Two Villages
Serbian director, Emir Kusturica, hosts an annual film festival in the town of Kuestendorff, a small mountain village in western Serbia. The village is very small and has the Serbian name Drvngrad. Kusturica attends all the films that are screened in the festival. His acolytes call him "the Professor." He lives in a handsome house in the town.
The town’s main boulevard in Federico Fellini Street. The movie theater named after Stanley Kubrick is at Nikola Tesla Square. Other streets in the town are named after "Che" Guevera, Joe Strummer of The Clash, and several well-known football and tennis stars. There are four ski-slopes overlooking the mountain. Pictures show a town that is too pretty to be true. And, in fact, there is no real Kuestendorff. The village was built as a set for Kusturica’s 2004 movie Life is a Miracle.
Kusturica is a hirsute, jovial fellow, a good friend of Vladimir Putin, and a defender of the Russian regime. He is a controversial figure in Europe, either reviled as a pro-Serbian nationalist or much admired for his pan-Slavic views. Kusturica has built another village on the other side of the country on the eastern border of Serbia – this is Andricgrad named after the novelist Ivo Andric (the author of The Bridge on the Drina). Kusturica has been trying to film The Bridge on the Drina for years and he constructed this town as a set for that movie.
Kusturica said that he built these two villages to replace his hometown, Sarajevo, a city that he describes as having been destroyed in the Bosnian war (1992 - 1995).
The Director
Emir Kusturica was born in Sarajevo in 1954. His father was a Serbian journalist. The family was Muslim but non-observant. Emir was a rebellious boy and got in a lot of trouble. He played a small role in a 1972 film about Serbo-Croatian partisans operating out of Sarajevo during World War II, an experience that seems to have led him away
Kusturica took an interest in movies and graduated from film school in Prague in 1978. He made his first feature in 1981, Do you remember Dolly Bell? described as a coming-of-age picture. The film wons a silver prize at the Venice Film Festival. Kusturica’s next picture When Father was Away on Business (1985) was highly acclaimed and entered in competition as Best Foreign Film at the Oscars (it didn’t win). Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies was released 1989.
Arizona Dreams (1993) in Kusturica’s one American film, shot on location and starring Johnny Depp. (Kusturica has erected a bronze statue to Depp in Kuestendorff). Underground (1995) is probably Kusturica’s magnum opus, a long film summarizing the history of Yugoslavia. This movie has proven to be intensely controversial – it is either denounced as Serbian nationalist propaganda or honored as a carnal, comical surrealist film. In the movie, Kusturica seems to suggest that the violence in Yugoslavia was caused by an excess of testosterone in the land’s menfolk. Various critics, including Serbians, have derided the move, but others claim it is a masterpiece. These films were made against the backdrop of the Bosnian War (1992 to 1995), a conflict in which Serbia was perceived as the agressor and alleged to have committed serious war crimes and atrocities.
Black Cat, White Cat (1998) returns to a subject that earlier interested Kusturica, the plight of the Romani or gypsies. Super 8 Stories is a documentary about a touring rock and roll band, the No Smoking Orchestra – since 1986, Kusturica has played bass guitar in that group. (In 2007, Kusturica tried to mount a punk rock opera based Time of the Gypsies using the No Smoking Orchestra as the house-band. The show never really congealed.) Life is Miracle (2004) involves soccer players on opposite sides of the Bosnian war. Promise me this is another film involving involving the war as is On the Milky Road (2016), a movie about star-crossed lovers caught up in the war. Between 2007's Promise me this and On the Milky Road, Kusturica made a documentary about his favorite soccer player Maradone (2008) – the footballer has a road named after him in Kuestendorff – and a short subject in the omnibus film sponsored by Maria Vargas Lhosa, various directors’ responses to the idea of God, Words with God (2014). Kusturica converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2005. When Kusturica’s 2016 film, On the Milky Road was not shown at Cannes that year, it was rumored that the Serbian had been ejected from the film festival because of his support for Vladimir Putin and that leader’s policies. (In fact, On the Milky Road simply hadn’t been finally edited when the film festival took place.)
Kusturica’s pro-Putin and intensely nationalist Serbian inclinations have stirred controversy. "The No Smoking Orchestra" dedicated a laudatory song ("Wanted Man") to an accused Serbian war criminal, Radivan Karajzic and the Kusturica’s films seem to be less likely to be distributed in the West since the controversy over Underground (1995).
