Couloir excursion

Maybe, thanks to Arsenij Jovanović, Belgrade will get another metonymic address. Kosančić's wreath 19. Although we don't believe it, because what is that compared to France 7, Knez Mihailov 33, Tolstoje 34, Užička 15...

"Kosančićev venac 19 is the house of painters and sculptors, visual artists who have lived, worked and died there for over half a century. Hanging out with a few of them, making friends, working with some in the theater - with Duško Ristić for example - I wondered how it would be possible to preserve what is fleeting and leaves few traces. Pictures will remain, and sketches, and some stories will remain, but not the voices of those people, not the daily confessions that illuminate them most fully. I started recording, proposed the project to the Soros Fund at the time, they gave some money... We worked for several months."

And there's the book, Kosančićev wreath br. 19, published by Samizdata B92.

"In the meantime, some have died." Duško Ristić killed himself, as he said he would. In the book, they all get mixed up," he says at the beginning of the interview for Time Arsenije Jovanović, who lost his patience while waiting for the book to be published. He has weaned himself off the extemporaneity here, the real thing. And he applied it in the book:

"Extemporization is very important. Sooner or later we all disappear. A banal order would be trivial.

It was not my intention to make an eccentric arrangement, nor do I consider that procedure to be eccentric, it is just a different balance of testimony. Everyone talks, in a nightmarish or non-nightmarish recollection, some, then others, some about cats, others about flowers... They were never all together, many of them haven't spoken to each other for years, but in the book they gossip about each other nicely sitting in the same imaginary space."

Arsenije Jovanović, a Belgrade native from Rovinj, from Istria, from Kjođa, from Venice... from the sea, is a pioneer of our radio. He was a theater and television director, acting professor...

"WEATHER": Od what you live?

ARSENIUS JOVANOVIĆ: From ars acoustics, they jokingly say from Arsa's acoustics. It's not exactly Eldorado. Radio programs very rarely, and only a few national ones - commercial ones never, devote time and attention to that segment: WDR from Cologne, Deutschland Radio, until recently RAI, Radio France with the Atelier of Radiophonic Creativity, the Nordic countries, especially Denmark, Norway and Sweden show interest almost not at all, Spain has Ars Sonora... In Canada, in the French part - in Quebec, they want to shut down the department of the all-Canadian national radio, so prominent radio producers have launched a campaign against that, through the European Radio Union, through the committee for ars acoustics led by José Igues, a doctor in that field. In Australia, too, they are undergoing a major reorganization, but I do not believe that they will shut down the department that has existed for ten years. They are still fresh and very rich. I worked for them in Sydney for two months - they often broadcast my work.

I live, therefore, from copyrights. Ars acoustic works in the world have the same treatment as musical works. It takes a long time for the royalties to be collected at the head office in Switzerland, and then to reach the national agency, but it is waiting. Fortunately, before the war, I transferred from SOKOJ to a French agency, which - unlike ours - works.

I am at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts liquidated 1993, overnight. Now the case is being renewed, it is burning these days like the cases of many - I hope that justice is in sight.

A trip u Hollywood?

It was a coincidence, professional luck. It was as if some hot comet passed by, hooked me, took something from me - I took something from her, and flew into space. Terrence Malick, completing the film that has been waiting for twenty years tanka crvena line - a film that will win the Silver Bear in Berlin - remembered that he once heard mine on American Public Radio Kremansko prophecy. I admit, I was impressed that such a man - who graduated and taught philosophy, whose whereabouts are unknown, who almost never gives interviews and occasionally disappears from the public - remembered Kremanski prophecies. A woman from New American Radio who once entered me as a foreigner in an American national competition where I would receive a prize and $4000 - I lived on that money after a year - gave me my address, so the film producer called and asked Kremansko prophecy who director passionately he wants da ima u his own filmao. I thought it was a student film, an amateur film, only to find out later that the director was Malick and that it was a film with the most expensive top American actors from Cusack to Travolta. They offered me $5000 saying that even those expensive actors work for nominal fees. The amount was huge for me at that time - I was in Kjoja, my daughter was being born, in my country hell was at its peak - and I wrote to them that I assumed that my fee was a matter of reality and not dishonesty or a desire to deceive me, and that - if they think $5000 is adequate - I agree. The film was in post-production – a month before promotion – I could have easily asked for five or six times more, but I couldn't. The whole thing was a little off the charts for me - I received almost the same fee from a modest radio station and from the mega-industrial commercial hell called Hollywood. Admittedly, the film is Hollywood only from post-production, and I received a wonderful package with children's wardrobe from the film crew.

