Lucidno SARAJEVO FILM FESTIVAL
Cinema of the resistant gaze: anyone in the cinema darkness?
On the road: In the name of the father
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Director/screenplay: Ognjen Glavonić. Cast Camera (color, widescreen): Editor: Jelena Maksimović. |
In the age of lies (so-called age of post-truth), political and other idiocy and exhibitionist (self) deceptions, emerges a lucid feature film boldly tackling the political and historical truths, a film that ushers in sanity to the ambiance of madness. The title of the film is The Load (Teret) and the name of the author is Ognjen Glavonić. This is the kind of European film I’d been waiting for years to resurface, especially after watching the 2016 documentary masterpiece Depth two by the same author (screened in Berlin), which heralded a new talent and a new phase in the post-Yugoslav auteur filmmaking. Contrary to many expectations, Depth two is not a precursor to the fiction film, but a by-product, as the director himself admits, a documentary film that emerged during a very long filming process and meticulous research, becoming an extraordinary documentary testimony to the human stories never told before.
The idea to make a film on the gruesome massacre of Albanians in Kosovo by the Serbian regime forces originated in 2009 when Glavonić came across two internet texts on mass graves found in police camps between Zemun and Batajnica (near Belgrade). According to his own words, “one text referred to the objects found in the mass grave of Batajnica, belonging to the persons who were thrown there – more than 700 of them. The second text was related to a driver of a refrigerator truck transporting these corpses and his work. After talking about that to many friends, colleagues and just about everyone I was close to (…) I realised that none of them had even heard of this case”.
Almost ten years ago, he began his research on a script which, as time went by, grew thicker, longer and more detailed, piling up new stories and information, the conceptual development of which evolved into something different, drifting him further and further from his original plan, also obstructed by too many difficulties to secure finances, especially in his homeland. A completely new platform emerged: instead of overwhelming his originally planned fiction film with too many factographic details and documentary evidence, he decided to make something new - from a different perspective and genre, in a different style and format, which became the documentary Depth two. Indeed, the author creates something not only different from what he had originally envisaged, but a pioneering work of art, completely different from what we had been used to seeing in documentaries.
In a rigorous cinema verité manner, Depth two focuses on exposing one of the most atrocious organised criminal operations of Milošević’s government, which consisted of, first, murdering Albanians in Kosovo, then hiding the massacred bodies from the local and international watchdogs. The corpses of murdered Albanians were, in conjunction with the police and military forces of Serbia, removed from the site of crime, transported by trucks and dumped into Danube or to Batajnica soil., during the country’s bombing by NATO in 1999. The regime was painstakingly covering up these atrocities until they were revealed in the media several years later, but two decades on, there is a renewed trend to deny these harrowing truths, in line with the global trend of silencing the truths.
Equipped with many documents and evidence, Glavonić focuses on the horrors and atrocities committed, without reconstructing the events chronologically or showing them. What he does display are the verbal accounts – off voice - of crime perpetrators/witnesses and survivors of the massacre, mainly relying on the testimonies from the Hague tribunal. In this powerful interplay of two parallel, often detached narratives - verbal and visual, not always mirroring each other - no violence is shown, but violence is everywhere. The narrators are only heard, and we have to listen to every word spoken while we watch the desolate landscape of now emptied locations in which the cruel events took place, or macabre images during the horror-like transportation. The dramatic tension is minimal, as the director’s approach to this gruesome, macabre topic is not sensational (suspense montage, too cosmetically contrived scenes or an overly dramatic soundtrack, for example), nor to represent the irrepresentable, thus luckily stripping the film of most thriller elements. The viewer is entirely focused on detailed verbal descriptions of the crimes, while watching the human-less locations, trying to imagine the events, as if the un-representable could be imaginable.
Almost ten years later, The Load (co-production of Serbia-France-Croatia-Iran-Qatar), which premiered in Cannes (in the Quinzaine) this year, becomes, paradoxically, a fictional. ‘sequel’, returning to the original idea and revisiting the same topic.
The film protagonist is a middle-aged man Vlada who desperately needs cash after he loses his failed factory job at a time of the country’s deep economic and other crises and becomes a truck driver, supposed to transport an unspecified freight from Kosovo to Belgrade. The opening shots, with their powerful naturalistic aesthetics reminiscent of the best of the Yugoslav so-called black wave film masters, already set the general tone for the context of a grim, bleak reality, a country in disarray, torn apart and degraded from its long ethnic conflicts, Yugoslav wars and now enduring the NATO bombing too. Tatjana Krstevski’s masterful cinematography paints Vlada as he moves in slow, heavy steps through the muddy soil towards a ruined shack from where he makes a landline phone call, then walks through an even muddier soil, while a small lost bony dog is looking on…
After these initial introductory shots – which do not explain anything about the truck freight - Vlada drives and drives, on and on. He is silent. He looks stern. The narrative is linear, but the director neither provides explanations nor conventionally reveals. He subtly alludes and suggests. He studies Vlada, leaving it to the most insightful viewers to capture his inner tumult. The viewer is supposed to imagine the protagonist’s emotions, as his face randomly reflects them: worried, anxious, troubled, indifferent – all at the same time, frowning and spasming occasionally, grimacing lines of burden, his face almost embodying all the sad, cramped faces of those ‘average, innocent, blameless’ people of Serbia, who eerily feel that something inhuman, atrocious is happening, but they’d rather not know the details… Vlada is brilliantly played by the rising star Leon Lučev, who deservedly won the Heart of Sarajevo for best actor award.
