Let's take (to take only one example) the beautiful flames of a pretty, burning village. Everyone knows this is a potent metaphor for a host of real-world "solutions." The famous quote from the US Marine in Vietnam comes to mind: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." One imagines the same justification -- if it had sentience -- coming from the invisible mouth of the AIDS virus. The incidental, if total, destruction of the object/host in question becomes beside the point. It's a side-story (even if as a stirring, filmic one). Because after all the main point -- the very focus of the matter -- is achieving, wielding, and keeping power. And what's a few fried villages, or even a body-count the millions, compared to that? Let's take (to take only one example) the basic behavior of that consummate behind-the-scenes operator, president-for-life Slobodan Milosevic, whose professed reason d'ętre in the last half-decade or so was the preservation of a state (and not incidentally, his own power). What's a little destruction of a state to get alarmed about, when the ultimate goal is its preservation? Furthermore, how could one such patriotism? Clearly, only a powerful man could accomplish this -- so more power to him! And other examples abound. Let’s take another -- a recent criminalka called “Pretty Village, Pretty Flame.” The film made a sensation, among other places, in the pretty little village of Ljubljana, which being “saved” by flame-treatment only a few years ago, and which shows that clearly in the discernment of its film critics and commentators. I had occasion to see "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame" only two months ago, in the richest community on the East Coast of the United States: East Hampton, Long Island. This is a village which hasn't required "saving" of the above variety for more than 300 years -- when its founders helped rescue the heathen Indians from the land they had previously occupied. To its credit, East Hampton saved the Indians very effectively, and is now the residence of people such as Steven Spielberg and others, who occupy gleaming palatial homes directly on the flawless sand beaches of Long Island's southern fork, facing in the general direction of England. The occasion of the projection of the film in question was something called the "Hamptons International Film Festival". Among many other features, documentaries and shorts, this TV Serbia production made an appearance here, along with its director, Srdjan Dragovic. Since the reputation of the film (not to mention the war which gave it so much inspiration), preceded the actual 35 millimeter in print to Long Island, I stopped by the Festival Office to pick up what informational material I could before the screening. I was curious: "Pretty Village, Pretty Flames" had been produced by that same media institution which played such a decisive role in Serbia's bold moves to rescue Yugoslavia from the fascist Croats and the Bosnian fundamentalist mujahadeen (those new-minted barbarians crowding each other at Serbia's sacred gates). And yet "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame" has a glowing reputation, so to speak, in both mainstream and specialised English-language media, who view it as an argument against Serbian -- well, let's call it "nationalism." Clearly, herein lay a discrepancy. How could the film embody -- indeed, stem from -- the selfless patriotism and necessary will-to-power described above, and yet be critical of it at the same time? My curiosity was further piqued when, taking my seat in the movie theater before the projection, I noted that the Variety rave and the NY Times piece both referred to a graphic scene early in the film, in which rampaging Serbian troops brutally execute an elderly Muslim man (a resident of one of many pretty villages being saved). Following this shocking episode, according to the journalism, one of the characters says: "They say war brings out the best and the worst in a man." Heavy pause. "Where is the best?" In both of these texts, in fact, this moving episode of self-doubt on the part of the Muslim man's killer -- as well as the depiction of the killing itself -- are used as evidence of the critical nature of the film. As well they should be: isn't it exactly this kind of over-enthusiasm in the line of duty which gave this particular fire brigade a bad name? And in the Western media particularly? Clearly, something was amiss. Still, before the lights went down in the theater, I also couldn't help noticing that the very expensive-looking pamphlet about the film (printed by TV Serbia) included a statement by director Dragovic. Although not completely coherent, it seemed to indicate that the UN-sponsored economic sanctions against his country had inconvenienced his film work, and that Dragovic was not happy about that fact. Not only that, but "...while the world had welcomed the three idlers with highest honors, hoping to solve their dirty war, the Serbian nation had turned into a nation of smugglers and black marketers (sic) who had to travel to bordering cities in search of food and fuel." How degrading! It takes only a small additional leap of the imagination to picture the citizens of this same Serbian nation now themselves forced to dig graves in city parks, within close range of heavy artillary and merciless snipers in the hills. Could it be that Belgrade TV had passed the story of Serbia's ongoing martyrdom to good hands? Dragovic's words reassured me. Despite the reviews, I probably didn't have to fear overmuch for the director's patriotism. And when the English-subtitled print flickered into life, I saw only more evidence. After credits and a neo-newsreel-propaganda sequence, it became clear that, for American consumption at, the execution scene (the one so key in establishing the good name of "Pretty Village, Pretty Flames" in the Times and Variety) is now -- gone. It has vanished. Excised, on a forced march to the editing room floor. Uprooted from its context, like so many citizens of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and dumped into the memory hole. Instead, the attack on the village cuts (with a lurch not in keeping with the generally seamless editing of the film) to an interior shot. The old Muslim man is simply another dead body, who could easily have died accidentally in the assault on the town, rather than as a result of a willful execution. The "best/worst" line by the Chetnik executioner remains, now restored to its rightful role a faint, rude echo of Shakespeare -- the shocked reaction of a dutiful soldier to a regrettable death in the line of duty. The Times and Variety reviews dated from August. The Hamptons Film Festival was in October. It is now mid January and even as I write this, Belgrade students gather daily in their tens of thousands, to throw eggs and rocks at TV Serbia and the other cornerstones of the Milosevic media bunker. No need to bore anyone with a tedious list of the other attributes of "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame" which, in the final analysis, is a worthy patriotic product and a credit to the institution which made it. I won't get into the misogyny (in which every woman is a whore, not excluding the tedious caricature of a hapless pathetic American greenhorn journalist). No need to emphasize that, at it's core, this is the work of people masticating anew the glorious epic story of Serbian victimhood (the Bosnian Serb soldiers, who after all were only trying to get on with their rescue activities, are encircled by faceless "Turks" and trapped in a siege situation). It’s not necessary to emphasize that if the film still had that excluded scene, it could reasonably be understood as a serious -- if partial, flawed -- attempt at showing the behavior of a vast majority of Bosnian Serb men during the war (and therefore might conceivably qualify as being critical of the state which funded it). Finally, that fact that this intrepid band of filmmakers literally went to ethnically cleansed Bosnia, found the most picturesque destroyed villages available, and then burned them again -- all for the benefit of their little drama -- well to be frank, it makes me too sick to my stomache to mention. Let alone analyse for it’s self-evident moral implications. No, I'd rather skip to the end of the film, to the scene of my guilt. When the lights went up again, and the room shook with applause, and the director and a producer appeared in front to answer questions, and many hands were raised by my countrymen (the direct descendants of European settlers in the New World, now trying to understand a New World Order evidently beyond their comprehension) -- mine, inexplicably, was not among them. "Many people from Sarajevo and from Croatia saw this film," said director Dragovic, responding to a question. "They said it was an honest film. And I'm very proud of that." He smiled, modestly. Applause: What a fair fellow! I should have raised my hand. I should have raised it, and said: Mr. Honest Director, if you did show your film to people from Sarajevo and Croatia (people who weren't ethnic Serbs who had fled from those places), and if in fact they actually did say the film was "honest" -- then it could only have been because of that crucial missing scene. Removing the only explicit depiction of a war crime converts, at a stroke, the film’s principles from war criminals to misunderstood war heroes. It is the exact equivalent, within a fiction, of the attempted cover-up of mass murder going on even now in Bosnia. Why then, Sir, is it missing now? Would you care to explain? |