Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Underground
1995 · Emir Kusturica · Underground on Sightlines
A bomb falls on the Belgrade zoo and the animals walk out. Smoke, rubble, geese loose in the street, a chimpanzee who will stay with this film for the next fifty years. It is 1941, the Germans are overhead, and one of the first things Kusturica shows you is a city whose floor has just been broken open. Whatever was caged is now in the traffic.
Hold on to that, because Underground keeps doing it. A surface cracks, and something older and hungrier comes up through the gap.
Deleuze had a name for cinema built this way. He called it naturalism, and its characteristic image the impulse-image: not a cinema of decisions and consequences, but one of drives (appetite, acquisition, lust) erupting through whatever social arrangement is supposed to contain them. He described it in two layers. There is the derived milieu, the world as it presents itself, with its uniforms and its paperwork: occupied Belgrade, then the Party, then the secession wars of the 1990s. And there is the originary world, which is what the milieu turns out to have been a crust over, a place with no manners in it where people are only what they want. In Stroheim and Buñuel, Deleuze's examples, that originary world has to be conjured out of a desert or a locked drawing room. Kusturica builds a floor and puts it downstairs.
That is his specific invention here, and it is spatial rather than symbolic. Marko keeps a cellar full of people manufacturing weapons for a war that has been over for years, telling them the bombs are still falling. Above: banquets, medals, a Party career. Below: the same brass, the same drink, the same brawling, in a permanent 1944. The vertical geography does the thinking for the film. Nobody has to explain the metaphor, because you can see the staircase.
Why bring Deleuze to a picture this loud? Because without the concept the cellar is one very long cruel joke, and with it the cellar becomes an argument about where nations come from. Naturalism also gives the film its shape in time. It runs on entropy, on what Deleuze called the line of slope: not a plot climbing to a crisis but a world sliding, irreversibly, downhill. Underground's three movements are usually described as War, Cold War, War. That is not a progression. It is a circle with a drain in it.
Then there is Marko, who may be the purest example the movies have of what Deleuze called the forger. A liar acknowledges the truth he is hiding. The forger manufactures the real that other people live inside. Marko rises through the ranks on a fiction he refreshes daily, and that fiction has an entire population housed in it, working, marrying, raising children in the theater of deception he maintains from above. Deleuze's term for this is crystalline description: an account that composes an object and then quietly replaces it. There is no war down there. There is only the description of a war, and the description is enough.
Film theory has a long habit of treating the camera as a witness. Bazin's realism rests on the photograph's odd authority, the fact that the thing was there in front of the lens, so the image testifies. Underground runs on the opposite contract and dramatizes its cost, and it was made to pay for that. Jeanne Moreau's jury gave it the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1995; within weeks Alain Finkielkraut was denouncing it in Le Monde as Serbian propaganda, a charge he leveled before seeing it. Žižek and others pressed the case in more considered terms. Wherever you land in that fight, notice its shape: an argument about whether a fable can lie, conducted partly from a description of the film rather than from the film. The powers of the false have a way of coming back around.
The two floors are also two presents. Deleuze's term is peaks of present, contradictory nows held simultaneously rather than a past dropped into a present as flashback. Nothing in the cellar is a memory. 1944 is not being remembered down there. It is happening, on the far side of a door, while 1961 happens on the stairs, and the film cuts between them as neighbours in space. Time becomes architecture. The cellar is close to what Deleuze called a perfect crystal, a sealed world with no outside, where the actual and its image can no longer be pried apart. The country above it is the other kind of crystal, the decomposing one: an order still running its ceremonies while men like Marko eat it hollow, surviving every regime precisely because they never believed in one.
Filač's camera almost never stands still. It plunges into crowds, cranes over banquets, runs with the runners, and the effect is to make a gathering into a single body, Deleuze's dividual, a crowd that behaves as one unit of feeling. Bregović's brass supplies its pulse. When these people eat, dance, shoot and weep at once, you are watching what Deleuze (borrowing from Brecht) called a gest, a posture that exposes an entire social relation without stating it. The Kusturica wedding is a gest for a country. Celebration and catastrophe are performed by the same muscles.
