Kosovo, the Movie: Humanity and Humor in Balkan Cinema

Horton | Kosovo, the Movie: Humanity and Humor in Balkan Cinema Andrew Horton University of Oklahoma andyhorton@compuserve.com Kosovo, the Movie: Humanity and Humor in Balkan Cinema The print and TV news coverage of the Kosovo war zone and my classrooms this Spring term suddenly came together in a particularly relevant way. I had just finished a unit on Balkan cinema with my seniors in Film and Video Studies, and we had particularly emphasized the dark fatalistic humor of so many of these award winning films. Then the NATO bombing began. Immediately my students were moved to discover that years before the current NATO bombings against Serb atrocities, filmmakers in Yugoslavia, Greece and other Balkan nations had shaped memorable tales of war and cruelty but laced them with a saving laughter that comes from deep pain. An orphan from the northern border inTheo Angelapalos' EternityAndA Day(1998). 66 I Film & History Current Events in Film | Special Section Humor and humanity in the Balkans? These are not items emphasized in the day to day coverage we receive of cluster bombings and mass graves. But my students felt good that they could tell their bewildered friends "something" the news doesn't reveal: that Balkan filmmakers have tapped into a depth of laughter in many of their films which points the way beyond hatred and bloodshed towards a larger more healing sense ofhumanity in that troubled part of the world. It is this unexpected depth of dark humor that I have appreciated over the years as a screenwriter working with several directors in Yugoslavia and Greece and as a film scholar involved in writing about Balkan cinema including, most recently, the Cannes Festival winning directors Emir Kusturica of Bosnia and Theo Angelopoulos of Greece. What is Balkan cinematic comedy? This term students particularly singled out Yugoslav director Slobodan Sijan's Who is Singing Over There? which won the Best First Film award at the Venice Film Festival in 1981. The film is an ensemble road comedy about a bus load ofYugoslavs driving through the countryside of South Serbia, headed for Belgrade in 1941 while World War II rages in the background. The bus contains a comic cross section ofYugoslavs, but the film is "narrated" by two gypsies who open the film looking at us (the camera) singing a song that describes the bus journey and ends with the lines, "I am miserable, I was born that way, Oh, but to have dreamed it all!," lines which always evoke a lot of laughter from audiences. The punch line of this Balkan picaresque comic odyssey is that they reach Belgrade on April 6th, the day the Germans actually bombed the city killing thousands including, in Sijan's film, everyone on the bus. Except, of course, the two gypsies who emerge Bruno Ganz as a Greek poet and Achilleas Skevis as the 8-year-old boythe poet rescues in EternityAndA Day. from the rubble of the bombing, dust themselves off, face us, and sing again, "I am miserable, I was born this way, Oh but to have dreamed it all!" Whenever I teach this film here in the States, many ofmy students find themselves saying that Who is Singing Over There? is one of the best films they have ever seen. Why? Because, they explain, of the humor coming from the horror, and the humanity of each individual captured in this playful yet dark carnival ofBalkan life. They also come to understand another level to the film: the gypsies are the underbelly of Balkan life. They are the ones who are not mentioned on CNN or in the Press for they are not a part of the regular feuding that has and will go on. They Theo Angelapalos' EternityAndA Day(1998). Vol. 29.3-4 (1999) | 67 Horton | Kosovo, the Movie: Humanity and Humor in Balkan Cinema A scene from A film with No Name(1988), a film made by a Yugoslav director, Srdjan Karanovic. are the ones who carry on, like Sijan's two hapless musicians, despite all. Perhaps the best known director from the Balkans is Emir Kusturica, a Yugoslav who is a Bosnian Muslim from Sarajevo. In a remarkable series of films available...