Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of National Class Category Up to 785ccm
1979 · Goran Marković · National Class Category Up to 785ccm on Sightlines
Start with the car. It is a Zastava 750, the Fića, the little licensed Fiat that half of Yugoslavia learned to drive in, stripped and numbered for racing. Its engine is under 785 cubic centimeters, which is the whole point of the category and the joke of the title. Branimir Mitrović, known to everyone as Floyd, drives it as if it were a Formula One machine. Goran Marković films it with enough speed and danger that we believe him, at least while the engine is screaming. Then the race stops, and Floyd has to go back into the city.
The film covers one week in Belgrade, counting down to Saturday's race. Floyd is a dandy, a charmer and a talker. He owes money to mechanics and friends. His girlfriend is patient, and she is running out of patience. Draft notices from the army keep arriving, and he answers none of them. Marković builds the week from encounters. Floyd walks into a café, a flat or a pit area, puts on a performance, gets out of something, and moves on. The scenes are funny and quick, and each one adds one more thing he hasn't dealt with.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema in the 1980s, gives us a useful way to see what Marković is doing. Deleuze argued that classical cinema, especially Hollywood, ran on what he called the action-image. A character perceives a situation and acts to change it. The situation pushes, the hero pushes back, and the act settles things. The sports movie is about the purest version of this. A week of training and trouble leads to the big game, and the result decides who the hero is.
Nacionalna klasa has that skeleton. The countdown is real and the race is the event everything aims at. But Marković empties it out from the inside. Nothing Floyd could do on Saturday would answer the draft board, pay his debts or keep his girlfriend. Even a win would only put him at the top of a tier that by definition is never first. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image. The characters still move and talk and scheme, but their actions no longer reach the situation they are in. The link between seeing and doing has gone slack. He traced the break to postwar Italian cinema, and one of the films he leaned on was Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), about young provincial men who lounge, pose and never leave town. Floyd is a Belgrade cousin of those idlers, a direct descendant of the type.
The lens helps because it explains why the film feels the way it does. As a comedy it is buoyant, and still something sinks underneath it all the time. We are watching a sports film whose motor has been quietly disconnected. Each encounter in Floyd's week is what Deleuze called a weak link. The episodes sit next to each other more than they cause each other, the way a stroll moves from street to street. The racetrack is the film's governing image for this: a closed loop you can take at full speed and never arrive anywhere. Deleuze would call it a symbol, one object that holds the film's central relation. That relation is going fast while standing still.
The second thing to watch is Dragan Nikolić. His Floyd is always "on." He makes entrances and exits, works his audience of friends, women and rivals, and manages his image. Deleuze took a word from Brecht for this, the gest: a posture or attitude that shows a social relation instead of hiding it. Floyd's swagger is a gest in that sense. His charm is the currency he uses to buy one more day without obligations, and watching him spend it tells us something about a whole generation of city kids. They had been promised consumer modernity and a little freedom, and they found themselves in a second-tier category. Nikolić plays the charm as both a gift and a disease. The film asks us to adore exactly the qualities that are hurting him, and we do. That double pull is the film's real invention.
It comes from a particular school. Marković trained at FAMU in Prague, and the film owes a great deal to the Czech New Wave. Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965) taught the Prague-trained directors to find comedy by watching social types behave instead of cranking plot. Forman's The Firemen's Ball (1967) made a bigger wager: diagnose a whole society through one botched amateur event. Marković reruns that wager with an amateur car race. The hustler-hero comes from closer to home. Živojin Pavlović's When I Am Dead and Gone (1967), a Black Wave film, follows a feckless, charming drifter sliding toward ruin, and Aleksandar Petrović's I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) brought the rough, location-bound texture of life on the margins. The Black Wave had been suppressed by the time Marković made this film, so he warmed its realism into something that could pass the censors and fill cinemas. For the race footage he borrowed the cockpit-mounted cameras that Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966) made standard, and put them inside a car that could hardly be humbler.
The film is remembered and quoted across the region as a portrait of Belgrade youth on the eve of the 1980s. What it did to film as an art is subtler. It shows that a popular genre comedy can carry the modern crisis of action without announcing it. It keeps the countdown and the stakes the audience came for, and lets us feel, laugh by laugh, that the structure promises something it can't deliver.
So watch it twice in your head at once. Ride along with the countdown, because the film earns that pleasure. Keep an eye on the draft papers too, and on the loop of the track. Ask what a race could possibly settle for a man who has made a life out of not settling anything.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The sports-film countdown to Saturday's race is kept intact, but no act on the track can resolve the draft notices, debts or failing relationship; even a win only crowns him in a category defined as second-tier
- weak links — The week is built as a picaresque series of encounters in bars, flats and pits, each one deferring another obligation, linked more by succession than by cause
- symbol — The recurring racetrack, a closed loop you speed around without arriving anywhere, is the film's governing spatial metaphor and condenses its central relation
- the gest — Floyd is always 'on.' The staging stresses entrances, exits and image-management for an audience of friends, women and rivals, and Nikolić plays charm as both gift and disease, exposing the social relation underneath
- action-image (large form), deflated — The structure of a global situation pressing toward a decisive act, the Saturday race, is set up and then hollowed out: the decisive event can transform nothing