Serbia is Schizophrenic, Cinema Komunisto Director Mila Turajlic Says
“We lack an official consensus over our history. It’s what makes Serbia schizophrenic,’ Belgrade-born director Mila Turajlic told an audience of film fans and academics in London.
Mila was using a situation at Serbia’s Military Museum to illustrate her feelings on a culture with far deeper issues of identity and direction.
“The second floor of the Military Museum has been closed for seven or eight years and it really illustrates questions about modern Serbian society,’ she said “The ground floor of the Military Museum covers Serbian military history from the beginning of the Serbian Kingdom to the Second World War. The second floor is dedicated to the Second World War. This is the oldest museum in Serbia and one of the most visited ones, which gives you an idea of Serbian history really being dominated by war.
“The government told the museum that they had to reconceive the exhibit of the Second World War because it is biased from a Communist perspective. So the director of the museum said to the government, ‘No problem, what story do you want us to tell? Do you want us to put the Chetniks in it?’
“They got no answer – because we have no answer. There is no consensus in Serbia on what story of the Second World War will be our official story. I think that this situation in which we lack an official consensus over the narrative of our history gives a real indication of the state we’re in today. It’s the biggest problem we have as a country. It’s what makes Serbia schizophrenic. I really believe that.”
After graduating from the London School of Economics with a degree in Politics and International Relations, Mila converted to filmmaking and a degree at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, in the belief that ‘art will always be more subversive than politics’.
Although Mila does not view history through rose tinted glasses, she does believe that today’s Serbia could learn lessons from Tito’s period of the former Yugoslavia.
“I would not describe myself as Yugo-nostalgic,’ she said. “What I feel for that society is much more complex than that. The word I would use to describe what I feel for Yugoslavia is envy. I envy them for living in a society that had a very defined idea of who they wanted to become. They had an idea of where they wanted to go.
“If you live in Serbia today, that is the one thing you do not have. We do not have a consensus over where we came from, we do not have a consensus over where we are today, and we absolutely do not have a consensus of what society we want to be. So in that sense, they were a society that had an idea that was greater than themselves. I envy them for having that.”
Mila was speaking at the London’s (Post) Yugoslav Film Festival after the UK premiere screening of her award-winning documentary Cinema Komunisto, which pieces together a history of Yugoslavia through its films produced under the watchful eye of Josip Broz Tito.
Since starting her movie, Mila has noticed a resurgence in interest in Tito. For Mila, this raises more questions about the Serbia of today than it says about the Yugoslavia of yesteryear.
“When I started this film today there was almost no interest in Tito. He was gone from public life. Everything had been changed, street names were changed, his statues were gone, our public holidays were gone. He was literally erased, almost overnight.
“Maybe because last year was 30 years from his death or because things have gone so downhill in Serbia, there is a huge resurrection in President Tito. His grave has become an incredibly visited site. The number of visitors in the past five years has grown exponentially.
“I don’t think this is a sign of people discovering this ‘golden era’. I think it is a sign of how bad things are in Serbia today that all of a sudden that looks like our golden past.”
Cinema Komunisto tells its story using clips from Yugoslavian cinema, in particular the films of Belgrade’s prolific state-approved Avala Film Studios. During the Tito years, Avala churned out hundreds of partisan movies and wartime blockbusters, as well as feel-good dramas and heroic propaganda tales. Documents unearthed by Mila show that Tito had a strong hand in the direction taken by many of these movies. Since the death of Tito, Avala has been allowed to crumble and presently lies in sad abandonment.
“The tragedy of Avala is that everything is going to be thrown away very soon,’ Mila explained. The studios have to be privatised because they are still social property, which under the new Serbian constitution is not a recognised form anymore so they have to be sold.
“Initially they were to be auctioned off. There were some interested buyers, particularly from the United States, and it came down to requiring a political decision, There’s a very complicated ownership issue that needs a political decision to be solved and that decision was lacking. So now they are going to be sold off as real estate. They are on an incredibly valuable piece of land and (the purchaser) won’t care about the history of what’s on the land.
“We’ve launched a petition to get the Ministry of Culture to recognise this as a culturally important site, to preserve the costumes and props. You can sign the petition on our website.”
Mila feels strongly about the downfall of Avala and the cultural heritage that will disappear with it. Cinema Komunisto uses film clips to drive the narrative, accompanied by footage of Tito entertaining the great and the good of international cinema.