The Yugoslav title translates as Once Upon a Time There Was a Country, and the last movement earns that past tense. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema begins when the filmmaker can no longer address a people that already exists, when the people are missing and must be invented instead. Most films in that tradition begin with the absence. Underground shows the people going. Its final image is a strip of land breaking off and drifting away with the party still going on it. The film does not explain this. It says goodbye, in the voice of a fable, because the history is unusable. Deleuze called that fabulation: characters and film caught in the act of legending themselves.
None of it came from nowhere. When Father Was Away on Business (1985) gave Kusturica his method for telling Yugoslav political history sideways, through domestic farce; Underground scales the trick to national size. Time of the Gypsies (1988) is where he and Filač worked out levitating bodies achieved in camera, the Roma brass, the immersive fluid camera, all inherited here wholesale. From Fellini he took two precise things: the brass processions and communal set-pieces of Amarcord (1973), staged as collective memory, and the circus-parade choreography of 8½ (1963), which is the grammar for herding a hundred bodies and a band into one moving shape. The Tin Drum (1979) had already proved that national catastrophe could be filmed as grotesque carnival. And the Yugoslav Black Wave, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) above all, supplied the local habit of fusing ideology with bodily excess and letting the montage misbehave.
What it passed on is a whole vocabulary: brass, animals, weddings and delirium as the default register for Balkan history abroad, a Kusturica mode that shaped how the wars of succession were narrated on screen, for better and worse. Bregović's score pushed Balkan brass into the world-music market of the decade. And the controversy itself became a standing case in the ethics of allegory during atrocity, which is not nothing.
Its claim on the art is simpler than the arguments around it. Kusturica took the maximalist party film, the Fellini crowd at full roar, and made it carry a political thesis that sober cinema could not carry: that a state can be founded on a maintained fiction, and that the people inside it will keep working, singing and dancing regardless. The film refuses to sort that out for you. The same appetite that makes these people so gloriously alive is exactly what makes them easy to lie to, and Kusturica never decides which fact is the larger one. Watch it again for the band. Notice how rarely it stops, and what has to happen before it does.
Concepts in play
- originary world — The cellar: an entire community kept below ground for decades making weapons, drinking, brawling and marrying in a permanent 1944, revealed as the savage substrate under the Party's surface world; the bombed zoo releasing animals into Belgrade in 1941.
- derived milieu — The three concrete historical settings — occupied Belgrade 1941, Titoist officialdom where Marko becomes a Party grandee, the 1990s secession wars — each exposed as the crust over the cellar's appetite; the film's vertical geography of surface and cellar it returns to again and again.
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — The three-movement architecture commonly read as War, Cold War, War: a historical scheme that does not progress but sinks, ending in the wars the film was made in the shadow of.
- le faussaire (the forger) — Marko's 'surreal duplicity' propelling him up the Party ranks while he maintains from above the elaborate theater that keeps the cellar believing the Second World War never ended, and steals Blacky's Natalija in the process.
- crystalline description — There is no war underground; there is only the maintained description of one, and it fully replaces its object for the people laboring at a permanent war economy.
- peaks of present — The cellar's ongoing 1944 and the surface's post-war decades held as simultaneous nows, cut between as adjacent spaces rather than as flashback, so the film's time is experienced as architecture.
- perfect (saturated) crystal — The subterranean world as a sealed environment with no outside, its inhabitants' actual present indistinguishable from the image of war staged for them.
- crystal-decomposition — Titoist Yugoslavia above ground: an order still running its ceremonies and medals while the opportunist who thrives under every regime eats it from within — the satire's target, the mythology of Yugoslav socialism.
- the mobile section (plan) — Vilko Filač's camera plunging into crowds, craning over banquets, tracking alongside running figures, with foreground and background competing so the frame itself dramatizes excess and simultaneity.
- dividual — The set-piece gatherings — weddings, feasts, funerals, reunions — staged so that bodies, animals, banners and Bregović's brass band become one affective mass rather than a set of individuals.
- the gest — The broad, physical, quasi-theatrical ensemble style (shouting, brawling, weeping, singing) fused to the near-constant brass: a people who dance through catastrophe, their postures exposing the social relation the film cannot state directly.
- the people are missing — The Yugoslav release title *Bila jednom jedna zemlja* ('Once Upon a Time There Was a Country') and the closing image of land severing and floating away, a valediction for a nation dissolving as the film was being made.
- fabulation (legending) — The tragicomic allegory's deliberately mythic, hyperbolic mode — characters standing for historical forces, the closing benediction delivered as fable rather than history.