Punk Rock
Emir Kusturica may be the only significant director who fancies himself also a rock star. The No Smoking Orchestra is on tour this summer. It will be playing in Montenegro in August and Barcelona this October. The band is currently touring wearing bandoliers and huge sombreros. On the evidence of You Tube, the music sounds a little like demented Klezmer mixed with equally demented Mariachi band music – in othe words, it’s great. One of the band’s signature numbers is "Fuck you MTV" – a title that seems pretty anachronistic since MTV has not been taste-maker or aired music videos to any degree since about 1995.
Schutka
If the Romany had a capitol city (although the very notion is inimical to Gypsy identity), it would be Schutka, a sprawling, squalid ghetto outside Skopje, a city located in what is now Macedonia, but previously a part of Yugoslavia. Over 50,000 Romany live in Schutka and make that place their home-base when they wander abroad. Kusturica traveled to Schutka and lived there for nine months, gathering ethnographic information about the Romany and assessing people in the ghetto for parts in his movie.
The opening sequences in Time of the Gypsies were shot in Schutka and the film reverts to that place from time to time. Perhan’s funeral was also filmed in Schutka. Without exception, the gypsy actors in the movie were recruited in Schutka. Ljubic Adzovic, the woman who plays Perhan’s grandmother, lived in Schutka – she was the mother of nine children and supported herself by palm-reading. The young woman who plays Danira (Elvira Sari) was available only part of the year – in certain seasons, she traveled with a band of gypsies to Westphalia in Germany where they supported themselves by committing petty crimes and begging.
Schutka has the largest concentration of Romany people anywhere in the world.
Kusturica’s Gypsies
Challenged by European journalists about his portrayal of Romany people, Kusturica replied:
I portray gypsies, not "The Gypsies." They are people that live faster than we do – they have short life expectancies and, at forty, a gypsy is older than we are at 60. They are always in crisis. Thus, they experience everything very intensely, very strongly, very swiftly. Even physically, they are different from us – their body temperatures are generally well above 100 degrees.
Kusturica had to teach his actors to say their lines by memory. They couldn’t read his script because most of the gypsies cast in the film were illiterate. The Romany, themselves, have no written language.
Feast of St. George
Early in the film, Kusturica shows us an idealized image of the Slavic festival, the Feast of St. George. This festival takes place on May 6. On that day, people eat barbecued lamb and garland their hair with flowers. The festival, of course, is a remnant of a pagan Spring fertility festival and, in Slavic lands, is generally understood in that light. An indelible representation of the Feast of St. George or its pagan predecessor can be seen in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev – the film shows bonfires, naked people dancing in meadows, and nude girls, with flowers in their hair, offering themselves to monks. Kusturica’s portrayal of this event is equally spectacular: it appears as a dream sequence with Perhan embracing his turkey, rafts of burning debris floating in a broad river that is filled with gypsies, and, at last, a sexual encounter between Perhan and Azra – they float down the river naked in a coffin-like box. The music on the sountrack is a Serbian hymn to St. George. On a large raft, we see a Popanz or large scarecrow figure of St. George. This figure is intended to scare away demons. St. George, of course, was a great slayer of dragons and he appearance in effigy on his feast day is intended to vanquish evil spirits who infest the earth.
The Romany
Sometime around 600 A.D., a family group, possibly a small village, of Indian peasants emigrated from their homeland in the Punjab. (DNA testing shows that 70 percent of all Romany people carry markers affiliated with a single male line.) It is sometimes said that these Indians were likely "Untouchable" or lower caste, a clan disenfranchised by India’s rigid caste system. These people reached Iran around 900 A.D. where their presence as conjurors, thieves, and beggars is recorded in their Persian Book of Kings (the Shahnameh).
The Romany arrived in Greece and the Balkans around 1200. At that time, many of them were enslaved by the Mongols. The local Slavs (the Wallachians) also enslaved some of the Romany, but ignored others. By 1400, some the Romany had reached England. There they were harassed, branded, and their women mutilated by having their ears cut off. In most of Europe, the story was the same – the Romany arrived in an area, were immediately persecuted severely, and, then, fled from that region. Ultimately, the majority of the people established encampments in the Balkans. However, they continued to travel widely across the Europe and have, generally, been regarded as a dispersed (or diaspora) population.
