Emir Kusturica has shown the ability to adapt. He was one of the bright young filmmakers of Yugoslavia—and then there was no Yugoslavia. And even before his country cracked apart, he was always living in multiple modes. Kusturica was raised in Sarajevo in a secular Muslim family of Serbian origin—this in a time when Sarajevo was a thriving multi-cultural hub of the Balkans. He studied film in Prague at a school that had numbered Milos Forman and Milan Kundera among its faculty. When Yugoslavia dissolved, he gained attention for movies—such as Underground and Black Cat, White Cat—that seemed to satirize the civil war that followed, often set to the madcap tempo of Gypsy music.
As shown in Giorgio Bertellini’s compact and insightful critical analysis, Emir Kusturica (published by University of Illinois Press), the director has always worked from “a combination of formal irreverence, comedy and romanticism.” Bertellini also puts it another way: Kusturica’s films “have revolved around a poetic core… in a dialogue with pressing historical concerns.” A prominent theme in many of his films is the pressure of outside forces in triggering ethnic violence, a topic he already explored years before the Yugoslav civil war of the ‘90s. His characters are often on a journey or end on one; his visual strategies including framing through windows and doorways and the arrangement of symbolic objects such as icons or signs.
Although he is known in the U.S. mostly by film buffs, Kusturica comes out of a cultural context larger than motion pictures. A guitarist with Belgrade’s No Smoking Orchestra, Kusturica doesn’t hear music as incidental to his films, but integral. Bertellini locates Kusturica’s identification with a Yugoslav youth movement of the 1980s, the New Primitives, whose “poetics of ironic rebellion” mixed avant-garde experimentation with local culture. Anti-ideological, embracing paradox and irony, the New Primitives rejected Communist orthodoxy and Western modernism. One of the most familiar manifestations of this movement was the Slovenian punk band Laibch, which “targeted the ideology of past and present totalitarian regimes through a provocative over-identification with their rituals, slogans, and idioms.” Kusturica followed much the same path in his best-known film, Underground.
