CoMo No. 11: Bosnia and Herzegovina (March, 2023)

[Mario Gaborovic]

Hey I found the film but there's no subs. If someone uploads it at KG, maybe I would do the subtitles eventually to improve my ratio there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_tBlYdhQMs

[niminy-piminy]

ha, when i see the written language i can vaguely understand what's being said.
edit: oh, subbed is only the Italian intro

[Mario Gaborovic]

ha, when i see the written language i can vaguely understand what's being said.
edit: oh, subbed is only the Italian intro

The members of NS and some other musicians/actors were also creators of Top Lista Nadrealista (Surrealists' Top Chart), a Yugoslavian version of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The show lasted from 1984 to 1991. Of course, it was made up of comedy sketches and music videos' intermezzo, and some of them were really hilarious. Their main target was already present NATIONALISM, and in this ending credits they made a Atari Pac-Man with members of different ethnicities killing one another (in their respective killing methods during WW2, while appropriate local tune is playing on synthesizer.) The man in white is obviously The Leader himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_lista_nadrealista
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sud58KiYFc

[niminy-piminy]

i see now KVIFF 2000 had a section called "Focus on Bosnia and Hercegovina" and were screening the following films:

Horoskop (Boro Drašković)
Kuduz (Ademir Kenović)
Mali vojnici (Bahrudin Bato Čengić)
Most (Hajrudin Krvavac)
Otac na službenom putu (Emir Kusturica)
Ovo malo duše (Ademir Kenović)
Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell (Emir Kusturica)
Miris dunja (Mrza Idrizović)
Crni biseri (Svetomir Janić)
Žena s krajolikom (Ivica Matić)

[sally]

mario honey, i would buy you a drink, only i would need to stop raving first about......




landscape with a woman - ivica matić (1989) #CoMoHerBo

now THIS is a stone-cold bosnian classic, should be on all the best of yugo lists (DP is karpo ačimović godina, need i say more?)

(waiting for mario to tell me why i'm wrong )

man just wants to paint naked women, poor soul.....

[Mario Gaborovic]

Landscape with a Woman was made in 1974 as a TV film. Ivica Matić (1948-1976) was born with a heart anomaly; one day he went to help some friends building a house which proved to be a fatal decision. The very same day he returned home, lied down and never woke up but his only film made Bosnian film history. In 1989 the film was re-released but as a theatrical feature on 35mm.

[sally]

oh he only made one film? well, it was a gem.

[niminy-piminy]

[Mario Gaborovic]

https://zff.hr/arhiva/2015/en/film/landscape-woman

The whole movie reminds of a naive painting IMO. Such a tragic loss of a talent.

[niminy-piminy]

https://zff.hr/arhiva/2015/en/film/landscape-woman

"He made some thirty short films and one feature film."

oh, 30 shorts!! i expect all out of reach...

https://bhfilm.ba/en/vanjski-saradnik/ivica-matic/41

Born in 1948 in Vareš, Bosnia-Herzegovina. He joined the Sarajevo Amateur Film Club and made several well-received amateur films prior to taking up the job as a professional cinematographer (and occasionally director) for TV Sarajevo. He continued to make exceptional amateur films. His only feature-length fiction film, LANDSCAPE WITH A WOMAN - an artistic essay about the relationship between the society and an artist - won the award of the International Critics’ Jury at the Monte-Carlo Film Festival. He died in 1976 in Sarajevo. Sudden death prevented him from completing several ongoing film projects, including from making a movie based on his screenplay THE BRIDES ARE COMING. In 1978, the screenplay was made into TV film THE BRIDES ARE COMING by Emir Kusturica.

1976 – WOMAN IN A LANDSCAPE
1976 – HEAVY WATER (short documentary)
1971 – (PORTRAIT WITH CIGARETTE) (short documentary)
1971 – A JOLLY CREW ON A BEACH (short documentary)
1971 – PERSONAL ADS (IN MEMORIAM) (short documentary)
1971 – AN INOCANT LADY IN GREEN GRASS (short)
1970 – PROCESS (short documentary)
1970 – (IVICA MATIĆ'S FILM) (short)
1970 – WEEDING (short)
1969 – INTERVJU WITH PARAMOUR (short)
1968 – WHAT HAVE YOU LOST FIRST: VIRGINITY OR CHILD BENEFITS? (short)
1968 – REST IN PEACE EVERY DAY (short documentary)
1967 – HOLY BOSOM (short)
1967 – KISS ME AND I'LL BEAR YOU A DOG (short)
1966 – KISS THE DOG (short)

[Mario Gaborovic]

Kutak za sporni trenutak aka Cor(n)e(r) Of the Matter (2005)

https://letterboxd.com/film/corner-of-the-matter/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26_uSJORgBk

This 17-minute short follows the lowest-tier football goalkeeper who has a unique way of motivation when it comes to goal's defense - he places his meal inside the goal, so that the ball wouldn't come across the plate and destroy his lunch.