Romany is a language that derives from Sanskrit. All Romany people are, at least, bilingual – they speak Romany in their family groups and the language of the country in which they are settled. They have no laws and no political structure. A figure called the "King of the Gypsies" is often associated with them – however, usually the "King of the Gypsies" is a man nominated for the role because of his chicanery and low status. "The King" is eminently disposable and so, when the authorities decide to harass the gypsies by arresting or killing their "King," no real harm is accomplished.
The Skopje gypsies are a mixture of Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims. (This can be clearly seen in Kusturica’s film in which some of the characters are obviously Christian while others are equally clearly Muslim.) Their religious practices also contain odd vestiges of Hindu beliefs, including cults dedicated to the worship of the goddess Kali.
No one knows for sure how many Romany exist. They are stateless, mostly illiterate, and don’t cooperate with census-takers. (An estimate is that there are, possibly, 14 million Romany today.) They are despised by most Europeans (when not being lionized as exotic, charming musicians and fortune-tellers) and usually persecuted wherever they go. European hatred of Gypsies is startling and unashamed. In Greece, a tour guide told us that certain areas were "infested" by Gypsies and that you should avoid them like the plague. On the side of a mountain in rural Greece, I saw a gypsy encampment and it was, in fact, horrifying – the squalor was unbelievable. A refined Italian tourist guide told us that we should not even look at gypsies – "they are very dangerous" and "no good will come of you looking at them." That said, gypsy beggars are ubiquitous in European cities – we saw a number of gypsy beggars in Ruben Ostlund’s The Square. Every European cathedral has a half-dozen gypsies sprawled around the threshold to the church, many of them women with small and, apparently, sickly babies, begging for coins from the tourists.
Periodically, governments try to eradicate the Romany. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen killed them wherever they were found – they generally weren’t deemed worthy of transportation to concentration camps because their work ethic (or lack thereof) made them unreliable slave laborers. The gypsies were mostly shot dead where they were encamped and, then, bulldozed into mass graves. How many died? Estimates vary between 250,000 to as high as 1.5 million. As recently, as 2010, the French government raided Romany encampments, confiscated their goods, and bulldozed their shacks and Airstream trailers.
Another film
In 1967, Alexander Petrovic, a Yugoslavian film maker, directed I even met happy gypsies. Petrovic’s movies the FIPRESCI (International Association of Film Critics) award in Cannes as wall as the Palm d’Or. Petrovic shot his film near Sarajevo and used real Romany in the production. The film was shot with dialogue in Romany. This film established a couple things: first, Europeans, although they hate and fear actual gypsies, like to see movies about them; second, Yugoslavia’s gypsies were a resource that could be exploited in films.
I even met happy Gypsies is a leading example of the sardonic so-called Yugoslavian "Black Wave", a film movement probably best characterized by Dusan Makajavev’s picture made in the late sixties and early seventies, including most notoriously WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie.
Telekinesis
Telekinesis is a popular subject in film. In Time of the Gypsies, Perhan is telekinetic – this plot element seems to me unnecessary and detracts from the film. However, Kusturica’s commitment to "magical realism" drives him to include this feature in the movie. Telekinesis, of course, often manifests itself as levitation and Time of the Gypsies is replete with scenes of objects floating in the air, most notably, the sequence in which Azra gives birth while a train roars by (a genuinely surprising and shocking scene), the bridal veil that haunts the various characters, and, of course, the sequence in which the pathological gambler, Merzdan, drags his family’s home off its foundations to shake down his mother for money that she has squirreled away. (Being suspended with feet off the ground is one of the visual motifs central to Time of the Gypsies – a good example of another scene exploiting this effect is when Perhan tries to hang himself.) Turkeys can’t fly or, at least, not very far and so the epiphany of the ghost turkey to the dying Perhan at the end of the film is also an example of a miraculous levitation. Kusturica, I suppose, would claim that the levitations in the film are, perhaps, homage to Chagall, an artist who often used this motif in his paintings. I read the levitation motif as more related to Merzdan’s attack on his mother’s shack – Romany life is nomadic and, therefore, unsupported; the Gypsies as people without a country are "groundless" – they hover evanescently in various places, here today and gone tomorrow.
