INTERPRETATIONS

Early works of film barbarogenius

Inspired by enormous public interest in religious and political activities of Emir (also known as Nemanja) Kusturica, the author discusses the problems of artists (for example, Ezra Pound and Knut Hamsun) who were prone to fascism, just like Kusturica endorsed Milošević’s regime. However, Škrabalo’s text focuses its attention to Kusturica’s early motion pictures, nowadays rarely reviewed in Croatia.

Claiming to have found evidence in Kusturica’s opus of familiarity with Serbian avant-garde Zenithism movement, which included the idea of a barbaric genius who would overthrow the tradition (while the champion of the movement, Ljubomir Mikić, became rigid Yugoslav unitarist), the author proceeds with his original text in which he critically dissected young author’s opus at the very beginning of his career. The text was entitled »Emir Kusturica’s new primitivism« and in it Škrabalo interpreted his international successes Time of the Gypsies, Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and When Father Was Away on Business, despite their virtues and charm, as formulaic »primitivism« (that is to say, as belonging to Sarajevo’s subcultural New Primitivism movement), an exotic social phenomenon that was interesting to the western public. Škrabalo also points out that it is rather inappropriate and out of place for Kusturica’s political declarations to cause such mayhem because the so-called new primitivism is meant to create controversy (especially in Bosnian and Herzegovinian, and Croatian media) for the sole purpose of focussing attention to itself as a way of life.

Ivo Škrabalo