Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Underground
1995 · Emir Kusturica · Underground on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera plunge into crowds instead of holding still. (camera)
Filač's camera cranes over banquets, tracks with runners, and rarely settles, making each gathering feel physically alive.
Payoff: This restless camera is where the film gets its drunken, unstoppable momentum.
Listen for the brass band under scenes of celebration and violence. (sound)
Bregović's syncopated Balkan brass plays through weddings, gunfire, and grief alike, never pausing to distinguish one from the other.
Payoff: The music refuses to tell you when to feel safe, so ask what is actually happening under the trumpet.
Notice the staircase between the party above and the cellar below. (staging)
Kusturica keeps returning to the same vertical geography, a world underground and a world on the surface, connected by one passage.
Payoff: The staircase does the film's thinking for it: one nation, two floors, two entirely different realities.
Notice the animals loose among the actors, geese, a chimpanzee. (setting)
A chimpanzee, geese, and other creatures recur as anarchic presences moving freely through weddings, feasts, and battles alike.
Payoff: Their indifference to the chaos around them makes the human mayhem look even more absurd.
Notice how each decade arrives with the same brass, drink, and brawling. (structure)
The film leaps across fifty years of Yugoslav history, but its set-piece gatherings, weddings, feasts, funerals, repeat the same appetites each time.
Payoff: The repetition suggests history is less a story moving forward than a cycle that keeps re-arriving at itself.
Once you have seen it
Notice that the cellar's war and the surface's peace happen at once. (structure)
The film cuts between the two as neighbors in space rather than treating the cellar as a flashback or a memory.
Payoff: Both decades are equally real and equally present, which is what makes the deception sustainable for so long. In the reading: peaks of present. The reading calls this peaks of present: two contradictory nows held simultaneously, not a past folded into the present.
Watch how easily Marko slides between roles across the decades. (performance)
He moves from black-market hustler to Party grandee to postwar opportunist, refreshing the same fiction to fit whatever regime is in power.
Payoff: He survives every regime precisely because he never believed in any of them. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading calls Marko a forger: someone who does not hide a truth but manufactures the reality other people live inside.
Watch what happens to the land in the film's final image. (structure)
A piece of land breaks away from the rest and drifts off, the party continuing on it, a farewell staged as fable rather than explained.
Payoff: The film says goodbye to a country by telling itself one last story about it. In the reading: fabulation (legending). The reading calls this fabulation: a film caught legending its own country because the real history had become unusable.
Carry this in: Watch the staircase between the party above and the war below. The film never explains it; the geography does.