UNDERGROUND

France-Germany-Hungary-Yugoslavia, 1995

Director: Emir Kusturica

Production: CiBY 2000 (France), Pandora Film (Germany), Novo Film (Hungary), with the participation of Radio-TV-Serbia, Komuna-Belgrade and Chaplain Films (Bulgaria); color; 35 mm; running time: 167 minutes (some prints are 192 minutes). Released 19 June 1995 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and 20 June 1997 in the United States; distributed in the U.S. by New Yorker Films; filmed 1994 on location in Belgrade and Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and at the Barrandov studios in Prague, Czech Republic.

Producers: Pierre Spengler (executive), Maksa Catovic, Karl Baumgartner; screenplay: Dusan Kovacevic with Emir Kusturica; photography: Vilko Filac; editor: Branka Ceperac; production design: Miljen Kreka Kljakovic; art directors: Branimir Babic, Vladislav Lasic; set design: Aleksandar Denic; costumes: Nebojsa Lipanovic; original music: Goran Bregovic.

Cast: Miki (Predrag) Manojlovic (Marko); Lazar Ristovski (Petar Popara Crni — Blacky); Mirjana Jokovic (Natalija); Slavko Stimac (Ivan); Ernst Stötzner (Franz); Srdjan Todorovic (Jovan); Mirjana Karanovic (Vera); Milena Pavlovic (Jelena); Danilo "Bata" Stojkovic (Deda); Davor Dujmovic-Perhan (Bata); Dr. Nele Karajlic (Falling Gypsy); Dragan Nikolic (Film Director); Emir Kusturica (Arms Dealer); and others.

Awards: Palme d'Or, Cannes International Film Festival, 1995; Best Foreign Language Film, Boston Society of Film Critics Awards, 1997.

Publications

Books:

Handke, Peter, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, New York, 1997.

Norris, David, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth, London, 1999.

BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema, London, 2000.

Articles:

Levy, Emmanuel, "Underground," in Variety (New York), 29 May-4 June 1995.

Finkielkraut, Alain, "L'imposture Kusturica," in Le Monde (Paris), 2 June 1995.

Malcolm, Derek, "The Surreal Sarajevan Dreamer," in Guardian (London), 29 June 1995.

"Propos de Emir Kusturica," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 492, June 1995.

Zizek, Slavoj, "Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism," in New Left Review, no. 225, September-October 1995.

Kusturica, Emir, "Mon imposture," in Le Monde (Paris), 26 October 1995.

Gopnik, Adam, "Cinéma Disputé," in The New Yorker, 5 February 1996.

Hedges, Chris, "Belgrade Journal: Scathing 'Conscience' of Balkans Spares no One. An interview with Dusan Kovacevic," in The NewYork Times, 8 February 1996.

Robinson, David, "A Tunnel Vision of War: An Interview with Emir Kusturica," in The Times (London), 5 March 1996.

Yates, Robert, "Gone Underground," in The Guardian (London), 7 March 1996.

Maslin, Janet, "From Former Yugoslavia, Revelry with Allegory," in New York Times, 12 October 1996.

Dieckmann, Katherine, "When Kusturica Was Away on Business," in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 5, 19 September 1997.

Turan, Kenneth, "Sarajevan's Journey from Cinema Hero to 'Traitor,"' in Los Angeles Times, 6 October 1997.

Iordanova, Dina, "Kusturica's Underground (1995): Historical Allegory or Propaganda," in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and TV (Hants), vol. 19, no. 1, 1999.

Underground is a historical film exploring the violent state of affairs in Yugoslavia. The film's narrative spans over five decades, highlighting episodes taking place in 1941, 1961, and 1993. Real events are combined with fictional historical encounters and occurrences. Documentary footage of selected moments of Yugoslav history is used as a background against which the fictional protagonists mingle with real historical personalities à la Forrest Gump. The film is characterized by elaborate scenes, ornate props, and a haunting musical score. Visually, the film is very dark, shot mostly in various shades of brown. There is even a shot taken from an unborn baby's point of view, watching out of the darkness of the womb. The film leaves a lasting and unsettling impression.

Underground is screenwriter Dusan Kovacevic's and director Emir Kusturica's personal take on Yugoslav history. In the film they follow closely the lives of three protagonists—Marko, a cunning cynic; Blacky, an artless dunce; and Natalia, an opportunistic blonde— who are shown at various stages of their lives that largely coincide with the highlighted moments of Yugoslav history. Marko and Blacky both have a crush on Natalia, and many of their actions are determined by this romantic rivalry. The somber backdrop to these sensual affairs, however, is a war with no end.

