When Father Was Away on Business, Emir Kusturica (1985)
The Balkans has always been on the fringe of empires. The margin between Rome’s East and West: the much fought over domain at the center of Ottoman, Venetian, and Austro-Hungarian territorial ambitions. The Croatian language betrays the country’s history and cultural receptivity to outside influence: Čaj from Turkish, voda from German, pronouns from Latin. However, though parts of the Balkans have for periods been included within diverse spheres of cultural influence, they have always remained fundamentally without them as well. The region’s tradition of borrowing and lack of encompassing cultural consistency has itself created a vibrant and robust regional singularity. This singularity has been created through a history of conquest and avoided assimilation, but it continues to be expressed clearly in the art, literature and cinema of the region.
Danilo Kiš is in many ways the prototypical citizen of the Balkans. He was born in Vojvodina (in Serbia) in 1935. His mother was a Montenegrin; his father a Hungarian Jew (who was killed at Auschwitz). He is recalled as the last truly Yugoslav writer. His famous story “A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a fascinating pastiche of style and influence. In it Kiš combines fact (Davidovich was an actual figure in the Russian Revolution) and fiction (invented dialogue and characters within the framework of actual happenings). The line between reality and fantasy is blurred to the point where the two are unrecognizable. Footnotes carry the tone of factual orientation, but are in fact contrived; the story reads as an idealized metaphor, but the narrative arc is, in fact, true. Kiš was very influenced by the work of the Porteño Jorge Luis Borges in his mixing of genres (fantasy, realism, history, meditation) in a single work, and also by Karlo Steiner, an Austrian, whose diary Seven Thousand Days in Siberia coldly recounts the experience of life in a Siberian gulag under Stalin. Another story by Kiš, "Books and Dogs," written in a similar pseudo-historical style, takes place amid the persecution of French Jews in the year 1330. The unique Balkan-ness of Kiš’s writing is reflected in the fact that both of these stories take place in foreign locales, in obscure and distant historical settings, yet both comment directly on political happenings in his contemporary Yugoslavia. In addition to his diversity of influence and styles, his stories present a distinct dichotomy between engagement and disengagement with political issues.
The seminal Yugoslav filmmaker from the 1970’s, Dušan Makavejev, is known for his radical experiments with film structure and stylistic montage. His films deal with themes that are in line with other artists in this “golden” middle period of Yugoslav culture – namely their disillusionments with the Socialist system in Yugoslavia compared with the ideals of the Revolution - but the techniques he uses to explore them are totally distinct, and in many ways representative of Yugoslav society. His 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism, deals with the confluence of sexual revolution and socialist revolution in the context of the German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Like Kiš, Makavejev marries together multiple strands – self-made documentary segments about Reich and American counter-culture artists, a fictional story about a liberated Yugoslav woman who seduces a Russian ice skater with whom she argues revolutionary ideology, a 1931 Nazi propaganda film on mental patients, combined with Yugoslav patriotic hymns and footage of transvestite Jackie Curtis walking around New York dressed in an army uniform. These disparate strands can come together in different ways for each viewer, but taken in conjunction in each other they put forward a layered argument of Makavejev’s theme. The structure of this film – and others by Makavejev – can be seen as a sort of extended metaphor of Yugoslavia itself: diverse strands, though held together by a common form, coming together in a single, if convoluted, entity.
Emir Kusturica is the most internationally well-known filmmaker to come out of the former Yugoslavia, and so has in many ways shaped the Western conception of the Balkans. His second film, When Father Was Away on Business, won the Palme d’Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and was later nominated for an Academy Award. The film presents a highly evocative portrait of a young boy’s life, growing up in Bosnia in the early years of socialist Yugoslavia, shortly after Tito’s split with Stalin. The film is, stylistically, inspired by such film classics as Fellini’s Amarcord in its presentation of a coming of age story, with political overtones and bouts of magical realism. But When Father Was Away on Business is also uniquely Yugoslav. The film’s setting is distinctly Bosnian, with a tight-knit group of neighbors for whom the fact that they all belong to different religions never becomes pertinent. The world it presents is drawn with small details that reveal a love and affection for the distinct character and rhythm of everyday life in the place.
The Post-Yugoslav film No Man’s Land by Danis Tanovic, winner of the 2001 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film is also interesting for its presentation of a unique Balkan world, obviously intended, in part at least, for a Western audience. The film shows the story of two soldiers, a Serb and a Bosnian, who find themselves trapped together in a trench between the frontlines during the Bosnian War. In one scene, the soldiers strip down to their underwear and wave around clothes to try to get help without betraying their identities to the opposing lines. Of course, it is impossible to tell who is what when their uniforms are removed, and indeed, everything in the film supports the notion that nothing divides these two, except for nationalist pride of indistinct origin. They argue endlessly over who started the war, but no one knows the answer. After the bungling intervention of United Nations peacekeepers and a female British television journalist, nothing is solved. After being rescued from the trench, the two shoot each other. Again, Tanovic adopts certain Western artistic forms (interestingly one of them is the absurdist, cyclical binary dialogue of Samuel Beckett) and distorts it into something altogether different in support of his own artistic goals.
These are, admittedly, only a few arbitrary examples of the artistic traditions of the Balkans (specifically the former Yugoslavia) in the second half of the twentieth century, but in these distinct genres and forms, can be seen several themes persistent in the culture of the Balkans as expressed through its art. These are: a readiness to adopt elements of foreign culture, an ease in dealing with various strands of identity or genre simultaneously, and a protective pride in expressing the peculiarities of their own culture and way of life. The Balkans may have spent much of its history on the fringe of empires, and on the edge of more established identities, but its inherent multiculturalism and comfort with diversity puts it right at home in the age of modern globalization, in which the whole world is seeing the type of cultural mixing that has typified the Balkans for millennia.
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