Emir Kusturica

Contemporary Film Directors

Edited by Justus Nieland and Jennifer Fay

The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the

world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief

aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,

to give serious critical attention to their work, and to il-

lustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.

Contributors to the series include an array of internationally

respected critics and academics. Each volume contains

an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview

with the director, and a detailed filmography.

A list of books in the series

appears at the end of this book.

Emir Kusturica

Giorgio Bertellini

UNIVERSITY

OF

ILLINOIS

PRESS

URBANA,

CHICAGO,

AND

SPRINGFIELD

2015 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Frontispiece: Emir Kusturica in Maradona by Kusturica (2008). Courtesy of

Photofest.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bertellini, Giorgio, 1967

Emir Kusturica / by Giorgio Bertellini.

pages cm (Contemporary ilm directors)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-252-03889-1 (hardback)

isbn 978-0-252-08044-9 (paperback)

isbn 978-0-252-09685-3 (e-book)

1. Kusturica, EmirCriticism and interpretation. I. Title.

pn1998.3.k88b4525 2014

791.4302'33092dc23 2014025160

For Argia and Giovanni

Contents

Acknowledgments | xi

the art of a romantic trickster | 1

Dissention 13

Beginnings: A Yugoslav Auteur from Prague 13

Historical-Romantic Cinema 23

A Yugoslav in America 63

Disconnection 73

Once upon a Time There Was a Country 73

Dissonance 97

Cats and Birds 98

Super 8 Music 108

Life Is a MiracleHe Promises 114

Kindred Spirits 136

Bridges on the Balkans 143

interviews with emir kusturica:

a montage | 151

Filmography | 157

Bibliography | 167

Index | 177

Acknowledgments

This volume grew out of earlier Italian editions, published by Editrice Il Castoro (Milan) irst in 1996 and, in a revised and doubly expanded edition, in 2011. I wish to thank Renata Gorgani, Andreina Speciale, and Alessandro Zontini of Editrice Il Castoro for their work on those earlier editions and for agreeing, in cooperation with Daniel M. Nasset, on an English version for the University of Illinois Press and its Contemporary Film Directors series. I am very grateful to Daniel, for his feedback and for shepherding the book to completion; to James Naremore, Justus Nieland, and Jennifer Fay, for welcoming the volume into their series; and to Louis Kibler, for his tremendous help in preparing this mono-graph for the English-speaking reader. My work on Kusturica results from long-standing debts to a num-ber of scholars, journalists, librarians, festival organizers, and friends. I wish to thank Richard Pea, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the director of the New York Film Festival, for a fundamental course on Eastern European cinemas taught at New York University back in 1995 and for the discussions that followed; Nancy Friedland of Columbia University Libraries, then at NYU/Bobst Library, for teaching me how to get ahold of all sorts of materials preserved in U.S. libraries; Mark Thompson of Article 19 for his intense critical feedback; Steve Erickson and Pavle Levi for their precious suggestions and many passionate conversations. I also wish to thank Denise Breton, UGC Hachette, and the now-defunct CIBY 2000, particularly Huw Morgan, for sending me press kits and copies of the ilms discussed in earlier versions of this volume. I received great help and support also from Italy. I thank my friend Tina Guiducci, who sent me hard-to-ind materials; Antonio Maraldi,

xii | Acknowledgments

who mailed me a copy of his work on Kusturica; Sabino Martiradonna, for sharing the materials of the conference Ti ricordi di Sarajevo? (Do you remember Sarajevo?), held in Rome in the fall of 1993, in addition to press clippings that I had overlooked; and Gianfranco Miro Gori of RiminiCinema, for much critical information. Since the irst Italian edition of this study, I have incurred numerous personal and scholarly debts, particularly with Pamela Ballinger, Herb Eagle, Victor Fanucchi, C. Paul Sellors, and, once again, Dina Iordanova and Pavle Levi. I wish to acknowledge their scholarly work and friendly suggestions: they have taught me new things and made me understand better what I thought I knew already. I am grateful to Cecilia Sayad for accepting my paper proposal on Kusturica for her panel on New Paradigms in Audiovisual Authorship at the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, and her work on the subject. I am also indebted to Karla Mallette and Joshua H. Cole, in their role as past and present directors of the Center for European Studies at the University of Michigan, for inviting me to give a talk on Kusturica and thus for giving me an opportunity to test, and receive precious feedback on, my argument. The Center for European Studies also generously provided the funds for the purchase of the illustrations. To write a book sometimes means to be lucky enough to ind evi-dence in the most disparate places and receive help from colleagues and individuals one has never met. I am gratetul to Nicoletta Romeo of Alpe Adria Cinema (Trieste) for the promptness and kindness with which she has sent me the catalogs of the exhibitions on the Yugoslav Black Wave, held in 1998 and 1999; Phil Hallman, the ilm-studies ield librarian at the University of Michigan, for locating DVDs from around the world; Aleksandar Saa Erdeljanovi, of the National Film Archive of the Republic of Serbia (Jugoslovenska Kinoteka), for kindly answer-ing my queries; Andrea Gambetta of Solares Fondazione delle Arti (Parma), for his willingness to share information on the making of Super 8 Stories and for various suggestions; Lorenzo Codelli for his support; and Matthieu Dhennin for his generosity in ielding my questions and for the extraordinary work he does with his Web site, kustu.com. I am particularly grateful to the superbly constructive feedback that I received from Daniel Goulding and, especially, Justus Nieland and Jennifer Fay. Their suggestions have improved tremendously my argument and my

Acknowledgments | xiii

prose. Needless to say, I take full responsibility for the views expressed in this monograph. For permissions to reproduce sections of previously published interviews in the inal section, I am grateful to Luisa Ceretto and Paola Cristalli (Quaderni del Cinema and Cineteca di Bologna), Matthieu Dhennin (kustu.com), Luisa Fava (La Stampa), Brenda Fer-nandes (Sight and Sound), Adriano Piccardi (Cineforum), and Christian Viviani (Positif). For their patient observations on accents, as well as linguistic and cultural differences within the former Yugoslavia, I am grateful to Alek-sandra Nikoli and, in particular, Romana Capek-Habekovi, who with great affection keeps correcting my spelling and pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian names. A special thank you also to Marco Mller for his pre-cious help early on. Lastly, I wish to thank my father, Enzo Bertellini, who for years has collected precious clippings from newspapers and periodicals, as well as Benedetta Bertellini, Pierluigi Ercole, Margherita Sacchi, and Gilberto Zacch, for their help, patience, and support. This volume is once again dedicated to Argia Lavagnini and Giovanni Coc-coni, without whom I would not have started.

Emir Kusturica