Radio Beograd je, therefore, definitively ad Act?

No. I hope for a slight spiritual revival in our environment, so I believe that with personal and structural changes, Radio Belgrade will also recover, that the radio department will revive and regain some of its former glory. More than twenty years ago, at a time when I won the Prix Italia twice and the Premio Ondas once, Radio Belgrade was penetrating the world's radio centers, primarily European, by force, with its reputation. In order to return to that level, everything must first be fundamentally changed. In Radio Belgrade, there are crazy people, policemen, paranoiacs, outright whistleblowers who worked for the police for thirty years... There are also some in the drama editorial office. These are, I hope, the outgoing people.

Nada?

One can choose to look through the magnifying or the panoramic side of the binoculars. When he looks through the magnifying glass, he sees a lot of bad things - a lot of bad things piled up when I came recently. However, one must keep in mind that, God forbid, it would have happened if October 5 had not happened. That should be the basis of the assessment. But, four eyes should be opened, the sieve should be thickened as much as possible - now the decision is being made about the next at least half a century. It would be terrible to allow evil to infiltrate a new beginning. The problem is not the big fish whose fate is now obsessively preoccupied - they will be judged or delivered - they should be left to the law, make an antiserum for the future and forget about them. But small fish can slip through.

More attention should also be paid to intellectual criminality, intellectual war profiteering, complicity. There are so many cases in such varieties that it is difficult to establish criteria. Because evil appears in countless varieties, unlike good. When - rarely though - our medieval masters painted symbols of evil, devils, they did so with much more spontaneity than when they painted symbols of good. Imagination is more playful in the face of evil. Good is simple, boring, one-way, simplistic. In life, goodness is very rare, and the varieties of evil are endless. Some devils can even be made adorable. This should be taken care of.

U to many interviews you reconsider own responsibility because instrumentalization performances Kolubarska battle. How long th came u tome reexamination?

That is the only question that can be asked of me on the topic of responsibility, where was I there. I try not to defend myself, because in that case I would invalidate my accusations directed at others.

I will repeat what I have said many times: when I was working Kolubarska battle at no point did I think that I was thereby participating in the coming evil. If that occurred to me... Of course, it's easy to say that now, I risk being believed or not. Maybe I wouldn't really give up, but I would look for another way, some other way, somewhere I would give myself an alibi...

Maybe bis rectified a farce?

And no, not that! I have respect for the Battle of Kolubara.

I watched those peasants who came to the show - now I'm as excited as I was then - they were brought by their grandchildren, they traveled for eighteen, nineteen hours, they changed from bus to bus... I was waiting for them, those often half-blind peasants who had never been to the theater except maybe in Corfu. Today, hardly any of them are still alive. I saw tears in eyes that no longer had tear glands, and realized that it was about something above politics, above the nation.

I was not aware that the whole thing could go in a bad direction, I did not understand Predrag Matvejević's warnings. Now Matvejević and I are in occasional correspondence and I feel great respect for him, I consider him an exemplary personality of the entire Balkan area, but at a time when Kolubarska battle ignited and turned into a conflagration and a huge flame - admittedly before lighting the decisive fire in which the area of ​​the former Yugoslavia will burn - I did not understand his letters. In a very gentlemanly way, he criticized the instrumentalization of the play, and I felt resistance. It's my fault. I considered others more invited to debate with Matvejević - Dobrica Ćosić or Mihiz - but I felt an impulse, a desire to answer him and defend the play. I admit that I did not read his texts carefully or intelligently enough then. As far as I remember, those texts were not attacking, they were not aggressive, they suggested thinking: where the burning of national feelings can lead. Those were salutary warnings of possible consequences, of what will happen - Matvejević was wise enough.

