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interview by Marija Gajicki
in ''Nezavisni'', July 1998
If "Early Works", in the opinion of some film critics, marked
the end of an illusion in which the word "revolution" was
capitalized, if "Marble Ass" could be interpreted as one of the answers
to the question what has left of the marble man in the nineties, in
which terms then could we speak of Zilnik's latest "Where is this Ship
Bound to?"
It may well be that with this film Zelimir Zilnik ends the
story of the system of values from a disputable social system, the
story quite visible in his artistic and documentary film career,
starting in 1967. The latest Zilnik's film, premiered at the fifth
Palic International Film Festival (which took place between 24 and 31
July 1998), discloses his characteristic documentary -style view
of things. This is the view that "encircles" a seventy-year-old
actor named Giuseppe Pastorchic on his way through Central and Eastern
Europe in search of the woman of his life. This unusual film voyage
starts in Istria, continues through Slovenia, Hungary and Vojvodina and
ends in Montenegro by summarizing both a life story and a century at
its end.
Q: Your films have always contained certain realistic, life experience
which both inspires and provokes the basic plot of the film. To what
extent was the life story of your latest film's main character, the
Istrian Giuseppe, the foundation for the story of the destinies of
common people from Central and Eastern Europe?
A: Building up a film story usually goes this way: I define the
subject-matter I would like to pursue, and then I gather interpreters
and associates with whom the project is going to be packed up. The
"pack-up" should be as authentic as possible. Since I see the film as
an iceberg in which pieces of time, characters, ambiance in which we
shoot the film get frozen, I get ready for the hard work of looking for
the participants. Sometimes I take famous actors, sometimes people who
have never acted in a film before. Lazar Ristovski simply seemed to be
the most veritable womanizing foundryman ever, same as Milenko Pavic
Dika seemed to me the ideal businessman-trickster, or Skelzen Ulaj from
"Brooklyn-Gusinje" the authentic gastarbeiter bridegroom - to name only
a few characters that had roamed into my films. Giuseppe Pastorchic was
not the cause of the whole story, he just "stuffed" the story with
his brilliant performance. He had been ignorant to the crucial elements
of the plot, such as being a child of an Austro-Hungarian officer,
travel to Montenegro and stay in Budapest, or the whole row of
entanglements concerning love and the mob. He has never experienced any
of these, but his performance lead spectators to believe that the film
was the reconstruction of Guiseppe's life story. Creating the dilemma
whether we watch the real life or the film is very intriguing to me.
Diving into the illusion of the screen is the very sorcery of the film.
Q: Who is actually central to the film story - is it Guiseppe or the
countries of Slovenia, Hungary and Yugoslavia (Vojvodina and
Montenegro) he travels through with Djordje, in search/quest of the
woman of his life?
A: I will tell you about the origins of the story, and you see for
yourself what is essential in it. Two years ago I was invited to make a
screening of my films in Gorizia, in Italy. The town resembles
Petrovaradin, having a hill with an Austro-Hungarian fortress on it,
only that Gorizia is a few times bigger. In the fortress, there was a
projection room. Many people came to see the films and we lead
conversations a few hours long afterwards. They asked me about
Yugoslavia, its tearing apart, the life we live today. They were very
much interested in Vojvodina, in multilingual education, media,
administrative procedures. I was astonished.
The senator of the
province was also there, and he invited me to the dinner after the
screenings, using that occasion to ask me about every detail of our
life here. I flew off the handle! C'mon, guys, chill out, tell me how
do YOU live, we are not of much use anymore. Then they started
lamenting how the things got tough for them after the disintegration of
the East. How come? They are also a former Austro-Hungarian province,
multinational, with German, Slovenian and Croatian schools. The
unstitching of the former Yugoslavia along the national seams brings
them under the thumb of Rome, implying a denial of the "luxury" of
being different.
Their nostalgia related to the former Yugoslavia leads
to the statement "you'll get together again, just tell us when". They
saw my modestly funded productions and asked me if I had any
suggestions for them and if we could collaborate. On the next day, I
went to Triest with my late friend Vuk Babic. He showed me the Serb
cemetery, with rich tombs as evidence of the economic power of the
shipowners and merchants who had moved there from Herzegovina. Then we
had a long talk with his friends, some Italian communists, divided in
two factions, one of which claimed Yugoslavia disintegrated because of
Tito's old revisionism, whose expression was his "dilution" of
communism through fights with Stalin. The other group claimed the
opposite: the state socialism collapsed because of the Stalinist
isolationism, because it did not possess the essence of socialism,
which democracy is. It was there, in the Triest harbour, with my feet
dipped into the Adriatic Sea, that I sketched the main features of
Giuseppe's story: the main character, Italian, who observes the
turbulences in the East with the experience of a nation that had once
in the past been seized by the euphoric frenzy of fascism, and with an
even greater experience of a nation that pulled its own empire down in
civil wars, an empire that had ruled the whole world.
I told my friends from Gorizia I had the framework of the story and I
was looking for a seventy-year-old actor that would give a summary of
his life in the film, as well as a summary of the century that is
drawing to a close. That was the point when our endless correspondence
started: they claimed that there was no such actor, and that there was
nobody who could organize the shooting of such a film in several
Eastern bloc countries.
Six months later, there was no progress yet. So I started looking for
an actor myself. It was in Hungary that I discovered Giuseppe
Pastorchic, a retired bricklayer from Monfalcone, and, as one can see,
he did a great job playing the part.
Q: With the film "Where is This Ship Bound to?", you seem to get out of
the thematic circle that the Yugoslav cinema had fallen into years ago.
You seem to have decided to "break down another myth", this time
telling a story about Central and Eastern Europe in a humouristic way,
a story about little men's destinies that have shaped the past and the
present of this corner of the world. "Tito Among the Serbs for
the Second Time" broke down one of the greatest myths around. "Marble
Ass" was an analysis of the myth related to masculinity and the warrior
mentality. What is it that lies in the essence of your interests when
it comes to the film "Where is This Ship Bound to"?
A: That is a good question. Do I, at such a relatively old age, want to
become an expert at Rome and Anthony and Cleopatra, or is there some
other motive? And why not say immediately what the other motive was? It
was an idea, a thought that torments us here, and everyone in the
former Yugoslav republics, no matter how much we are trying to suppress
it. And the thought is the question how one can swallow down and digest
all these defeats inflicted on us, the defeats that would go on
torturing generations to come. Within the Yugoslav film production, we
have already been given several answers: stories about our ill fate and
wild nature, whose point is that we are a people prone to destruction
and slaying. As if it was one of the features of the great Slavonic
soul, which uses the pauses in-between its fratricidal sprees to create
and recite sentimental poems. Another answer to the question is related
to depicting the arrogant stupidity and gluttony of our leaders, who
are designers of those defeats.
In this film, I have chosen a slightly different point of view: a
defeat is a logical lesson and a price we pay to the irresponsibility,
which we all show when taking part, or not taking part, in the "public
affairs". Our general, decades long assent to carry the weight of
arrogance and stupidity of those in power, at a point began to make us
different from the normal world. Maybe it is time for us to let go of
the narcissistic insight of our own "corruption" or our own "ingenuity"
and take a look around ourselves. Let us see what the others are doing
and how they live. Let's simply get off the tree from which we have
been falling head-on for decades. |
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