A book will be published soon Purish on the occasion of one hundred years since the birth of the great director. The publisher is the Čačak Cultural Center. The text that follows is an excerpt from that book
It was an undoped year when youth - that animality, as Rastko Petrović said - is constantly forgotten. As with the poet Izet Sarajlić - close in the distance. Our friend Amigo reports through his friend Genius called Genius that a movie starring Alain Delon and Lino Ventura is being shown in the cinema in the city of P. at four in the afternoon. Escape from the gymnasium that only worked in the afternoon. When Amigo announced that Alain Delon was playing, there was a particularly pronounced panic in the town, because he was deeply convinced that Delon was the main man of the City, something like Gary Cooper, precisely at four o'clock.
At the door is a cinematographer, distributor, mobile cash register, artistic case none other than the monstrous, implacable, cruel Radovan Aždaya. Although he did not weigh more than forty kilos, although he was in serious age, he looked with eyes that were there somewhere behind his ears. For Radovan Aždaja, there was a belief that it was better to be looked at by a laser (which had just been invented at the time) than by Radovan. His view was a form of quick freezing (although there were no freezers in Serbia at the time).
Before noon on that fateful day, Amigo and Genius (since they were idlers by profession) collected money for cards by the principle of wiretapping, in the translation of begging. Because Radovan Aždaja's motto was "Honor to everyone, loyalty to no one".
In the hall we are Amigo, Genije, Rade Roki, Stamat, Batan Đerovac, Dule Lari, Rašo Klempo, me and one little girl, who was sometimes a "sweet help" in the darkness of the cinema hall (in the most beautiful darkness of one's youth).
Before turning on the machine, Radovan Aždaja nicely says: "Don't think I smelled smoke." So, a misunderstanding at the beginning, because we all smoke, and the little one smokes too.
In the first row sits - himself - Rašo Klempo, the most respected tapper of Yugoslavia at the time. The warm-up begins. The genius asks: "And why does Rasho Klempo always sit in the first row, but he can't read?" Batan Đerovac answers: "Rašo likes to talk to actors".
The movie starts. It says: "Morning". Milena Dravić, Ljubiša Samardžić and the team. Alas, mother, still black and white in broad daylight... Amigo is the first to react: "People, this is not Sophia Loren!" The genius, like any genius, screams: "Rejoice, return the money!" Stamat stands up and says: "Najo gallery!" In the City of P., that expression was a message that no one gives you two percent, that you have no prospects in any sense and direction.
That's how - among that genial gentry, among those highly educated forerunners of our contemporary film criticism - I saw Purisa Đorđević's film for the first time in my life.
SOMETHING IS AT THE DOOR
When - via that glorious high school cinema screening - I entered that murky black and white water, I felt something was brewing. Everything smelled like a revolution: it was no longer number one Alain Delon and his team, but it smelled of some strange bewitchment, desire, vague need for something insufficiently clear but inflamed. Then I had the urge to jump out of my skin. I felt that something was at the door of my heated, upset and crazy youth. It was as if Wednesday had turned into Saturday. Through Purisha's films, I felt that "something is brewing". Satisfied with Westerns, having discovered the follies of partisan views, Marilyn Monroe is no longer alive, the Beatles and the Stones are coming. In our soul, we also reach out.
And then Puriša Đorđević plays the main role in my beautiful, unhappy young life.
THE WAR I WAS IN AFTER THE WAR
There is no more beautiful war than in Purisa Đorđević's films: a small town, Germans, Chetniks and partisans, Čačak in the foreground, a memory of the pre-war brothel in Čačany, the cinema in Krenov's hotel, beautiful music, refugees, pre-revolutionary Russians (there is also Leonid Envald, Marina's uncle Vladi - the wife of Vladimir Wysocki - who lives with two sisters alike), in the movies beautiful and young actors and actresses, Mija Aleksić is there somewhere as God intended dao, a little love smack, side-shooting - god bless you.
But still war. As an established human phenomenon, for Purisha war is not an epic. For him, war is simply a passing state: putting on shoes and taking off shoes. In his films, he follows the fragments of war, the effects on everyday life in which shooting, gunfire, and skittering refract like a black image of the soul. Unlike those who understand war as defeat and victory, Purisha understood it as a parallel world. For him, the question of whether people die in war is a general phenomenon: they die as they normally do in life. His characters also live in war. Life in war is a process in which there is no day without a bullet. After everything comes preparations for peace, and one lives in peace until war comes. In Purisha's films, everything is optimism, a paradise settlement, everything is bright and cheerful, as with Henry Miller in his novels. Everything here is simple: in war you prepare for a normal life with comings and goings, with departures and arrivals, there are expectations and farewells forever, heartbreaking hopes and soulful beliefs. Purisha's thesis is simple - the sun either rises or it doesn't. Purisha simply does not cross the line of the possible. This is the essence of his cinematic physics and metaphysics. But it happens that his physics sometimes turns into psychology, when reality is deeply buried in personalities. This is why his film characters are in a state of internal war. They always seem to be ahead of the shooting machine. What to do - can you see that it is war?
