Emir Kusturica walked on to the stage and declared that he was happy he had turned out to be a movie-maker and not the gangster his parents feared he would grow into. The audience gathered to watch him conduct the master class at the recent Marrakech International Film Festival was immediately
drawn to the Serbian director’s charisma. It found him irresistible as he went on, twinkle in his eye and the magic in his voice casting a mesmeric spell on the listeners here that evening. Beyond this alluring persona lay a string of movies that were masterful – and, well, political. But, above all, controversial.
Take his 1995, Underground that won him the Palm d’Or at Cannes and the harshest of criticism. The film is cinematically brilliant and details the history of Yugoslavia from World War II to the 1990s conflict. But it was panned as pro-Serbian and vulgar celebration of a society where people “fornicate, drink, fight in a kind of eternal orgy”.
A decade later, the man himself came under fire when he changed his religion. He was baptised into the Serbian Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica, and he told his critics (who called this act as the final betrayal of his Bosnian Muslim roots): “My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs. Religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks*.*"
Despite these attacks, Kusturica continued making one movie after another – Black Cat, White Cat, Life is a Miracle, Promise Me This and so on – which were so gripping that no jury could ignore them. At Berlin, at Venice and at the Oscars, he made his indelible mark.
He is now set to create his next major piece. Johnny Depp will play the Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa, in the Spanish language biopic, Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman with Six Fingers. Kusturica will begin shooting this in January or February 2010”
Pancho Villa will be “my biggest cinema experience till date”, Kusturica told me during an interview at Marrakech. “There will be seven episodes, and the story would be narrated through the eyes of the rebel’s friends and the woman he was in love with. Salma Hayek would play his lover, and it would be shot in Spain and Granada”.
A greater challenge for him is the need to adopt his cinema to the changing times and technology. “We now have to calculate how to make films suitable for the small screen”. Time was when hardly any close-ups were used, except by auteurs like Ingmar Bergman. There was so much space around the subjects that were shot, and that was the aesthetics of good cinema. But television has now transcended borders, and pictures are now viewed not only on the small screen, but also on the tiniest of mobile phones.
Today, the mantra is practicality. “Nobody cares how things happen. What is the procedure? How do you do it? The means are not important. Only the end is. Just deliver, as they say in English. When you deliver, nobody analyses. Nobody asks” he averred.
Cinema is also affected by rank commercialization that is sweeping the world. Western societies are particularly hit, and “I consider Serbia as a Western nation…Noam Chomsky says that one can measure the level of ‘occupation’ in a country by the amount of television time given to commercials of foreign companies. If you look at the time that such commercials occupy, you would understand the enormity of occupation. Of course, America comes in militarily as well. They do not care. India is much better in this case. It has a far healthier conception. It still has its integrity preserved. Serbia is a disaster.”
Calling himself a political helmer, Kusturica quipped that the term free market was a misnomer. “It is fine as long as you are consumer, but not otherwise”. The rules are very hard for small countries”.
Kusturica regretted that like opera the cinema he loves and as he understands it will soon be finished. “Each big city will have one big screen and a few thousand people will watch movies on it. The rest will watch on television screens, computer screens and mobile phone screens.
The pleasure of watching larger-than-life moving images in a darkened auditorium will soon pass into history. That is, if the Serbian director’s prediction is right.