The most famous movie featuring telekinesis is Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976 and remade in 2013). De Palma’s The Fury (1978) also invokes telekinesis and is the prototype for many movies involving telekinetic adolescents weaponized by evil government agents – the X-men franchise has this flavor. Chronicle (2012) is an excellent film about telekinetic young men. Innumerable recent films use telekinesis as a plot point. See, for instance, Dark City (1998), Firestarter (1984), Matilda (1996), Phenomenon (1996), Push (2009). At the end of Tarkovsky’s 1979 Stalker, the mutant child seems to display telekinetic powers – although this is ambiguous. Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) features battles between telekinetic warriors who have been recruited by sinister military-industrial complex coroprations.
Telekinesis is a theme that appeals to young people and, almost always, the proponents of this power are adolescents or young adults, often kids who are otherwise powerless. This super-power seems to reflect wish-fulfilment on the part audiences, the desire to be all-powerful and savagely influential in the world. The notion that these movies demonstrate is that the id of a young person is powerful, rebellious, and can affect the world in various ways. The idea is that this power is both wonderful and terrible; it is incapable of being governed. The telekinesis theme in Time of the Gypsies is mirrored by Perhan’s rise to become a successful gangster with a crew of his own begging the streets of Milan. Perhan is driven to accomplish great things and this is symbolized by his ability to use his mind to hurl objects (including a murder weapon at the climax) through the air.
Moral Reservations
No doubt, Time of the Gypsies is an impressive film. Long and intricate, the movie grants us a startling glimpse into a way of life that is, certainly, unknown to Americans. A justification for movies and novels is that such art works allow us to participate with characters and folk ways that we would otherwise experience. Our identification with the characters in a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for instance, takes us into close contact with extraordinary, passionate people who lead their lives according to principles very remote from our experience. The same is true of historical novels or books that were written generations earlier – when I read Frank Norris, for instance, I am granted an insight into ways of being in the world that may no longer exist. The Time of the Gypsies represents for us what it might be like to be a gypsy in 1989 – this is something none of us can possibly know except by hearsay or written report.
The last twenty minutes of the film is masterful. Kusturica consolidates all his visual motifs and provides us with a powerful argument for a kind of tragic fatalism – we are not masters of our passions, nor do we control the world around us. Ultimately, our striving brings us face-to-face with evidence of our failures. We can’t escape the accidents of our birth or destiny. There is no God to rig the cosmic dice – despite our prayers, some things are simply unavoidable: Jesus hangs on the Cross upside-down as a symbol that he has no power to help us. The world is a squalid parade of horrors shot through rarely by moments of beauty and grace. Like the gypsies, we are fundamentally homeless in the world – at any moment someone can pull our house away from its foundation and leave it dangling in the cold, empty sky. Kusturic melds the image of turkey with the ghostly bridal veil floating over the mud; he visually connects the image of the boxes mysteriously moving under their own volition over the muddy roads with the uncanny shot of the gangster trapped and dying in a coffin-like toilet causing the outhouse to seem to walk across the meadow. This image, in turn, rhymes with the pictures of Perhan and Azar, more or less, naked in the coffin-shaped box drifting along the river lit by floating rafts of fire. The Milan cathedral is an image of power and confidence, the full force of a civilization that his cast out the gypsies. Elements of Tarkovsky illumine some of the scenes. Other shots, particularly some of the deep focus imagery, are reminiscent of the sequences in Fellini, an important influence on Kusturica. The visionary desolation of the ghetto where the gypsies live near Skopje and the encampment at Milan marked by the billboard of the soccer player is memorable; imagery of this kind arises in the films made Bela Tarr, particularly the nightmare communal farm in Satantango. The soundtrack is memorable and the complex mise-en-scene with layers and layers of activity occurring on location is often astonishing.
But I have strong moral objections to the film. Kusturica won various awards at Cannes in 1989. Roger Ebert was at the festival. He wrote an essay on the film noting that, every time, he came to Cannes, he saw a gypsy girl begging on the street. Each year, of course, she would be a year older and, each year, her expertise in various kinds of criminal endeavor seemed to increase. Ebert wondered what she would have thought of Time of the Gypsies if, somehow, she had been admitted to a theater where it was screened. We can pretty much stipulate that there were no gypsies on the jury that awarded the Palm d’Or to the movie.
Here is a thought experiment.
