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227 Chapter 12 Neighbourhood Identity and the Larger World: Emir Kusturica’s Underground Gordana Yovanovich Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnivalesque laughter1 and his concept of polyphony can help viewers understand Kusturica’s complex and controversial film. Made during the destruction of Yugoslavia, and based on Dušan Kovačevič’s novel Once Upon a Time There Was a Country, the film Underground (1995) tells a local story in international cinematographic language; Kusturica’s directing skills have been compared favourably to those of Federico Fellini. While the level of artistic skill in the making of the film is high, and at the level of the story there is an intricate dialogical relation between characters, at the level of the plot, as in other carnivalesque films (such as Mardi Gras: Made in China), numerous stories are about raw, startling celebration , where excess and transgression define everyday life. Kusturica’s highlighting of a “re-creative” dimension of carnivalesque exaggeration has been seen by Slavoj Žižek as “the reverse racism which celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Balkan Other, as in the notion of Serbs who, in contrast to inhibited, anemic Western Europeans, still exhibit a prodigious lust for life” (2000, 5). I argue that the interplay of local and global in the film, more than reversing the dominant paradigm of (cold and boring) civilized West and (exotic and alive) primitive other, leads the viewer to question the world view of binary oppositions like good guys and bad guys, promoted by dominant (Hollywood) culture. I further argue that the film’s highlighting of neighbourhood identities and local ways of life is not a form of nationalism but rather is a simple recognition that marginalized cultures survive because they have their own ways of gaining agency. Kusturica also shows that when local cultures are destroyed, ordinary people become “wasted humans” (Bauman 2004, 41) like Ivan in the film, who will seek justice. Chapter 12 228 Underground is the last film in the history of Yugoslavian moviemaking made in an attempt to save Yugoslavia from local and international devastation .2 It is an intricate commentary on the destruction of a state and national identity, and on construction of new “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson would say. Sean Homer rightly observes that the film is a “critique of Tito’s Yugoslavia and the film industry’s role in reconstructing history and national mythologies” (2009, 7), but it is also a montage of the country beyond Tito’s time. The obvious theatricality and exaggerated performances in Underground are a means of subverting the established order and questioning the ways of having or gaining agency in a chaotic world driven by different local and global forces. In the complexity of relationships and the development of repetitive history, community performances such as music at weddings, improvisations, and carnivalesque laughter play an important role as identity makers, particularly as a small, marginalized nation contends with rising global insecurities. The film begins with a local exaggerated Balkan/primitive macho celebration in the late hours of the night, followed by documentary clips of the different receptions locals gave on the morning of the “civilized” German invasion of Maribor, Zagreb, and Belgrade in 1941. The film ends with a local celebration, preceded by scenes in which global UN peacekeeping “Blue Helmets” are moving refugees of the wars of the 1990s, and participating in the arms trade that fuels the global restructuring of nations. In recent history, as at the beginning of the Second World War, national and international, local and global struggles are intertwined because, as Susan Woodward points out (1995), there were two key factors that contributed to the breakup of Yugoslavia. First was the fundamental shift in the international order with the end of the Cold War that saw Yugoslavia lose its strategic geopolitical position mediating between the East and the West, as well as its role in the Non-Aligned Movement. The second factor which contributed to the breakup of the country was the global financial crisis and economic recession of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. In the general trend of shifting identities, the destruction of a multiethnic Yugoslavian community opened up new possibilities of identitybuilding : first, to become a part of the European Union, as promoted—but also heavily conditioned—by the EU and the international community, and second, to revert back to ethnic or neighbourhood identities that could mean a return to traditional nationalism. Kusturica’s personal choices made both during and after the making of...

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