As Vlada drives on, the gaze is mainly constrained to the cabin of the truck. We are at the steering wheel together with Vlada and by being in this isolated, claustrophobic space, we are persistently and consistently in his mind and thoughts. Thoughts we hear none. What we do hear are the sounds. We hear every single sound of the truck on the road: wheels squealing, squeaking, gear shifting, brakes, slowing down, barely moving because of worn out, broken bumpy roads – a metaphor for squeaky squealing Milosevic’s Serbia of 1999? And, by extension, a metaphor of the whole international community - failure of the peace-keeping forces, unable to cope with the Yugoslav wars and stop the longest siege of one European city after WW2, to stop ethnic and other massacres, to stop the human trafficking and slavery (and deal with the large-scale emigration crisis today), only able for a military action? “Arsenals of democracy run deep”, reads one poster during the bombing…
As Vlada drives on, we become that loaded truck and this truck inevitably makes us sick, because now we know what the truck carries. From the ‘depth’ to the ‘load’, the protagonist’s initial indifference turns into his moral horror. Glavonić, it seems, in a meta-filmic gesture, urges the viewer to watch his previous film not because he shows authorial narcissism, but because he wants his viewers to be well acquainted with the real context, to have some pre-knowledge, because he is interested in the truth and in revealing it too. Because everything around us is fake, only the crimes are real.
The load becomes not only a gruesome, sinister physical burden (the Serbo-Croat word denotes more subtly both physical “load” and psychological, moral “burden”, a title which does not seem to be adequately translatable into English), but metaphorically a moral one, too. Those of us equipped with the previous film’s knowledge of the truck’s contents, embark together with Vlada on a physical ride that turns into an allegorical journey of moral nightmare, weighing not only Vlada down, but everyone he meets on his long harsh trip, including us, the viewers. Anyone in the cinema darkness?
The only moments outside the truck cabin are shot to show the country in disarray: burnt bridges, rusty factories, shabby houses, roads in flames, abandoned neglected monuments, poverty, petty crimes and simulation of joy at local rural wedding parties. Various characters he meets on the road are only a prop to the visual and moral decay surrounding him, in which the road film becomes a black comedy: young teenagers aimlessly wondering around abandoned monuments, a group of villagers fleeing their homes, checkpoint authoritarian policemen, many sad faces, drunks and a wedding couple listening to pathetic folk songs on loneliness. Vlada picks up a teenage hitch-hiker Paja (wonderfully played by Pavle Čemerikić), who wants to emigrate to Germany and gives him a tape of his recordings with his punk band. During their short talks, we learn that Vlada also has a teenage son and we anticipate where the tape might end. Most people and landscapes remain nameless in the milieu of fakeness.
As the road film turns into a black comedy, this bleak decaying nameless landscape becomes the mirror for the entire country, with some almost cinema-verité accurate episodes of the everyday life in Serbia at that moment. The reference to the lies served to people by media is made by a light-humoured dialogue, imbued with self-irony and sarcasm, between Vlada and the hitchhiker: “I heard on TV their living standards there (in Germany) are the same as ours”, to which Paja responds. “Sounds like something they’d say on TV”. The wedding party scene in a small rural restaurant, where random guests are forced to binge-drink as a traditional gesture of exaggerated hospitality, is a perfect example of the carnivalesque in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense (subverting the modes of the dominant culture, by creating a chaos through humour and exaggerated laughter)
The cause of crime and the crime itself become less of a subject than the effects and consequences they have on everyone, as Glavonić is loyal in both of his films to his preoccupations with post-war societal degradation, architectural and industrial decay and an overall cultural devastation, in an almost dystopian setting of macabre landscapes with the shade of muddy brown dominating. Seemingly insignificant personal objects– ranging from old photos, relics, an old camera, souvenirs from socialist anti-fascist Yugoslavia and WW2 - become vocal reminders of the brutal and shameful ideological change: a lollipop and a kid’s marble found in the truck all point to the horror-like, unfathomable fact that the “load” included children too…
What is significant, therefore, is less what is shown than what remains unseen. Without showing the evil scenes, the details that seem banal are much more eloquent than action-packed scenes of violence. By contrast to the documentary film, The Load is, to the epilogue, almost wordless. Mostly shot in long non-verbal takes, by Tatjana Krstevski’s exquisite cinematography, this interplay of what is shown and what remains invisible is pervasive, with the invisible and the unspoken becoming the film’s central narrative and ideological principle. Perhaps too slow for today’s digital viewers, used to action-packed scenes and special effects, this film, actually, gives time for thinking and contemplating, demanding concentration and commitment from the viewer – a much-longed for return to the pre-digital age.
