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Zelimir Zilnik, Newcomer, Fighter, Traveler, Player |
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by Svetislav Jovanov, 1998
"My name is Zelimir Zilnik. I make movies about old people". This
rephrasing of Ford's words could serve the purpose of introducing the
author of an exceptional achievement in film and television which is
unparalleled in Serbian and Yugoslav history of moving pictures. This
statement could be complicated indeed, the way in which only extreme
simplicity can be. Zilnik's "biography of a nomadic director" radically
enriches both theory and practice of the so called "authorial film",
especially its genre. Not only that this film maker has been writing a
unique "work in progress" throughout the years; this writing of his has
been performed within a unique subject matter and persistent, although
seemingly "loose" visual and dramatic pattern. This process has
persisted throughout Zilnik's works in spite of the changes in the
language of the media; it absorbed additional energy from them. On the
other hand, the author's position "inside of" history and "against" it
( position of a citizen, that is, a subject who speaks, and position
of artistic, that is, narrator and playwright) depended not only on his
relation to facts, but also on the relation to (anti)utopias.
Zilnik's poetics had experienced almost indiscernible documentary-film
phases of playfulness, irony ("Newsreel on Village Youth, in Winter",
"Little Pioneers"), and "critical observation" ("The Unemployed, "June
Turmoil"). The specific strategy of his "inserting the documentary"
into the fictitious story instantly expanded in "Early Works" for the
first time: the utopia of permanent Revolution is, in the manner of the
sixties, permeated with Freudian and Markuse's mythic concepts. Still,
this aspect of Zilnik's poetics was not dwindled only by repression of
the society apparatus, exposed as all kinds of censorship. Zilnik's
wit, completely devoted to combinative powers and always united with
the explorative sense of taking risk in subject-matter and the visual,
searched not only for the complete apparatus of visual narration, but
also for the dimensions of style termed "the feature of the genre" or
"the role formation".
A Brief Distortion of the Portrait
The feature of the genre was indicated and partly analyzed in the
camp-oriented "Freedom or Cartoons", an unfinished work with
ambitiously grasping subject-matter. As for the issue of the roles (or,
otherwise, "actants" and typical relationships between characters), it
had been approached to in short, seemingly veristic documentary films
such as "Farewell", "Market People" and finally "The Comedy and Tragedy
of Bora Joksimovic". Shadowed by this major examination (which is both
literal and figurative and always equally justified) are the change of
the length of Zilnik's films, moving away from genre classifications,
even the total "dissociation of the atmosphere". Out of fragmentary
urban "displays" and "bizarre professions" Zilnik treaded into an
ambiguous, open and multi-layered multiverse of "story within a story",
that is "a story situated beneath, beyond and within its own frame".
Less known, but compact and seductive para-film piece "The Comedy and
Tragedy..." is of course significant not only for its invention of the
technique of "the author-narrator" who is in himself a bond between
document and fiction. Within these "exchanges of fantasy", haunted by
an impulse of playing which looks for the new "support system", the
combining streak of Zilnik's outlined the first major type. That type
is Player, the figure which, no matter how successfully it effects its
environs, creates "adventure" in all of its appearances: paradox,
circus attraction, Minhausen-like story, the insanity of invention.
Evidently, this dynamic formation of a typology has resulted in shaping
two crucial characters: the Newcomer, such as the main hero of TV film
"The Injury and Recovery of Buda Brakus", and the Fighter, built in a
magnificent tour-de-force of two protagonists in "Vera and Erzika". The
frames and borderlines of Zilnik's characters and types were not
strictly "pure" in that period because of the very nature of ironic
blending of fiction and faction in the plot. Nevertheless, Brakus's
campestral "elan vital" refrains from falling into aggressiveness (
which, according to the biographical fact, he is up to) only owing to
the director's combining impulse. A pattern which is a temporary blend
of document and fiction required the suitable significance of the
story: that is how TV film "Dragoljub and Bogdan" came into life. Same
goes for the figure of the Traveller, a protagonist who, caught in the
conflict of imagination and reality, in one moment just shifts both his
and the viewer's "focus", inducing a new-sprung kind of narrative and
montage effects. Finally, the "second Stage" on the Zilnik's proscenium
of Improvisation and Concept has thus been established, within
reenacting contrasts of facts and associations which change its
position and meaning. The ambiance, motifs, causes of conflicts and
dimensions of time could finally start a new, accelerated progress,
since all the interested parts took their seats.