In the first part, called "War," which opens with the Nazi bombing of Belgrade in 1941, Marko, an energetic black marketeer, takes a group of friends and relatives to a cellar which he has equipped as an air-raid shelter. It soon turns out that he has planned the whole rescue operation with the intention of enslaving the people in the cellar. Above ground, Marko and Blacky complete a series of reckless burglaries that they present as motivated by anti-Fascist zeal. After performing a daring anti-Nazi stunt which is nothing else but another manifestation of a philanderer's showmanship, Marko gets rid of Blacky by sending him to "hide" in the cellar. He can finally claim Natalia exclusively for himself.

The events of the second part, "The Cold War," take place in 1961. In postwar communist Yugoslavia, Marko has become a celebrated poet, close to president Tito. He has married Natalia, and together they have created a mythology of themselves as brave anti-Fascists. A film is to be shot about their heroic experiences in the struggle. Simultaneously, Marko and Natalia still keep a large number of people, Blacky included, in the cellar. They trick them into thinking that the war goes on by playing soundtracks of Nazi bombings and Hitler's speeches. They use them as slave labor to manufacture arms that Marko trades internationally. One day Marko and Natalia descend to the cellar to attend the wedding of Blacky's son. Sweaty drunkenness reigns over this claustrophobic celebration and the wedding guests, all intoxicated, end up fighting over unsettled accounts. In the turmoil, the walls of the cellar crumble. The members of the wedding disperse in disarray and most of the enslaved inhabitants of the underground run away. Blacky and his son climb above ground and end up at the shooting site of a film which is supposed to glorify the heroic past. Mistaking the set for reality and believing that World War II is still going on, they kill all the extras wearing German uniforms. The son drowns in the Danube, and Blacky is captured by the police. Marko and Natalia escape the coming trouble, blowing up the house and the cellar.

The third part, again called "War," is set in the 1990s at an unidentified battlefield, presumably Bosnia, where the protagonists cross paths one last time. Marko and Natalia have continued in international arms sales, and are wanted by Interpol. Blacky, still mourning the loss of his son thirty-five years earlier, is now in command of the paramilitary forces shelling a nearby city. In a final showdown Marko is killed by his own brother, Ivan, one of the people formerly confined in the underground. The paratroopers shoot Natalia. Blacky passes by without recognizing his former friends.

The film's epilogue offers a sharp contrast to this apocalyptic ending. In a utopian wedding scene all the protagonists come back to life and gather together for a wedding feast on the Danube's sunny shores. As they cheerfully celebrate, the piece of land on which they stand breaks apart from the mainland and quietly floats away. The wedding guests are too busy dancing and singing to notice that they are being carried away into an unknown destination.

This final scene is the defining image that screenwriter Kovacevic and director Kusturica had in mind for this project. They were determined to use it as a metaphor for the Yugoslav people, who, as Kusturica explained in a 1996 interview with David Robinson: "go away never really knowing what has happened to them. That is the way of the Balkan people. They never rationalize their past. Somehow the passion that leads them forward is not changed. I hope some day people may find better ways to use the passion they have so far persistently used to kill one another."

Underground was awarded the Golden Palm at the 1995 Cannes International Film Festival, adding to the previous Golden Palm for Kusturica's When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and his Best Director award for Time of the Gypsies (1989), and enhancing the director's reputation as a "Balkan Fellini." The award carried weight with international critics, most of whom saw the film as an esoteric piece of elitist cinema preoccupied with the messy state of Balkan affairs but nonetheless endorsed it. Underground, however, came under critical fire for the historical and political propositions upon which the story was built. The main accusation was that the film was a well-masked version of Serbian propaganda, presented at a time when Serbia was largely believed to be the aggressive force in the Yugoslav break-up war. Others charged that by making a film in Belgrade at the time when Serbia was at war with his own native land, a Sarajevan director like Kusturica was committing an act of betrayal. Many in his native Bosnia denounced him as an intellectual traitor who had taken the side of the aggressor. The media noise was significant, but the debate remained quite cryptic for larger audiences. The director was so upset by the controversy that he declared a withdrawal from filmmaking—a promise which he did not keep. He returned to cinema soon thereafter and continued shooting in Serbia and internationally.

—Dina Iordanova

UNDERGROUND

Play by Joshua Sobol, 1991

Underground (1991) is the third and final play in Joshua Sobol's triptych about the Vilna ghetto during the Holocaust. The play focuses on the secret typhus ward located in the Vilna ghetto. During his research on the Vilna ghetto, Sobol was fascinated to learn that the typhus ward was so secret that even some of the physicians in the hospital did not know that it existed.

