirkian irony or excess in the already excessive film); the 'instability and improbability of the peace and continuation of the conflict'. For the hyper sensitive Serbian side it is the last minute's punch line blaming and singling only Serbs in the whole situation.

 

In both hospitals (London's hospital and Srebrenica's MASH like field one) Bosnian kids and babies help Englishmen to patch their crumbling lives. Doctor (Nicholas Farrell) protecting the Bosnian couple and baby Chaos acquires the surrogate family, while Griffin (Danny Nussbaum) adopting the Bosnian orphan approaches the profile of role model citizen. As the main story spaces both supply the probable global metaphor – our lives are search for cure in the world that resembles hospital or even better an asylum.

 

The rich, hectic text is additionally hypersaturated with Shakespearean allusions: from the paraphrases of the opening of Romeo and Juliet to the wise daughter of The Merchant of Venice, Portia who becomes silly daughter of the conservative Tory. The spectrum of references include quotations from Browning Freaks (1932) or Manchevski films[10] - all together being both exaggerated and inverted. Ironic inversion is evident in the Bosnian syndrome – a total identification with the victim. After the hellish experience Jerry (Gilbert Martin) develops a Bosnian syndrome, wants to get his leg amputated and ends up driving in the jeep, listening to the blasting Balkan music. Bosnian origin of war is dethronised as the most important element and the narrative became global(ized) romantic antiwar and social comedy. In their distinctive ways all beautiful characters try to accept other people and change themselves as it is really all that takes 'to make life beautiful'.

 

 

Mythical Nation vs. Mythical Destiny

The hypothesis about intricate interdependence of the representation of the Balkan war and role played by visions of nationhood, ethnic relations or Balkan Fathom has to be corrected and modified after the analyzed cases. The array of war discourses spans from the metaphorical mythical representation with strokes of (deconstructed) nationalism (Pretty Village…) through fatalistic image of conflict as universal tragedy, shared guilt and overall victimization of the participants (Savior); to the excessive, caricatural image that stipulates the mondialisation of the Balkan syndrome. The reality rooted, media propelled common sense picture is both subverted and clarified. Imagining/othering of the nations and their connections has not retained the pivotal role in the first interpretational concept. The film narratives departing from the realistic premise of nationalist conflict inevitably slip into to the mythologisation of the nation, envisioning of the mythical nationhood, using the tropes of the local national mythomania. The qualification ethnic has every reason to be replaced by mythical. Newly articulated pair myth of nation vs. myth of destiny is not binarism but rather variation of the same mythical thing. The Gordian knot of war as nation and war as destiny anyway is necessarily seen in mythical optiques.

 

War as nationalist conflict or media image as nationalist dialogue express the need for virtuous national heroes, uncontested patriotism powerfully disseminating the historical myth of nationhood. But even in Pretty Village the explicit labeling of the enemy as the different nation occurs peripherally. Muslims are metaphorically and literally shown as the contours at the tunnel's end, figures with the voices but without faces. Thus, the entrapped Serb group is allowed to 'give face' or 'give name' - identity - to the shadows. The given names are diverse, emphasizing many different identities and bringing into the question even the ontological status of the people outside.[11]

 

The other concept is built like the jig saw puzzle, set of intrinsically connected and compared powerful images of suffering. The images of war chaos, pain and disaster are proved to be alike all around the world and the intercultural optique forces the viewer to 'piece relevant elements together' (Hjort:113) in comparison. The tragedy is always related with the morality message about suffering that brings redemption, remorse; that proves the futility and aimlessness of war. Through numerous references it exploits the psychological and historical scars of the collective memory or traces already inscribed in similar film texts. The images of Bosnian clash are becoming increasingly decentered (nationally and geographically) and assimilated into the wider picture of antiwar attitude. Like in Manchevski's Dust (2000) Wild West moves into the Wild East and vice versa.

 

In the end the war as the thing that stayed behind us could be looked upon in whimsical, ironic, and parodic way like in Beautiful People. Themes of intertwined and eschewed friendship and love comment those of hate and war in hilarious rather than cynical way. Comforting thought is that the ethnic conflict experiences are shared all over the world and are not exclusively the Balkan destiny. The final discourse is built due to exchanged, compared interpretations and shared legacies of the national (regional-historical-mentality) stereotypes. The Balkans in this unique and paradoxal way are confirmed to be like the rest of the world, acknowledged part of Europe. And not the threshold and that leads us back to the myth but of a new kind.

 

 

LITERATURE:

1.     Higson, A. 'The Concept of National Cinema', Screen, 30/4 (Autumn) : 36-46.

2.     Hjort, M. (2000) 'Themes of Nation' in Hjort, Mette and Scott MacKenize (eds.) Cinema and Nation, London and New York: Routledge.

3.     Iordanova, D. (2001) Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and Media, London:BFI Publishing.

4.     Selenic, Slobodan (1993) Ubistvo s predumišljajem, Beograd: Prosveta.

5.     Smith, A. (2000) 'Images of the Nation: cinema, art and national identity' in Hjort, Mette and Scott MacKenize (eds.) Cinema and Nation, London and New York: Routledge.