Whose Burden, Whose Right to Forget?: Musical-Filmic Escapes into Sexual and Racial Plurality in Northern Serbia

• In Event: Yugoslav Responsibility I: Disjunction and the Presence of War in (Post)Yugoslav Culture

Abstract

This paper examines willful forgetting through music and film in wartime Serbia and sexual and racial minorities' roles in fantasies of escape. It reevaluates the collaborative filmscoring (but unequal crediting) of Romani and Serbian tambura musicians in Kusturica’s films Underground (1995) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998) via musician interviews and Kusturica's desire not to “live any more with the luggage of history.” The paper draws critical comparisons between musical avenues to magical realism in Kusturica’s work and Žilnik’s queer cult film Marble Ass (1995), which featured tambura punk band Zbogom Brus Li in a wartime drama about a transgender prostitute and her male soldier client. The band understands its name, “Goodbye, Bruce Lee,” as a farewell to naïve love of romanticized filmic violence in their 1980s childhoods, which paradoxically has since amplified their use of martial arts films onstage. Žilnik, too, sustained interest in musical violence and death, touching upon themes of racialized musicality in portraying a sub-Saharan African student and rock musician during Yugoslavia’s “national awakening” (Black and White, 1990) and in his ode to Ella Fitzgerald upon her death (For Ella, 1997). Drawing upon ethnography at live performances and close readings of the films and archival materials, the paper demonstrates that exoticizing explorations of musical departure also abandon filmic premises of pluralism. Sustained sonic attention to nostalgia and myths of innocence ultimately opens new possibilities for archiving wartime habitus outside lived embodiment and memory to an extent not realized in fully fanciful musical suspensions of history’s luggage.

Author

• Ian MacMillen, Yale U