[sally]

this is really lovely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_MuU8Lq8cM

[Mario Gaborovic]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKbfu8rRrho

[niminy-piminy]

ORPHEUS (Tina Šmalcelj, 2013) #CoMoHerBo
https://youtu.be/ILVd4kttR_M

PANGAEA (Emma Rozanski, 2015) #CoMoHerBo
https://youtu.be/n16XS3NRvwE

[niminy-piminy]

KIYAMET (Ivan Ramadan, 2011) #CoMoHerBo
https://youtu.be/EpSatm1rZDE

WOMAN IN PURPLE (Igor Drljača, 2009) #CoMoHerBo
https://vimeo.com/276638539

[Mario Gaborovic]

Dajak čamac / Dayak Boat (1940)

https://letterboxd.com/film/dayak-boat/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUE6xouI-Rs

The earliest found film made in local production was this 3-minute shot of people bathing at Vrbas river. Aleksandar Bojko (1896-1969) from Banja Luka left behind some short films starting in 1938 and continued to make them well into the 1960s.

Before that, Bojko was involved in some Croatian film productions (which was considerably more vibrant than the rest of ex-Yugoslavia's) because Bosnia didn't have its own.

https://aleksandranovkovic.wordpress.co ... dar-bojko/

[niminy-piminy]

SARAJEVO FILM FESTIVAL FILM (Johan van der Keuken, 1993) #CoMoHerBo

During the Sarajevo Filmfestival 'Beyond the End of the World', two people are followed with a camera: festival director Haris Pasovic and student of architecture Marijla Marketa. He has organized a well-attended festival in the heart of this city; she is one of the visitors. Accompanied by the sound of shellfire she watches movies by famous directors. We also see her in a more ordinary situation: at home with her father and sister. Her mother is dead. The film offers a very sincere and direct impression of the absurd situation in Sarajevo, where people are ignoring the hazards in order to see a movie, and where Maijla works in the garden, again accompanied by the incessant whizzing of grenades.

https://youtu.be/5MquwwQOdsE

[sally]

kalabaka (the secrets of unknown europe) - fred von bohlen (1928) #CoMoHerBo


this film (only part of which goes through bosnia) is both one of the most amazing early travelogues i've seen and the most offensive (all the isms) blonde asshole is a total imperialist jerk but the film is a gorgeous, surreal fever dream. (special thumbs up to action priest having the most fun of his life)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAShU5C3aVM

[Zynab]

this film (only part of which goes through bosnia) is both one of the most amazing early travelogues i've seen and the most offensive (all the isms) blonde asshole is a total imperialist jerk but the film is a gorgeous, surreal fever dream. (special thumbs up to action priest having the most fun of his life)

ohh this looks amazing! thanks for the heads up and link

[niminy-piminy]

THE CITY (Vojislav 'Kokan' Rakonjac, Marko Babac, Živojin Pavlović, 1963) #CoMoHerBo

Grad is a psychological drama about the thin line that separates depression and melancholy. It gives us the opportunity to understand that the alienation of the modern socialist man is not just a social problem, but also a poetic aestheticization of urban thinking and behaviour.

For Pavlovic, Babac, and especially Rakonjac, self-destruction is not a defense mechanism, but a lifestyle.

Through their analysis of public consciousness, the three directors project their secret Bauhaus, seeking its shadow in the hidden areas of obsolete thought, in the everyday of Socialism.

The film ends up in a real suburb of Belgrade, defining a new border area between intimacy and claustrophobia, Neoclassicism and Constructivism, night and day, village and city, sound and images, present and future.

This is the only officially banned movie in the history of Yugoslavia.

[niminy-piminy]

Before the war, there was a Czech, a veterinarian.
Being trained a veterinarian, he didn't know how to write a film review.
So, he cried.
Crying, he encountered an old man who told him, "Don't cry, it's a shame, you're a man."
So, he stopped crying but he still didn't know how to write a film review.
Clueless, he encountered a young woman who told him, "If you don't know how to do it, you'll learn."
And he truly learned! ↓↓

A LITTLE BIT OF SOUL (Ademir Kenović, 1986) #CoMoHerBo






https://youtu.be/VbD_kBJc_gI

[Mario Gaborovic]

Yeah and once he descended to the town to write down a review, he somehow "couldn't".

[niminy-piminy]

NEVER BEEN BETTER (Ivana Pauerová Milošević, 2006) #CoMoHerBo

Born in Sarajevo, but now a Czech citizen, Ivana Milošević went to Bosnia and Herzegovina a decade after the end of the war to film a polyphonic portrait of a historically, socially, and politically divided country.


