It’s 40 years since the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, as I was recently reminded by this photo reportage by Rick Findler in the Sunday Times. Findler went to the Trebovic mountain near Sarajevo and came back with some tremendously melancholy photos of the decaying bobsleigh and luge track winding through the forests, which the Times put next to the before pictures of the first Winter Olympics ever held in a communist country. By all measures the event was a great success, and became a point of pride in this alter-communist country which in 1984 did not show signs of destress. Canadians may remember the Olympics because it was the city of Calgary that took over the hosting duties four years later, and Britons will absolutely recall it due to the mega-stardom that it bestowed on the figure skating pair from then on known globally as Torvill and Dean.
Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s “Bolero” is imprinted in my memory as one of the key televisual events of my childhood/youth and I’m one of the hundreds of thousands. Anybody older than Gen Y age who grew up in Yugoslavia will remember the Sarajevo ‘84: I recall the images from the opening and closing ceremonies, the DDR skater Katarina Witt, but most of all the Bolero. The Olympics, paradoxically, gave the Yugoslavs sobering up from the Tito era hope in the future of the complicated country, and its ability to meet challenges. I find it impossible not to tear up at the T-D Bolero (see also under: signs of aging).
Places and things in Sarajevo named after the Torvill-Dean Bolero still exist. The pair now in their sixties recently skated one of their last ice dances in Sarajevo, as they announced their retirement and the final arena tour. Everybody in Sarajevo still knows who they are but what none of us knew back then is that they were both working class and that, although by the early 1980s world champions, they still had full-time day jobs of an insurance clerk and policeman. A £53,000 sponsorship from Nottingham council allowed them to quit and train for the Sarajevo Games full time - in a small town in West Germany, because the British skating rinks were all booked up. Britain itself was in economic and political turmoil in 1984, the year dominated by the miners strike and heavy manufacturing beginning to off shore.
Eight years later, the Trebevic luge track was used by the Serbian forces for artillery positioning during the siege of Sarajevo.
The war in Bosnia was back on my mind lately because I finally watched what is probably the best film on the topic, Quo Vadis, Aida? (TPL card holders can watch it for free on Kanopy, otherwise it’s easily rentable on YouTube etc.) It came out in the unfortunate year of 2020 and although I remember that it caused the ripples in the region (Serbian ethno-nationalists were not fans), and was selected for Tiff and Venice, it fell off my radar. I know what happened in Srebrenica, I’m not the one who needs reminding, I thought.
My loss, it was. Directed by Jasmila Žbanić — it makes a difference that the director is female, I think — Aida is a terrific film that shows the lead up to the Srebrenica massacre by the Serbian (para)military forces at the helpless watch of the UN peace keepers as a thriller. The thriller of the time-is-ticking-away kind, the Titanic and the Poseidon Adventure disaster thrillers. It decidedly is not a war movie, avoids the standard war movie tropes and is, unusually, led by a female character, a UN translator who by virtue of her job has temporary access into spaces closed to others and is able to cross the invisible and visible boundaries other actors can’t.
No blood is spilled on camera and the horror of the film lies not in any kind of gore: it’s all about the frantic organization of getting your loved ones onto the right bus and into the right holding hangar, across myriad bureaucratic, physical, natural obstacles. Will this pass open this door? Will that UN commander who’s less foolish be on duty this afternoon? Will this storage room keep someone’s husband and sons for a few days until we think of a better plan? People can’t believe a massacre is about to happen even when they are minutes away from it, and the movie is superbly accurate on that. This is how we operate, this has been observed in other genocides, and multiple times over in the Balkan wars of the 1990s: things remain unbelievable even as they’re happening before our eyes. It can’t happen here, or It can’t happen to us, even while it’s happening.
But the UN, my god. The UN “peacekeeping” and their commanders’ belief that Mladic is negotiating in good faith. The Dutch boys with toy guns put before the roaring wolves. Canada used to be big on that and take pride in its “peacekeeping” history through the UN and even claimed it invented peacekeeping. Let’s not ever bring up peacekeeping again; already in the 1990s in Bosnia and Rwanda its futility (at best, downright harm at worst) became obvious.
Carol Off, in her best work The Lion, the Fox, the Eagle (2000), wrote about the utter haplessness, and the occasionally corruption, of the UN forces in peace keeping situations. There were times, she writes in the Rwanda chapter, when there was no one in the UN HQ in Manhattan to answer the phone after hours. We are talking that degree of omnishambles. Aida has a scene along those lines, when a desperate UN officer in Srebrenica tries to get someone, anyone, at the UN to say when they will make good on their promise to send reinforcement.
A very different film to Aida is Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, a 1994 absurd comedy & war movie which came out in Milosevic’s Serbia and which I watched as a student. Only now, when I watch it again, do I see why everywhere outside Serbia it was considered straight-up pro-Serbian propaganda. It’s at the same time an anti-war movie (this stands) and a multilayered, cinematically skillful pro-Serbian agitprop. I suppose Srdjan Dragojevic, one of the more interesting recent Serbian filmmakers, could not step out of that frame. The cause of the Bosnian war, you could divine from it, are alternately, the inherited culture of lies of the Communist era (presuming this means the suppression of ethno-nationalisms and the false unity and brotherhood that grew on the soil of that suppression) and, well, when in doubt about the Balkans go Jungian, a mythical monster, the Ur-evil living in the Balkan caves, the historical curse of the recurring wars. The cave in this movie is a tunnel: opened to fanfares in the Communist era, the tunnel soon enough got decommissioned and became a place to be avoided by the local children who traded tales of the supposed monster ready to come out if disturbed. Two of those boys are the crux of the story and they are of course of Bosniak and Serbian extraction but they don’t know it until it’s 1992.
How the war got imported and adopted and how everyone became aware of their ethnicity and religion within a narrow time frame is rushed through. For the most of the movie, we follow a ragtag group of Serbian fighters in Bosnia-Herzegovina who are barely aware of this fantasy called the Greater Serbia. Only one of them appears to be drunk on Serbian Lebensraum, but he is absurd in his chetnik gear and kind of funny. The rest just happen to have been drawn into the army which “protects” Serbs in the recently independent BiH. A couple of them have been conscripted from Belgrade before they could come up with an escape plan. A medic driving a doctor around in a truck is a recovering junkie. Only two are actually Bosnian: the principal character (one of the two boys, twenty years later) and a bespectacled “professor”, a standard war movie character.
Their leader is an old Yugoslav Army officer who, one expects, is burning Bosnian villages because he believes that is how you continue to protect Yugoslavia. He is played by a popular actor who built his career in partisan war movies and who is a legend in China as “Valter” of Valter Defends Sarajevo. The rest of the cast are popular Belgrade actors who honed their skills in comedy.
Inevitably, the men are outmaneuvered by the local defenders and led to the notorious tunnel. It’s in the tunnel that most of the movie takes place. Lots of flashbacks to the heroes’ childhood and teen years, and forward to the present time with only the three of them recovering in a hospital in Belgrade where, because that is now the convenient line for the Milosevic regime, the Bosnian war is seen as something that took place in another country and nothing to do directly with Serbia.
The two childhood friends eventually get a stand-off and the final, Bond-type exchange — the other, Bosniak lad is outside the tunnel, as is the Yugoslav general’s former army colleague and erstwhile best friend. A lot of coincidences are on the nose and the movie is excruciatingly dumb about women, only one of whom, an American journalist “from the CBC network” who ends up inside the tunnel by mistake, has a proper role. The soldiers are, while salacious in their words, implausibly respectful to the one woman in their midst. (Who wears her hair hilariously long and lush, a mistake that no war reporter would make.)
Unlike in Aida, the gore abounds and so do the explosions. But it’s definitely worth watching as a record of a time, and one of the still rare serious Serbian attempts to grapple with what it was doing in Bosnia in the 1990s. The YT above is the entire movie without the subtitles; I expect it’s findable somewhere with the subtitles too.
One of the best things that I’ve seen to come out of Serbia recently though was the mini-series The Family, about the last days of Milosevic in his mansion in Belgrade before his arrest and dispatch to the Hague. The then PM Zoran Djindjic was assassinated not long after, most likely in retaliation by the Milosevic-loyal retired warlords and paramilitaries who found a new lease on life in peace time in organized crime. If you can find that, highly recommended. Also directed as a thriller.
Otherwise, and indirectly connected to everything here, the Cinema Komunisto might be of interest, a documentary about the role that the partisan resistance cinema had in the making and the gluing together of Yugoslavia through a war mythology.