The Depth of the Screen: Duplication of the Story
Newcomer, Fighter, Traveler, Player is also the dynamic rectangle of
the TV series "Hot Paychecks". Superficial viewers conceived of it as
the "critical discourse with the mirror of populism". However, in the
adventures of the vital Dule and the loser Dika Zilnik does not promote
only the archetype of "the vital strength", but also demonstrates how
elusive fact becomes when contrasted with the reliability of the
fiction. The mentioned narrative rectangle is not noticeable enough on
the surface of the ironic urban fairy tale called "Good Morning,
Belgrade". It may well be that owing to this quality of being
imperceptible in the early works this film is a masterpiece,
balancing the biographical and imaginary, real milieu and imagined
meanings. Zilnik's concept of counterpoint becomes instantly realized
in a different thematic and stylistic key, in a gay nihilism of the
genre of "Pretty Women Walking Through the City". The metaphorical
"railway engine of the revolution" (maintained by, as the real story
goes, the Player, the Newcomer and the Traveller) reminds of
catastrophic Herman's cartoons about Jeremiah, whereas the metonymy of
double faced historian Vladimir Dedijer finished and corrects the
presenting arch or antiutopia. Balkanic, maybe European but definitely
Yugoslav History appears to be a defunct Machine. This is not suggested
only by the "itinerant terrorist" government from this film about the
centenary of the Revolution. The film named "Old Timer" implies an
opposite but analogous awareness that the machine (in this case a
motorcycle, as opposed to a populist bus) can become the instrument of
an "alternative history" if it is in hands of a rock generation
"individual". What has been implied in "Pretty Women" is explicated
in "Old Timer": the Newcomer and the Fighter belong to the
Machine/History/Dogma, whereas the Traveller keeps himself out of the
History et alia (both if he actually returns to it and moves away from
it). That is actually the way how the Traveller and adventure function,
same as the "open movement" in narrative currents which dominated in
Zilnik's poetics. The lonely Player, between the Machine and the
escaping Adventure, remains on the battlefield.
Marginal Remarks, or Ghosts on the Piano
Relativization comes in waves. First, it happens in terms of literal
approaching to "the thing being left" - hence the catastrophic, cynical
and naturalistic accents in "Black and White" and "Through the Ashes".
However, Zilnik is aware that wars are fought in hights, whereas life
and fiction weather out in depths, so he makes (after "Early Works",
"Pavle Hromis" and "Pretty Women") his fourth allegorical takeoff,
named "Tito's Second Time among the Serbs". Irony and nostalgia joined
hands, so that the historical Ghost (ghosts are still roaming Europe)
is not only treated as an object of a statistical analysis, but also
turned into a symbol of crisis, suffering and instructive humour: after
all, the Machine seems to be exhausting itself in the paths of
Adventure. Crossing the fields of bizarre experience of the Other,
always ready for alternative discourses ("Marble Ass"), or the
necessary exercise in "aloof documents" (''Throwing Off the Yalks of
Bondage''), Zilnikesque spirit of Difference expresses itself in a
minor masterpiece called "For Ella". There happens the necessary
transformation which is intriguing to the viewer and awaited for in
terms of style: using the convention of "model versus impersonator"
(analogous to "reader versus author", therefore to "real versus
imaginary"), one of Zilnik's most convincing Players becomes, both
aboundingly and hopelessly, the Traveler through the times of lost
illusions, through the times of Others as means of misunderstanding,
through the net of alternative time which can endow us with only a
doleful tune of love, a memento mori. Whether it is all about the fact
of death or the death fiction, it really does not matter. |
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