"Notes from the Underground: The Cinema of Emir Kusturica" (review)

Notes from the Underground: The Cinema of Emir Kusturica Modern Language Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Peter Hames Notes from the Underground: The Cinema of Emir Kusturica. By GORAN GOCIC. London and New York: Wallflower Press. 2001. xii 208 pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1-903394-14-0.

Given the proliferation of film-writing, it is surprising how few English-language monographs have been published on the work of directors from Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Forman, Polanski, and Kieslowski are known figures but their 'East European' work is largely viewed as a prelude to their success in the 'West'. Some would argue that Bosnian director Emir Kusturica now comes into the same category. He lives in Paris, and the funding for his last four features has come largely from France and Germany (and he most recently appeared in an acting role in Neil Jordan's updating of Bob le flambeur). However, Goran Gocic suggests that, with the exception of his French-funded American film Arizona Dream (1993), he has continued to make 'Balkan films'.

Gocic's book has the considerable merit of being the work of an 'insider', an enthusiast with an easy familiarity with the films. He describes his book as a user's guide and it has been compiled in the non-linear spirit of bricolage, moving back and forth between films, examining context, character, and motifs, focusing on his 'gypsy' subjects and the role of 'ethno' cinema. Alongside apposite quotations from Jameson, Said, and Zizek, we find discussions of Serbian folk art, the importance of sevdah (the state of exaltation and sadness that Slavs fall into when listening to music), the pagan origins of slava (Home Saint's Day)--a key element in Dom za vesanje (The Time of the Gypsies, 1988)--and the origins of scenes in proverbs and scatological humour.

Gocic traces Kusturica's work from his early success at the Prague Film School with Guernica (1978) through his collaborations with three writers, the Bosnian Abdulah Sidran (Sjecas li se Dolly Bell? (Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, 1981); Otac na sluzbenom putu (When Father Was Away on Business, 1985)), and the Serbian writers Gordon Minic (Dom za vesanje; Crna macka, beli macor (Black Cat, White Cat, 2000)), and Dusan Kovacevic (Podzemlje/Bila jednom jedna zemlja (Underground/ Once Upon a Time There was a Country, 1995)). This also marks a progression from his 'well-made' early films towards a loose 'postmodernist' style, 'a search for the miraculous' at the point of shooting.

Kusturica's films, Gocic argues, are 'anti-hegemonic', reject ideologies, and promote 'a cult of the margin' (p. 47). In Kusturica's films, the handicapped, the mentally ill, or the psychotic can be heroes. While in the 1980s he was heralded as a 'Bosnian emancipator', he has consistently identified with a minority viewpoint--Jewish, Bosnian Muslim, 'gypsy', and, more controversially, 'Yugoslav' post-1989. The appeal of Kusturica's films, which have secured three major Cannes awards, is that of 'ethno' cinema, a cinema rooted in local traditions but expressed in 'Western' form. This liberal political engagement with exotic subject matter is none the less, argues Gocic, an empowerment of the marginal.

When he filmed part of Underground in Belgrade, Kusturica, who rejected the claims of the Bosnian Muslim government, was accused of siding with Milosevic. (For a detailed account of this episode, see Dina Iordanova's Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: British Film Institute, 2001).) Gocic accepts Kusturica's argument that the film is 'nonideological', that its flawed heroes are Communists and therefore have 'international' names, that he was criticized by Mrs Milosevic. Like Zhang Yimou and Kiarostami, Kusturica, argues Gocic, reduces 'the possibility of any singular ideological, religious and/or nationalist reading to absurdity' (p. 164).

In contrast to most academic books on film, Gocic communicates an infectious enthusiasm(equivalent to the 'jouissance' he finds central in Kusturica's work). Some of his generalizations about Eastern Europe, Slavs, and the West are questionable, and one might question the 'authenticity' of Kusturica's identification with the Roma, but this is an instructive, stimulating, and productive exploration of his work.

PETER HAMES STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning