Undergroundis the farcical result of Kusturica's critique of communist systems. Kusturica 's underlying assessment is a departure from Serbia's popular veneration of Tito and his neutral government. Instead, for Kusturica, Tito's weak presidency is a crucial figure in Yugoslavia's political entropy. The Marko character is Tito's right hand man. We see him at Tito's side in the real life clips mixed with Kusturica's film to funnel the social-political reality into the fictional narrative. As an extension of Tito in some sense, Marko literally pens the people up inside of his elaborately crafted illusion of danger in order to exploit them for their labor with the construction of weapons. The people kept under the house are a comical representation of Serbian culture in microcosm. An extravagant wedding celebration takes place and all of the guests lavishly enjoy food and drink, despite the perceived danger above ground. At this point, Kusturica comments on Serbian culture as a persistently positive people, perhaps living in a delusion of perpetual triumph despite the political environment.
The underground situation reveals Kusturica's critique of communist systems. Communism functions by falsely assuring security to the people by ways of equal distribution of labor and prestige spreading out evenly across the professions to give the people a sense of "Brotherhood and Unity" in the sense that structurally, there is a mutual dependence between the people's state and the state's workers. One for all and all for one. (Robin Hood was an early socialist) Communism tends to put charismatic leaders forward as the sunny face for the system. Meanwhile the people are striped of any prestige in their respective fields and exploited for their labor to promote military strategies that in turn makes covert adjustments to the land while keeping the people in their place depending on how the ethnocentric authorities feel at the given moment). The supposed lateral organization of labor and contribution to the state is in fact organized in the way in which resources are concentrated at the center. All for one and horrible scratchy toilet paper, a couple rolls a month, for all. It can be said that people living in communist systems in Europe were in a sense kept underground supporting the terrain above them; which in turn functioned as a ceiling that tops individual economic growth at the level just about equal to the earthworms.
Kusterica's adoration of Serbian culture can be surmised with the amazing band playing Serbian folk songs throughout the film. Similar to Who is Singing Over There the musicians' were both in and removed from the action, and in Underground, as replacement for the soundtrack. During a scene were the men playing pool break out into one of the best fight scenes I've ever watched in film; the band actually reacts to the men, dodging bodies as the continue to provide the film with its soundtrack. At one point, on the cruise ship, a character leaves to piss, and the band takes off after him as a bathroom entourage. There is never a moment where music plays and there is no musician in sight. Perhaps a slight rebel against capitalism, Kusturica refuses to let music take a consumer capitalist role in his film because their is no extended assembly line kind of process involved, (i.e. hiring a band, signing the band onto a commercial label, recording the music in a sound studio, producing and mixing an album, promoting the album, the band having been heard by film makers, getting signed on to the film making project, mixing the soundtrack for the film, and imposing the layer of sound during editing) --his process that separates the laborer from his art, and estranging the consumers or audience from products or art they enjoy. The creators of the music make up part of the film's community. They are both working, as they provide soundtrack to the film, and entertaining the people in the film, and we-- the audience. The musicians function like the people underground who also labor, dance, and drink simultaneously emphasizing the survival of the Serbian sense of community.
The people are kept in the basement for 15 years (although they think it's only been ten since Marko slowed the clocks down-- an interesting performance of the regressive neutrality of Tito's government and communist states in general). Once they are freed, the situation begins to breakdown as can be seen in the heavy handed tragedy sequence. However, the people continue to dance, the band playing the same high energy folk song, as the very ground below them breaks off more and more, much like the frequent partitioning of the former Yugoslavia.
And now: Serbian music (Slovodan Salijevic - Kalasnjikov )
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