In it we see Bosnian Muslims organise a mass funeral for the victims of war, firmly convinced that the Serbian murders remain unpunished. Orthodox Serbs gather to pay honour a monument to their modern-day martyrs. Croatians express pride in the firmness of their hearts. A Catholic priest explains that Bosnia is like the nettle: it stings, but it also heals. One Sarajevo woman lost both her sons in the war; she gave birth to a third son, but she would never hesitate to again go out to defend her city. This starkly narrated film presents a brief montage of war reportage, followed by various encounters, where people relate differing accounts of individual events, consume spirits, and sing, waiting for one verse of a poem to be read: I gaze all night into the sky, but nothing, nothing do I understand.

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Tunnel
After the war, the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum was built onto the historic private house whose cellar served as the entrance to the Sarajevo Tunnel. Visitors can still walk down a small length of the tunnel (approximately 20 metres). The "house" museum exhibits archival materials including an 18-minute-long film, war photographs, military equipment, flags, military uniforms, along with flotsam and jetsam.
The museum is open to visitors every working day from 09:00 to 16:00.

[niminy-piminy]

BEHOLD THE MAN: ECCE HOMO (Vesna Ljubić, 1994) #CoMoHerBo

In the past few years, dozens of documentaries have been made on the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Many video registrations had the dramatic siege of Sarajevo as their main subject. ECCE HOMO distinguishes itself by its personal interpretation of the blockade of Bosnia's capital. This film has no voice-over commentating on the horrors, only images, larded now and then with fragments of religious and other music, and the hoarse croaking of crows. ECCE HOMO is not a political film, but a personal reflection on death. Time and again, she leads us to new funerals on improvised graveyards and shows images of the devastations: a burning tram, flats destroyed by fire, and the arrival of bodies at a morgue. The film reaches an emotional climax when the camera halts at a tombstone with a photo of Danica Ljubic. Who was this woman? The sister of the director? Vesna Ljubic: "The film is not sad, on the contrary; death is our only joy. And our hope."

https://www.filmneweurope.com/news/bosn ... f-covid-19
08-04-2021
OBITUARY: Bosnian Director Vesna Ljubić Dies of COVID-19
By Tina Kalinić

SARAJEVO: Vesna Ljubić, the first female director who made a feature film in Bosnia and Herzegovina, died of COVID-19 at the age of 82. Vesna Ljubić paved the way for Jasmila Žbanić, Aida Begić and all the other important females of Bosnian and Herzegovinian film industry.

Vesna Ljubić graduated in Film Directing from Centro Sperimentale di Roma and had an opportunity to work as an assistant to Federico Fellini while studying.

After returning to Sarajevo, she started working for Radio Television Sarajevo, where she stayed until her retirement and where she directed her first television film Simha in 1971.

In 1980, she made her first feature film Defiant Delta (produced by Sutjeska Film), which won best film and best screenplay at the Bergamo Film Festival.

Ljubić spent the war in Sarajevo and during and after the war she concentrated on documentaries. All three of her last documentaries Ecce Homo (1994), Adio Kerida (2001) and Bosnian Rhapsody: At the Margins of Science (2011), all produced by Ton Light Film, premiered at the IDFA Documentary Film Festival.

Rada Šešić, Head of Sarajevo Film Festival’s Competition Programme – Documentary Film, who worked as an assistant on Ljubić’s second film The Last Switchman of the Narrow-Gauge Railway (Sutjeska film, 1986), pays her a tribute: “Vesna Ljubić was an excellent storyteller and truly a cineast, an auteur who managed to create her personal cinematic style balancing skilfully between the surreal and deeply researched issues in the socio-cultural reality. Lucidly and with charm, often humorous and playful, she was narrating stories always connected to her home country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, tales of ordinary, wise men, who she obviously admired so much”.

[niminy-piminy]

TEMENOS (Nina Danino, 1998) #CoMoHerBo

'Temenos' means a sacred site or ritual precinct. The film Temenos explores the phenomenon of visionary experience, taking the viewer to locations where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared, including Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje in Croat-occupied Bosnia where the visions continue. Nina Danino films the landscapes that have witnessed these transcendental appearances, imbuing them with a sense of the sacred.


These locations are both specific and unknown since viewers are never told where they are. Instead, the audience is taken on a journey, during which they experience the raw exposure of emotion and the haunting voices that appear on the soundtrack. The operatic soprano Catherine Bott, the Tuvan diva Sainkho Namchylak and the New York experimental vocalist Shelley Hirsch all deliver extraordinary performances. Across the landscape, these voices weep bitterly, hum gently or give vent to unearthly sounds, sounds of nature, the screams of dementia, or angelic arias.

REVELATION 1

The following is a list of some of the bizarre occurrences at Medjugorje which contribute to the incredulity of the messages.

