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“You can call it Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian if you want. That is a way to count people”, says a young man in Enes Zlatar’s documentary Dijagnoza S.B.H. The film, shown to a packed house last night at the Sarajevo Film Festival, takes up the question of language and identity in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia’s constitution does not name an official language for the country, and the issue has since become one more tool for separating Bosnia’s three “constituent people”.
Serbo-Croatian, the named language of Yugoslavia, was essentially an umbrella term used to refer to the supra-national vernacular of the region, codified in 1850. While debates did exist under Tito as to whether or not one language was spoken by the three ethnic groups of the region, they did not have serious political import until the wars of 1990s sensitized unresolved questions of nationality. Today, the West calls the language spoken in the former Yugoslavia Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian (B.C.S. or, translated, Sprpski/Bosanski/Hrvatski-S.B.H.). But the cumbersome term has little appeal. “BCS? More like BS”, a Sarajevan told me.
The reactions among the audience of Dijagnoza S.B.H. were also dismissive of attempts to separate one language into three (or four, as calls for a separate Montenegrin language are now coming from Podgorica). But, no position on Balkan nationality is without ambiguity, and those in the theater deriding the division of their language called in the same breath for the official recognition of a Bosnian language alongside Serbian and Croatian. “Until we have a Bosnian language, I will never be able to meaningfully say ‘I am Bosnian’, because I will always have to say it in another “nation’s” tongue”, said one man.
The audience applauded and another man got up and said the idea of BCS is ridiculous, to equal applause. “We didn’t come to any conclusions in this film”, said Enes Zlatar, the director, “but I have concluded that the diagnosis is S.B.H.—a schizophrenic Bosnia-Herzegovina”.
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.
