Spectral Politics in Emir Kusturica's Underground

Abstract

Spectral Politics in Emir Kusturica's Underground Zina Giannopoulou The film Underground (Dir. Emir Kusturica, 1995) examines the history of the former Yugoslavia—in a state of war from the 1940s to the 1990s—as a palimpsest of catastrophes. The film won the 1995 Palme d' Or in Cannes around the time that the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia and later Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRFY) ceased to exist, having been divided into six independent countries. Framed by a prologue and an epilogue, the narrative of the film proceeds in three parts, each signaled by an intertitle. "Part 1—War" begins with the Nazi bombing of Belgrade on 6 April 1941 and shows the beginning of the Partisan resistance until the Allies bomb the remains of Belgrade in 1944; "Part 2—Cold War" marks the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tito's communist Yugoslavia and the opening up of the country to the West; and "Part 3—War" refers to the Bosnian conflict and breakup of former Yugoslavia. Kusturica is known for his raucous portrayals of Balkan life, but Underground's audiovisual and narrative excess sparked a domestic and international controversy. Some critics claim that the film propagates Balkanism by depicting "the impaired moral standards innate in the Balkan social character."1 Others interpret the characters' lust for life as "the authenticity of ordinary Yugoslavs that nourished the utopian impulse for a transnational identity."2 Still others stress the film's self-referentiality, its calling attention to itself as both fiction and document of historical reconstruction.3 Kusturica describes Underground as "a film about manipulation, the way that one or two people can keep large numbers of others in their power. In Tito's time, people were kept in a kind of metaphorical cellar, isolated and believing that they were living the best of lives. And in recent years the people who had kept the others in cellars announced themselves as democrats and promptly created new cellars."4 Instead of seeing these critical strands—wild Balkan passions, extravagance as impulse to a utopian and nostalgic pan-Yugoslavism, and cinematic self-reflexivity—as separate from or mutually incompatible with one another, I synthesize them into a reading that tries to do justice to the complex politics of former Yugoslavia as seen by Kusturica. My focus will be on the epilogue, the film's most spectacular sequence and "the main image that Kovačević and Kusturica (the screenwriters) had in mind when they first started working on the project and that they were determined to use as a metaphor in their film about Yugoslavia."5 I read the epilogue both intratextually, as the last narrative segment of a tripartite structure (the other two segments being the prologue and Part 2/the cellar), and intertextually through the theoretical lens of Derridean spectrality and the event, as articulated mostly in Specters of Marx (1994), a text written at the time Underground was made and grappling with the epistemological, ethical, and political exigencies occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall. [End Page 4] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 5] My reading aims to answer two main questions. First, how does Kusturica use time, space, and cinematic self-referentiality to represent the political realities of former Yugoslavia? Given that Underground, like all Kusturica's films, is a specimen of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon for hybrid texts of "fiction that is historically conditioned and history that is discursively structured," how does its inter-threading of history and fiction engage with the Yugoslav past?6 And secondly, how does the Derridean specter help to envision a space and time for Yugoslavia post-mortem that avoids traditional utopianism which Derrida rejects as rooted in ontology and thus closed to the transcendental "possibility of possibilities"?7 I begin with an overview of the film's use of time, space, and cinematic selfreferentiality, and then I examine these elements in the prologue, the cellar, and the epilogue. A brief detour into Derrida's spectrality and the event precedes my reading of the epilogue. Underground, or A Country Under Siege The titular...