PURISHA'S ACTING FLOCK
For Purisa Đorđević, life was not a problem to be solved, but a mystery and a game to be experienced. In this experience of life, he made several films that changed our cinematography, with his favorite actors Milena Dravić, Ljubiša Samardžić and Drago Čuma. Once, a long time ago - when we met - I told him in the most serious way that his films influenced my formation and attitude towards art, and he said to me: "Let it go, Brankić, I was fooling myself". Perhaps, when he told me that, he was being honest, but the fact is that he made films and wrote books with some hard-to-understand ease, introducing great novelties into films at that time, which is not easy at all. Especially in the time of socialist realism, black wave and communist moulds, patterns and cackles. For "Gradac" - in which he published three books - he started writing a book about his view of the Republic of Užice and shot half a new film Mouth full of dirt. Although it remained unfinished, enough for a smart man. Purisha has always been a child prodigy for me!
Dear Chuma. If you follow Purisha's films closely, you will notice that one actor plays an important role in those films. It's Drago Chuma. When he appears, the film takes a strange turn - instead of strange, one could say cheesy: cheesy in those films is a form of catharsis. But he is a symbol in Purisha's films. When he appears, Chuma moves the entire action of the film with his appearance, character and his role. That confusion is, in fact, Drago Chuma's style. There is a strange connection between the two of them that is a reflection of their personal closeness. Therefore, Chuma's roles in those films are a form of some mystery, which can be called a small film within a film. There is always a delict, a case, a twist or a puzzle. On one occasion, allegedly, an American producer - watching our films at the time - said that Drago Chuma was the only actor from our country who could act in Hollywood films. In fact, Chuma is an actor full of everything, it's just a matter of emptying his acting silo.
Milena Dravic. The people of Čačan, those windy mangupes, wrote this graffiti on the freshly painted wall of the "Car Lazar" tavern in Čačan: "No more guys like that, no more ladies like that, Milena Dravić and Dragan Nikolić forever with us!" In Purisha's films, everything revolved, rotated, bent and twisted around that actress. Everything she played in Purisha's films was reduced to a tragic state of life. Oh, how sublimely she bore and carried it! In those films, the characters she played were the basis of everything that, despite the tragedy, burned in the desire to live. The fate of her characters in those films expresses everything that breaks you in life: everything revolves around that fate, everything is love and courage, everything is parting immediately after the meeting, because there is no time for anything in between.
Ljubisa Samardzic. When a man sees him, he looks like someone who is leaving or returning from a battle. He is ready for anything, as if he was trained by Purisa Đorđević. In his films Lj. S. showed the courage and strength of the universal type of James Stewart and Marcello Mastroianni - cruel and subtle. Purisha recognized this, so his roles were special in the sense that he "acted life in itself". I have never seen such acting ease, simplicity and belonging to oneself. I think that Purisha managed to give the actors unlimited freedom because he wrote life-like, clear, everyday and almost comic dialogues for them.
Purisha was a master at that. And such dialogues precisely with that simplicity bring the actors to the point of complete fusion with the theme of his films. In one film, Ljubiša asks Milena: "Are you going to fuck yourself?" She replies: "Please!?" Ljubisa asks: "What is your name?" Milena answers: "My father." – What a charming master stunt! In fact, such are all Purisha's answers to the most important questions of life.
And now let's hear the song First love sung by Carlo Buti in the film Gangster funeral Abella Ferrara.
[An excerpt from a longer text]
Less than two days of blockade - that's how long it took to see how weak and powerless the public media service is, both from the outside and from the inside. At the moment of writing this text, it is the eighth day of the blockade, and the sixth that RTS is not broadcasting its program. They also seem to be facing a strike inside the house. And the essence of blocking RTS is not in what it publishes, but in what it keeps silent
In the months after the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, the flames of rebellion spread throughout Serbia. The first protests started in Novi Sad right after the tragedy. The authorities responded with arrests, police cordons and intimidation, but instead of calming down the protesters, new protests followed.
The rector of the University of Belgrade, Vladan Đokić, has been the target of top state officials and regime tabloids for months, who label him as an insidious instigator of student protests, an opportunist, "the face of evil" and "the leader of the criminal octopus." How and why a rector became "state enemy number one"
"I'm standing in the cordon, and my daughter is shouting at me 'aw, aw, killers'. What should I do? If they ordered me - I would throw down my baton and bulletproof vest and stand on the side of my child," a police officer from the south of Serbia, who works as needed in the Belgrade Police Brigade, told "Vreme"
The recent formation of the Đura Macuta government is part of the regime's revenge and cynicism. This can be seen most in the "black troika" of new ministers appointed to deal with the parts of society that are the leaders and symbols of the big rebellion that lasted for several months, the cause of which was the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, which claimed 16 human lives. Education, universities, unsolicited media and parts of the judiciary that refuse to listen to orders, either publicly, with announcements, or hiding behind legal procedures, should be dismantled. Those who will have no problem doing everything they are told, even reinforcing the orders with their own inventions, are chosen for this.
Ministers often call Vučić a class teacher. There is no joy or critical reflection in his classroom. Everyone has to bow their heads over the benches, hum and listen. What this is about, the reader sees on television every day
RTS is blocked, universities do not work, and threats, insults and calls to the prosecutor's office and the police to arrest blockers, rioters and terrorists are pouring out from the top of the government. The Serbian state has turned into a farce
Anyone who condemns the regime's targeting of people from the media, the non-governmental sector, the opposition and universities, must not agree to this targeting of RTS editors and journalists either.
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