guardian.co.uk
Srdjan Spasojevic insists his controversial film is a political allegory. Unfortunately, cinema is the wrong medium for parables
If you like torture porn, rape porn, incest porn, paedo porn, snuff porn, necro porn and (a bit of a breakthrough here) newborn porn, A Serbian Film has much to offer you. Even after the 49 cuts demanded by the BBFC spoilsports, it certainly earns its place on the shortlist for that sought-after accolade, "the nastiest film ever made". Good luck to it, you may or may not think. Yet we're not allowed to leave it at that.
Famously, this film is laid before us not as a robust piece of entertainment for what will doubtless prove an appreciative niche audience, but as a political allegory. Whenever he gets the chance, the director, Srdjan Spasojevic, insists: "This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government. It's about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotise you to do things you don't want to do."
Understandably enough, this claim has been derided as a pathetic attempt to accord respectability to a straightforward exercise in sensationalist depravity. Yet the more you hear of Spasojevic's apologia, the more sincere he seems to be. He has after all lived through a traumatic period in his country's history. He says he spent a decade trying to work out how to translate its essence into cinema, and concluded that pornography was the only possible metaphor for "the almost indescribable and exploitative chaos" that had dominated his life.
Fair enough. But just how does the film's story manage to tell Serbia's? The hero is lured by a psychopathic monster into perpetrating terrible acts, disgust at which leads him to murder and suicide. Along the way, a baby gets sexually defiled, a man gets raped to death through his eye-socket, a woman gets beheaded during intercourse and much else of the same ilk is depicted.
You can just about see why Spasojevic found a resemblance between these experiences and those of his country's citizenry during the last quarter of a century. Yet if you saw the film without having been tipped off, it's inconceivable that you'd make the connection yourself. If you've been briefed in advance, what strikes you is how utterly the action being depicted fails to illuminate its supposedly parallel political equivalent.
Spasojevic tells us that the baby scene, for example, "represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown". The trouble is that the ineluctably literal-minded camera shows us only a baby being abused, not a people. The film's metaphors cannot communicate themselves to the audience, and when explained after the event, they seem more comical than instructive.
You might therefore conclude that Spasojevic is not very good at cinematic allegory. Could it be, however, that cinema itself is no great shakes at this particular game?
From Plato's allegory of the cave onward, the point of allegory has been to press-gang narrative into the service of exposition. Its characters have to be functions of the tract, and have worked best in poems, fables and morality plays created to accommodate such ciphers. Once the novel arrived, allegory had to go underground. The naturalism implicit in the format impelled readers to see its characters as rounded people, and its stories as reflections of life, not values. Any symbolic function had to be read into the proceedings, and could therefore be either missed or misread.
Cinema is even more an essentially realistic medium. In films, blatant allegory seems absurd, so when it's in play it has to keep its head down. Often, it therefore ends up so tenuous that whether it exists, and if so of what it consists, become open to debate.
Many took it for granted that Monsters is an allegory about immigration, but this idea hadn't occurred to the director. Avatar was variously interpreted as an eco-homily, a neo-colonialism homily, a genocide-of-indigenous-people homily, an anti-America homily, a 'war on terror' homily, a white-messiah homily and a nature-of-cinema homily. The Dark Knight. Inception. The floor is yours. Are this week's eager young Narnia fans really supposed to twig that Aslan is Christ?
Yet if it's not clear what meaning is supposedly being conveyed, then it can't be conveyed effectively. On the contrary, filmgoers will be tempted to detect whatever meaning accords with their own pre-existing prejudices, and thus end up less edified than they were at the outset.
A Serbian Film is itself open to readings other than the one which Spasojevic intends. The film features a film-within-a-film, which, like the film itself, is supposed to convey a profound message through extreme violence and wickedness. Its director, however, is a madman. An allegory could certainly be inferred. A Serbian Film might well be telling us that only someone a bit daft would try to make an allegorical film.
Understandably enough, this claim has been derided as a pathetic attempt to accord respectability to a straightforward exercise in sensationalist depravity. Yet the more you hear of Spasojevic's apologia, the more sincere he seems to be. He has after all lived through a traumatic period in his country's history. He says he spent a decade trying to work out how to translate its essence into cinema, and concluded that pornography was the only possible metaphor for "the almost indescribable and exploitative chaos" that had dominated his life.
Fair enough. But just how does the film's story manage to tell Serbia's? The hero is lured by a psychopathic monster into perpetrating terrible acts, disgust at which leads him to murder and suicide. Along the way, a baby gets sexually defiled, a man gets raped to death through his eye-socket, a woman gets beheaded during intercourse and much else of the same ilk is depicted.
You can just about see why Spasojevic found a resemblance between these experiences and those of his country's citizenry during the last quarter of a century. Yet if you saw the film without having been tipped off, it's inconceivable that you'd make the connection yourself. If you've been briefed in advance, what strikes you is how utterly the action being depicted fails to illuminate its supposedly parallel political equivalent.
Spasojevic tells us that the baby scene, for example, "represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown". The trouble is that the ineluctably literal-minded camera shows us only a baby being abused, not a people. The film's metaphors cannot communicate themselves to the audience, and when explained after the event, they seem more comical than instructive.
You might therefore conclude that Spasojevic is not very good at cinematic allegory. Could it be, however, that cinema itself is no great shakes at this particular game?
From Plato's allegory of the cave onward, the point of allegory has been to press-gang narrative into the service of exposition. Its characters have to be functions of the tract, and have worked best in poems, fables and morality plays created to accommodate such ciphers. Once the novel arrived, allegory had to go underground. The naturalism implicit in the format impelled readers to see its characters as rounded people, and its stories as reflections of life, not values. Any symbolic function had to be read into the proceedings, and could therefore be either missed or misread.
Cinema is even more an essentially realistic medium. In films, blatant allegory seems absurd, so when it's in play it has to keep its head down. Often, it therefore ends up so tenuous that whether it exists, and if so of what it consists, become open to debate.
Many took it for granted that Monsters is an allegory about immigration, but this idea hadn't occurred to the director. Avatar was variously interpreted as an eco-homily, a neo-colonialism homily, a genocide-of-indigenous-people homily, an anti-America homily, a 'war on terror' homily, a white-messiah homily and a nature-of-cinema homily. The Dark Knight. Inception. The floor is yours. Are this week's eager young Narnia fans really supposed to twig that Aslan is Christ?
Yet if it's not clear what meaning is supposedly being conveyed, then it can't be conveyed effectively. On the contrary, filmgoers will be tempted to detect whatever meaning accords with their own pre-existing prejudices, and thus end up less edified than they were at the outset.
A Serbian Film is itself open to readings other than the one which Spasojevic intends. The film features a film-within-a-film, which, like the film itself, is supposed to convey a profound message through extreme violence and wickedness. Its director, however, is a madman. An allegory could certainly be inferred. A Serbian Film might well be telling us that only someone a bit daft would try to make an allegorical film.
background:
A Serbian Film
Production year: 2010
Country: Rest of the world
Cert (UK): 18
Runtime: 104 mins
Directors: Srdjan Spasojevic
Cast: Jelena Gavrilovic, Kabir Tourani, Katarina Zutic, Sergej Trifunovic, Srdjan Todorovic
Production year: 2010
Country: Rest of the world
Cert (UK): 18
Runtime: 104 mins
Directors: Srdjan Spasojevic
Cast: Jelena Gavrilovic, Kabir Tourani, Katarina Zutic, Sergej Trifunovic, Srdjan Todorovic
read more: guardian.co.uk
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