Because of the atrocious conditions in which the Jews live, typhus spreads in the ghetto. This deadly disease has to be contained and kept secret in order for the ghetto to survive. If Obersturmführer Hans Kittel and SS Dr. Jaegger discover the outbreak of typhus, they clearly will murder everyone in the hospital and liquidate the ghetto.

Sobol's play, like Ghetto and Adam, is a dramatic retelling of a historically true story by a character who eyewitnessed the events—narrated in the present by a survivor of the ghetto. In Underground a patient is in the hospital in Israel; his nurse finds the diary he possesses and reads about the typhus ward in the ghetto in 1943 (the patient in Israel in the present had been afflicted by typhus and had been saved by Dr. Berka Weiner). Through the anonymous man's diary, Sobol tells the story of how Weiner, his colleague and lover Dr. Sonya Solodova, and Dr. Gottlieb establish the secret typhus ward, with the blessing of Judenrat leader Jacob Gens, in the ghetto hospital, thus saving the lives of the Vilna Jews. These doctors successfully hide the typhus outbreak from the Nazis through a series of deceptive tricks. The doctors provide all of their typhus patients with fake symptoms, which they must rehearse and pretend to be afflicted by when Kittel and Jaegger come to inspect the ward, and the physicians create alternate sets of charts—the actual medical charts that indicate the progression of their disease and the fake charts that inform the Nazi visitors that the patients are afflicted by noncontagious illnesses that do not pose a threat to the community. As Gens points out to Weiner, the Nazis fear the outbreak of contagious diseases and would quickly destroy the ghetto inhabitants to prevent the spread of the illness.

The outbreak of typhus begins with the illness of Judith, who has survived the mass killings in the Ponar forest. Nazi soldiers have murdered thousands of Jewish men, women, and children at Ponar, but a few women, such as Judith, are only wounded and presumed dead by the perpetrators, who then leave the forest. Five of the women have survived and managed to come to the ghetto, where they tell their story to Gens. The survivors tend to be women because the Nazis murder the Jewish men in the morning and the women and children in the afternoon; those men who are wounded but not killed eventually bleed to death because they must feign death for hours while the Nazis are present, but the women who survive the shootings do not have to wait all day to leave the death pits, for they are shot just before the Nazis depart. After Judith returns and tells her story, the doctors discover that she has typhus. She eventually recovers and becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Tana. This pregnancy presents another problem in the ghetto because the Nazis have ordered that all pregnancies must be aborted, yet Judith insists upon keeping her baby. When Nazi soldiers discover that a woman has given birth to a baby, they habitually kill the baby and the entire family.

Dr. Berka Weiner is a caring and humane doctor who reluctantly agrees to head the typhus ward. He is not optimistic about the chances of fooling Kittel and Jaegger, but he agrees to try, partly because he falls in love with Dr. Solodova. Sobol's play dramatizes the personal interests and strong emotions that dictate people's actions in this time of crisis. The playwright also juxtaposes the humanitarians Weiner and Solodova with the selfish and egocentric Professor Lishafsky, who sells drugs for personal profit even though his people, who desperately need the medications, are suffering from disease.

As the play draws to a close, Gens confesses to Kittel that he has been protecting the armed partisans in the ghetto as they flee to the forest. Kittel responds by assassinating the ghetto leader; Gens's death provides closure to the final play in Sobol's triptych. As the play concludes the sounds of machine gun fire are heard, suggesting the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, which historically occurred only nine days after the murder of Jacob Gens.

—Eric Sterling

un·der·ground • adv. / ˌəndərˈground/ beneath the surface of the ground: miners working underground. ∎  in or into secrecy or hiding, esp. as a result of carrying out subversive political activities: many were forced to go underground by the government.• adj. / ˈəndərˌground/ situated beneath the surface of the ground: underground parking garages. ∎  of or relating to the secret activities of people working to subvert an established order: Czech underground literature. ∎  of or denoting a group or movement seeking to explore alternative forms of lifestyle or artistic expression; radical and experimental: the New York underground art scene.• n. / ˈəndərˌground/ 1. a group or movement organized secretly to work against an existing regime: I got involved with the French underground. ∎  a group or movement seeking to explore alternative forms of lifestyle or artistic expression: the late sixties underground. 2. (the Underground) Brit. a subway, esp. the one in London: travel chaos on the Underground.

underground adv. XVI; adj. XVII. See UNDER-2.