On June 29, 1981, the "seers" asked the "Virgin" how long she would be appearing to them and the response was: "For as long as you like... are you already tired of seeing me?" This is a dubious statement to be uttered by the Virgin Mary. Throughout the history of authentic apparitions the Mother of God has never been known to make Her appearances based upon the whims of a seer. Genuine apparitions are not under man's control. It is Heaven that decides the length and time of apparitions.

i have to confess that during watching this film (this scene specifically)...


i experienced a Marian apparition...


i fleetingly noticed the face of the Virgin Mary in the folds of the praying lady's outfit...


REVELATION 2

On August 2, 1981, there was a gathering of people singing and praying in a field. As the people were praying the "Virgin" appeared. She supposedly told the children that whoever wanted to touch her could. As people came forward to touch her the "seers" explained what the people were touching (e.g., hand, veil, robe, head). This seems repulsive and an act unbecoming of the Blessed Mother. The alleged "touching session" lasted for 10-15 minutes.

After the "Virgin" left, Marija stated: "When the Virgin left she was completely blackened." The "seer" explained this was due to the fact sinners touched her. People were then exhorted to make use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation as soon as possible. To conceive of the notion of the Immaculate Virgin Mary allowing Herself to become stained by sinners is absurd. Despite these bizarre happenings related in books by advocates of Medjugorje, followers remain undaunted.

moreover, while contemplating what i have just seen, i suddenly noticed one more figure (stone fractions of the sleeping ancient goddess upon whom the Marian cult was built)...

https://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/ni ... ay(3).html
The camera pans in circular movements giving a feeling of unworldly weightlessness. The memoirs of the Marian visionaries, Conchita Gonzalez, Bernadette Soubrious and the Medgorgjian children are spoken by the filmmaker over the now empty landscapes. Their words are particularly poignant in the case of Medgorgjia, the meeting point of Islam with Orthodox and Catholic Christianity and the scene of atrocities during the Bosnian war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medjugorje

Medjugorje is a town located in southwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, about 25 km (16 mi) southwest of Mostar and 20 km (12 mi) east of the border with Croatia. The town is part of the Čitluk municipality and geographically part of Herzegovina. Since 1981, it has become a popular site of Catholic pilgrimage due to Our Lady of Međugorje, a purported series of apparitions of Mary, mother of Jesus, to six local children that are supposedly still happening to this day.

[niminy-piminy]

JOURNAL NO. 1: AN ARTIST'S IMPRESSION (Hito Steyerl, 2007) #CoMoHerBo

Journal No. 1 - An Artist's Impression is an attempt at reconstructing lost images. The main topic of the first Bosnian newsreel, made in 1947, was a reading and writing class for women. Self-assured, they let down their veils and sit at the school desks. These were their first steps toward a modern, liberated role in their new nation. Four years after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the only surviving nitrate copy of this newsreel was lost in the chaotic battlefields of former Yugoslavia. Using two screens at a time, director Hito Steyerl tries to breathe new life into something that is no longer there. With unprecedented perseverance, she follows the route that the film canister travelled: from the archive to a barn, by way of a bunker. She speaks with people who saw the newsreel and asks an artist to capture their descriptions, as if it were a storyboard. She also incorporates excerpts from 1940s feature films to get nearer to the atmosphere on a visual level. But it turns out to be impossible to capture the starting point of Bosnian identity. Every attempt to illustrate this history in images will explode into fragments, as if stumbling onto a forgotten landmine.

Two years after the end of the Second World War, Film Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo, and four years after the collapse of the Communist bloc this newsreel, which has only survived on nitrate film, was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. In Journal No. 1 – An artist’s impression Hito Steyerl attempts to find out what was on this film document from Sarajevo’s Sutjeska studio. She listens to eyewitnesses, and according to her instructions artist Arman Kulasic made a number of drawings that resemble storyboards for some lost film. In the simultaneous projection of Journal No. 1 – An artist’s impression the unattainability of a historical zero hour of the national identity takes concrete form: What appears to be a moment of great change in this look back (the newsreel reported on a literacy campaign, Muslim women confidently removed their headscarves, Communist Yugoslavia under Tito celebrated modernization through education in its early films) remains limited by subjective memory. Instead the artist, who was in fact intended to serve merely as a “medium” for the off-screen voices, is himself given a voice: He was affected by ethnic cleansing during the fighting. Whenever there are no documentary images available, Steyerl employs images from fiction films produced at Sutjeska (the anti-Fascist Valter brani Sarajevo [Walter Saves Sarajevo] and Do You Remember Dolly Bell? by Emir Kusturica), without however intending to make a complete reconstruction: Multiethnic Yugoslavia remains fragmentary, both in general history and the history of film, a country between the images.

https://youtu.be/C3iSRiLRiBs

[sally]

epilogue