One of the film protagonists is also Vlada’s lighter, a gift from his father who fought with the partisans in the WW2, with the engraving of “While the Sutjeska river flows”, referring to the greatest Yugoslav battle fought against the fascists in WW2. But Vlada’s lighter, a family legacy, gets stolen and, thus, turns into oblivion, similarly to the WW2 monuments celebrating victory over fascism, a fact which seems to be completely forgotten in post-Yugoslav countries today, in which most frequent monuments erected are those glorifying – local fascists. A sniper-shaped monument in Popina, where kids aimlessly play, displays clearly the writing at the back: “When in need, repeat me”.
"Those monuments were a warning to future generations not to repeat the mistakes, to fight fascism again, if necessary. My character discovers that the crime committed is, essentially, fascist. This is a tragedy, this is a drama, this is our load”, states director Glavonić.
At the end of his painful trip, Vlada is looking for his old camera suggesting he might take it with him on his next sinister trips, maybe to capture the atrocities? This is left open to our imagination, but it resonates as an evident authorial (self-referential) commentary. If the legacy of the anti-fascist struggle is not completely clear to younger generations, the young author feels he needs to further explain it in the film epilogue, when Vlada holds a monologue to his son (played by Leon Lučev’s real life son, Ivan), referring to his partisan fighter grand-father and his grand-uncle who died in the battle of Sutjeska as a hero.
| Special Mention of the Jury @ Molodist – Kyiv International Film Festival Best Director @ Art Film Fest Košice Best Actor (Leon Lučev) @ Sarajevo Film Festival Special Jury Prize @ Sakhalin International Film Festival «On the Edge» Roberto Rossellini award for Best Director @ Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon IFF |
This loaded road journey is, therefore, focused on its moral preoccupations and consequences – historical, political, social, and (anti)patriarchal. The director confronts fathers and sons both literally (specially accented by the appearance of Lučev’s real life son, with Vlada also playing the father figure to the teenage hitchhiker) and metaphorically, referring to all the patriarchs, those powerful fathers who started the war and committed various atrocities without not only taking any responsibility and punishment for it, but continuing the promotion of grand nationalistic narratives and forging over and over new webs of lies – all in the name of the father. More directly than any post-Yugoslav films, The Load confronts the fathers with their sons and urges the dialogue between generations, which represents the cinematic oppositional gaze/gaze of resistance in Teresa de Lauretis’ terms. This implies that The Load is, also, a film on “isolation and occupation”, in director’s words. On the one hand, isolation, melancholia, lonely and doomed characters, on the other, violence, bombs, noise, killings and deaths. Common to both sides are fear, panic and paranoia. The film is a mirror of this paranoia and indifference, not only of its characters, but of all of us watching it. Military, police and civilians are all involved in the crime. We all seem to be complicit with war horrors and a wake-up call was needed in the shape of this film, not only to the citizens of Serbia, but to the cinema viewers everywhere in the world, and this is why this film can be regarded as somewhat patriotic too
The Load has already received several awards at film festivals, and also some classic film references, but to me it resonates Godardesque in its auteur politics. Structurally, it is actually most reminiscent of the short film master-piece Hello, Sarajevo (Je vous salue Sarajevo), in which Godard departs from one (seemingly ordinary) war photo (made by renowned Ron Haviv), and moving and magnifying its fragments reaches its focus – a soldier’s boot ruthlessly and arrogantly treads upon tied-up, curled up, tortured civilian woman lying on the floor. Similarly, but in the opposite direction, Glavonić departs from the truck interior, a claustrophobic cabin, steering wheel and other details, directing progressively his lens towards the muddy exterior, via random stops, random people and via more mud on the road of confrontations with lies, and eventually fascism, which we now live even more intensely than ten years ago when Glavonić got the idea for his film.
“I’ve long ceased to feel fear, I don’t give a fuck what others think…
I’ve long ceased to feel pain from all these deceptions, lies and deceit
Every day I am accused by two-faced liars
I won’t surrender to their lies”
This simultaneously melancholic and rebellious ending song echoes the author’s words that his film “seeks peace by war on lies”. I hope it’s not just my wishful thinking that our social and historical reality can be changed after such films…
Maja Bogojević