“The motivation for making this film was a feeling I had the first time I went to the Avala Film studios,’ Mila explained. It was 1999, during the bombing and I was a first year film student. Belgrade was a very weird place then but the film studios were particularly weird because they were completely abandoned. The thing that amazed me was that no-one at film school had ever told us about them: that they were there, that they were built, that they still existed and that they were in this state.
“I was so angered by the fact that our society had forgotten this – as well as many other things that we had chosen to forget – that I just wanted to make a documentary about the studios. It was going to be a very small film, a documentary about Avala Film today.
“Then when I started to research the history of Avala and particularly when I went into the archives and discovered the enthusiasm with which the films were created and the mission they were given to create the visuals for the new country, that’s when I realised I could use the studios as a fantastic metaphor for living in a fictional society. I could play with the idea of living on a set and the whole idea of the use of narrative to construct the official dream of a country. That’s when it became complex. Initially it was just about a feeling of disgust that this is a picture of our society.”
A project of such magnitude required meticulous research, delving through dusty archives in Britain, France, German, Italy, Russia, the United States, and across the former Yugoslavia.
“I’m kind of obsessive so I basically decided to research every single archive in the former Yugoslavia,’ said Mila. “I kept going back to view news reel. I would talk to the characters or I would find something that might give me an indication of what might exist as a piece of archive material. Then I would go to the archive and if it wouldn’t be listed I’d ask to view everything they had from a particular month, then I would ask to see the rushes down in the vaults.”
As the project progressed and Tito’s role became more integral to the story, it became clear that Mila needed to obtain access to rare materials from that period. The deeper she looked, the more interesting the tale became, as Mila explained.
“It took me one year to get access to Tito’s personal archive and that’s when I found these telegrams from film crews and his notes on the scripts,’ she said. “Up to that point I thought what everyone else knew, which was that Tito loved cinema. But at that moment I realised that he was actually involved in the construction of this narrative in a very active way. He was the grand narrator of this story.
“I had this idea that if we’re talking about the creation of a fictional country, why don’t we try to piece together the history of Yugoslavia using only clips from feature films. Then we could play with Yugoslav history but only from the way it was told. So I started to gather the old films.
“Around 780 films were made in Yugoslavia from 1945-1989. Of those, after three years of searching, I managed to find 320, which gives you an idea of how Yugoslav cinema is disappearing.
“I was driving around towns in Serbia meeting collectors to get the films. I would watch every single film and timecode it, write down interesting dialogue or scenes that struck me as a picture of Yugoslav reality. I created a database with key words so that when I was in the editing room and wanted to find something very fast I could just type in a key word.”
It wasn’t all plane sailing, though, as not everyone was as keen to reveal the secrets of their time working in cinema at time. The legacy of Tito’s power can still be felt among those left to carry the torch of Yugoslav history.
“This film took five years to make,’ explained Mila. “I talked to about 50 old film workers before I chose my cast. I did it very carefully because I wanted to be able to construct the film with no narration, so I needed characters to cover different periods. I also had this idea of wanting to have one actor, one director, one set designer, one producer and one studio boss to create a mini film crew. It took a long time to fill the right people to fulfil both roles.
“Every single person with one exception that I approached said no when I asked them to be part of the film – Tito’s projectionist in particular. It took me a very long time to build relationships with them and to persuade them to be in the film. They all had different reasons for not wanting to do this but I didn’t give up and I think at one point they just realised I wasn’t going to go away. That’s when they agreed.
So, with all this film receiving praise at festivals worldwide, what is on the cards for Mila?
“My next project is a documentary about Serbia in the 90s,’ she said. “If Cinema Komunisto is a documentary about the history of Yugoslavia through cinema, this could be said to be a documentary about Serbia through a keyhole.”
8 / 14 / 2011 1:18 am
Why does any one listen to this far-left anti-war commie? considering that military museums all about wars and preserving the memories of people that fought and died for them. This woman spits on the memories. A typical anti-war commie moron who can’t realize that people paved the way for her freedom. Another far-left peacenik. I can’t stand those people who hate militaries, even though they protect their stupid asses from being killed. I wish this bitch would shut up! Quit crapping on the history of Serbia. She’s just another anti-war far-left liberal commie. Nothing to see here, people. I hate those bastards!