Professor Petar Ljubojev, Ph. D.
from Ethics and Aesthetics of the Screen, Prosveta, Belgrade, 1997, chapter "Film
made in Vojvodina"
Zelimir Zilnik's film entitled "Marble Ass" (1995) represents a most
radical metaphor for a complete downfall of a country destroyed by degenerated
outcomes of collectivism in the catastrophe of war which befell young
people. Zilnik's characters come back from the battlefield only to face
a criminal milieu deeply rooted, extermination of humans, pillage, break
down of law and order, quotidian robberies.
Therefore, their only
way to survive becomes sharp dropping of all values. Amidst the
rottenness of a social scene which represents collectivism destroyed,
the first signs of a certain resistance come from desperate people. These
live as if in a puddle left after big floods, marginalized and stigmatized
because of their perverted outlook of the world of the bottom. In the film
of new Yugoslavia (the country could otherwise be called small Yugoslavia
and its production referred to as small film production from two Yugoslav
republics),
Zilnik's "Marble Ass" is beyond doubt the first ray
of hope signaling that film art will make an accusation against life
extinction motivated by maintaining the power in an impoverished country
heading toward the catastrophe of no return. Zilnik anatomizes
the margin, believing it has always been a faithful picture of circumstances
destroying man and degrading all moral values. In these circumstances
human life becomes worthless, taken down to the lowest scale of
the basement stratum poverty.
Zilnik's criticism was the first to reveal
the defeat of humanness in the age of powerful tycoons of corruption
snatching and recklessness. The corruption reaches to the bottom,
where there are people emerged from the muck of inconceivable and crushing
war conflict. The picture of the endangered individual (a young man),
which used to be dreary in earlier films, seems to be so smooth
and tender when compared to the milieu of "Marble Ass" - a vision of
catastrophe in the quotidian living routine of the mid-nineties.
|
