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The cinema works again! / Ponovo radi bioskop. Christopher Robbins (2008).
Video, defunct swimming pool, residents of Vranje, Serbia.
still from Bring It On: All Or Nothing, original and Vranje-style
still from Scary Movie 4, original and Vranje-style
the swimming pool.
As part of a series of public art projects initiated by Nikoletta Markovic and Generator, I organized Vranje residents around the idea of turning their town's defunct public swimming pool into a cinema for one night, to screen movie scenes chosen and re-enacted by residents of Vranje, Serbia. You can view excerpts from several of the films here.
"The setting is Vranje, Serbia; the public cinema is broken; the films are Bring it on, Rocky IV, and Star Wars II; the actors are Vranje's own silver screen hopefuls. Excerpts of the films are paired against their real-time Serbian reenactments, each denying the pure legibility of their counterpart. A cinema of relations (social and formal) is developed, of which this work is perhaps a preliminary demonstration. One is left wondering not only about the obscured social realities in which the actors are no doubt dramatically wrapped-up off-screen, but about the status, for instance, of the montage sequences newly derived as analogues of those in the originals. 'The Cinema Works Again! Ponovo Radi Bioskop!' is a strange and pleasurable document, refreshingly crude and conceptually pure." -Rhode Island State Council on the Arts
Vranje is located just 8km from the border with Kosovo - a border still disputed by Serbia, and a border made possible by U.S. intervention in the Kosovo war in the late 90's. In fact, during that war my country bombed Vranje numerous times, missed the military base, destroyed a row of homes, and dropped depleted uranium on their mountain-top. Ten years later, while I was living in Vranje, the U.S. Embassy in Serbia was set on fire in response to Kosovo's declaration of independence.
While working with Serbian, Albanian, and Roma youth, they began to talk to me about how it felt to be bombed by "me." I was touched by their simple frankness and lack of rancor. We were re-creating films of their own choice -- Star Wars, Rocky, High School Musical -- and the juxtaposition of the children's love of American pop culture with their recounting of sometimes frightening, often strangely nostalgic stories of our bombs was quietly revealing:
I remember one boy, who, in the middle of re-enacting a scene from 'Scary Movie 4,' broke off to comment "you know, when you bombed me, it was very scary. I knew the sound the planes made when they dropped down to bomb - actually it wasn't a sound - it was when my chest vibrated very low - that feeling was scary. A friend of mine, his house was bombed. Now his house is new and mine is still old..."
And then - suddenly, he was back in the scene - "Okay, so now I am Shaquille O'Neil and you are Dr. Phil, and you are cutting off your leg..."
The title of the project is Nikoletta's suggestion: "there is a very well known line from serbian offbeat movie (Maratonci trce pocasni krug - The Marathon Family) that says: the cinema works again!"
Thanks to the National Endowment for Democracy, the Embassy of Finland in Belgrade, Resurs Centar Leskovac, American Corner Vranje and Bujanovac, and, of course, Generator NGO Vranje for their funding and support of this project.