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The Sarajevo Film Festival starts this Friday, opening with Aida Begić’s Snijeg [Snow]. Orlando Bloom was in Sarajevo this week, and stopped by the film festival office. He will be starring in a new film about the siege of Sarajevo, based on Bill Carter’s book Fools Rush In. Other luminaries flocking to Sarajevo for the film festival include: Kevin Spacey, Charlie Kaufman, and our favorite Lacanian Stalinist, Slavoj Žižek.
Bosnian cinema, and Yugoslav cinema, is a tough thing to characterize, partly beacause the enormous social upheaval of the past century and the contemporary, peaceful chaos of ex-Yugoslav society is a tough thing to characterize. What is found in most films is the macabre humor characteristic of the region. But who really gets the meaning of humor, anyway?
For a look at Bosnian cinema see Kinoeye‘s article on “Out of Bosnia”, a 2002 retrospective in London. Or read some of the essays in The Celluloid Tinderbox.
August 15th kicks off the 14th annual Sarajevo Film Festival. Arguably the most important cultural event of the year (the odd “running of the bull” in the countryside notwithstanding), the festival brings in films and directors from across the Balkan Peninsula and Western Europe. This year’s program will be available online in August.
Recent Balkan cinema leads the region’s tradition of self-examination. Popular right now among academics is the formulation that the Balkans is a region positioned (artificially) in between antagonistic cultures (the West and the East, namely) and as a consequence only able to develop a culture that is at base antagonistic to itself. Specifically, it is argued that the West imposes this in between-ness by simultaneously excluding the Balkans from Europe and claiming it as European. Thus, the story goes, there can be no idea or ideology of the Balkans. A Balkan person opposing the Western ideology that excludes him will oppose basic elements of his own ideology; he can only feel at odds with himself.
However, several classics of Balkan cinema suggest a different story. Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1997) ends on a Yugonostalgic note, concluding that a country and culture once did exist, but was riven apart by the raw fact of violence which was primary over any type of ideology. In Sotiris Goritsas’s Balkanisateur (1997), the two protagonists travel from northern Greece to Switzerland. Equally as alienated in Bulgaria as in Switzerland, the two return happily to Balkan Greece and indifferently walk past a sign noting Greece’s recent entry into the EU. Geopolitics is not a problem.
These films, along with art from the war which effortlessly exploited Western commercial symbols, offer a picture of the Balkans which, when looking at itself, is not inhibited by its otherness from the West. Though certainly concerned with questions of the region’s relation to the West, these threads of Balkan culture seem to make steps, rightly or wrongly, in a decidedly post-national direction.