Assume that a movie is produced about a disenfranchised ethnic minority. Let’s use Native Americans for our minority – people who are readily recognizable, generally live somewhere else, and are considered exotic and, possibly, troublesome. In our movie, the following traits are not only attributed to this community, but, in fact, lavishly dramatized:
1. Indians are drunk all the time;
2. Indians are superstitious, guided by soothsayers and palm-readers;
3. Indians would rather dance than work;
4. Indians are willing to prostitute their children to make a buck;
5. Indians are violent;
6. Indians engage in all sorts of petty (as well as serious) criminal behavior;
7. Indians keep livestock (for instance, turkeys) in their homes;
8. Indians are vulgar (Elvis tapestries?), beggars, con-men, and thieves;
9. Indians live in squalor and family members are always grappling in the mud;
10. Indian women are mostly whores;
11. Indians are lascivious;
12. Indians are self-destructive – when thwarted in their wishes, they get drunk and burn themselves with cigarettes;
13. Indian children are generally unsure of the identity of their fathers;
14. Indian are willing to sell their own children;
15. Indians routinely engage in smuggling and human trafficking.
And, so, the list goes on. Would a film making these assertions against a minority population living in poverty be racist? Of course, every proposition advanced in this list is asserted by Kusturica as being characteristic of the Romany.
Emir Kusturica’s response to the accusation that his film is racist is simple enough: my film merely shows the unpleasant truth about Romany life. Although we wouldn’t want to say these things about any group of people, all of these aspersions are true when cast upon gypsies. In fact, Kusturica climaxes his film with an image that materializes a standard ethnic slur: Gypsies are so greedy that they would steal the coins off
the eyes of their father’s corpse. What seems to be a poignant and penetrating observation about Perhan’s little son is really just a filmed version of a well-established ethnic slur. It would be like ending a film about African -Americans by showing a barefoot Black man grinning as he steals a watermelon from a watermelon patch.
(In this context, Kusturica’s defense that he is merely realistically dramatizing the truth about gypsy life rings a little hollow when applied to a film that contains telekinesis, levitation, and a radiant ghost turkey.)
It is, perhaps, less than anodyne to recall that Kusturica is a proud Serb. In the last few years, he was denounced at Cannes for announcing his conversion to Eastern Orthodox Catholicism and, then, stating (in the context of the annexation of Crimea): "Of course, I think Vladimir Putin is a great man. If I were British, I would fear Putin. If I were Obama, I would, perhaps, even fight Putin. But as a Serb I love him." Kusturica’s most ambitious film, Underground, has been interpreted as justifying ethnic cleansing in what was once Yugoslavia. Some of these criticisms are unwarranted – as is often the case, the most vehement attacks on the movie were made by people who had not bothered to see the film. But there is reason to consider whether a partisan Serb should have much credibility on the subject of ethnic minorities. The Serbs seem to have rounded up Muslim Bosnians and either killed them or interred them in concentration camps where thousands died of mistreatment. The Serbs advanced a program of ethnic cleansing in which gang-rape was a tool of intimidation.
But, of course, it’s probably unfair to attribute these misdeeds to Kusturica although he has been outspoken in his defense of Serbia. Not all gypsies are thieves and beggars. Not all Serbs are war-criminals.
Tragedy or Comedy
To what genre does Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies belong?
In his Poetics at 1448 b, Aristotle says: "Tragedy differs from comedy in this respect. The latter sets out to depict people as worse than they are today, the former as better." Clearly, Time of the Gypsies depicts people as worse than they really are – although this begs the question whether the negative portrayal of human life is the result of Kusturica’s bigotry with respect to the Romany people. But, setting aside this cavil, is Time of the Gypsies some kind of comedy?
Probably, these categories don’t apply here. Most likely, a critic might argue that Time of the Gypsies is a Menippean Satire – that is, a narrative that grounds human behavior in bodily functions and demands. The leading example of such satire is Petronius Satyricon although Apuleis’ The Golden Ass is another, and more artistically successful, version of this genre.
Some critics have claimed that Time of the Gypsies is modeled on Francis Coppola’s The Godfather. Indeed, there are elements in the film that suggest this comparison – Perhan starts out as an innocent and, in fact, isn’t even full-blooded Gypsy (he has a Slovenian father). He is like Michael in The Godfather, the golden boy that family members seek to insulate from the criminality in which he is immersed. But, of course, he succumbs to pressure and ends up becoming a successful gangster, so wholly invested in that perverse culture that he plans to sell his wife’s first child.
The Godfather, however, feels like tragedy. Time of the Gypsies does not.
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