However, the magma of the great national delusion didn't start from any field, or from some field or from Kolubara near which the descendants of the battle participants live, but from the most educated intellectual circles, from the backstage level. I won't name those backstage - I'm not a whistleblower - but I sat there, passed by, listened, started recording, so I raised my hands.

Knows se za Batana u Rovinj.

It is an episode, a summer episode, a small summer branch of the great Batana, which was primarily in Belgrade. Well, in Zagreb and everywhere a little bit. Batana is a ferial couloir excursion more for fun and mockery than for serious qualifications. The main corridors worked continuously, a step away from the Academy. The casting of those catacombs is very similar to the casting of the Academy of Sciences. The great devil or great devils listened carefully to all this and built an alibi before themselves and the world, believing that they were listening to the intellect of the nation.

You report se Dobrici I will chat kad you come u Beograd?

No. We used to meet, say hello, drink coffee if there was an opportunity, but we never had meetings. Just in time Kolubarske battles. And even then I was so busy with work that there were few meetings...

Many years have passed, I cannot judge. Were there any calculated goals, goals with far-reaching political connotations, or maybe it was all business, profit of another kind... I don't know.

The scenography of the play was a sound that was constantly heard. Village, rooster, sounds that associate mood, rhythm, happenings, mixed voices, chants, laments, harvester's song, cries from Eastern Serbia, thunder of cannons and prangs... No one noticed it, not even a critic. Everyone was obsessively focused on the fate of the nation and its tragic epic, on the Battle of Kolubara, the catharsis, the victory... It was as if the Kosovo battle had been repeated, in which the Serbs were now winning. A bit infantile. The nation was neglected, for decades. Not only this one, but also others in the Balkans. It was as if the period of early childhood had been resurrected, in the national sense. It was naive, but as far as I'm concerned it was also virtuous.

It all depends on the context. If it hadn't been for what happened, that play could have played in Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Skopje... and it wouldn't have hurt anyone. But in the context of national and religious conflicts, it was hell.

I made two corrections in the text, categorically. Something ugly was said about Bulgarians - maybe that's what Ćosić says in the novel, it doesn't concern me - something that is directly rude on stage. The Bulgarian is mentioned as a category of evil. I threw it out, I didn't want to offend the whole nation.

I Dejan Washer je Bio u game za direction Kolubarske battles, Washer whose je Dovecote similarly instrumentalized. Da li th nekad talked o take?

We didn't. I watched the scandal from the sidelines Dovecote and realized that the pan-national, pan-societal pan-political discussion is moving away from the theater. I did not manage to reduce the account to the end - as a viewer and a professional - how good that play is theatrically. I doubt it's as good as the fame makes it.

It is not advisable to talk about the work of colleagues - although Mijač made it very clear that he did Kolubarska battle he doesn't like it and thinks it's ugly - but I will say that it's a different play, Kad su blossomed pumpkins, which is historic due to the fact that it brought to the stage and opened up to the public the topic of Bare Island, which until then had only been cautiously whispered about in the backstage, as an extremely modest theater act. There are no theatrical reasons for it to be considered a serious, creative directorial work. Some charming acting, rhythm and good dramaturgical phrasing do not make it more than a good school work without theatrical value. The action on the ideological, social or political level does not have to be - most often it is not - proportional to the theatrical value.

How bi farce Ball disrespect themes, means li to da you consider da more agency mature za distance i playing sa the past?

The answer to that question requires top professional knowledge, and I don't want to be a dilettante. What I do know is that we register everything that happens to us - on a personal or national level - as a subjective reflection, as a theatrical image. A picture of the past is not proof that the past was like that. But the correction of the image that - when it comes to the national past - occupies our consciousness so much, determining our present and future, is a hypothetical mental operative process. That mental operation on the entire nation - who is able to do it? The effect of those images can only be neutralized by strong counter-images, which will also not be absolute truth. I am afraid that we are in an impasse from which we cannot get out easily or quickly. In order for people to get rid of the burdensome images of the past, they have to confront them with a terrible counter, excessive, so that something else or something else is obtained as a result. It's a job for new generations.