Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Time of the Gypsies
1988 · Emir Kusturica · Time of the Gypsies on Sightlines
A bride goes up.
She's under a white veil in a mud yard on the edge of Skopje, and she rises — not far, a few feet — while the wedding underneath her keeps eating and shouting. Nothing in the film flags it. No dissolve, no slow motion, no cutaway to a face registering wonder on our behalf. Vilko Filač's camera stays in exactly the air it was already in, the air with the geese in it. And the way the shot was made was wires, a rig, somebody standing just out of frame, on 35mm, in 1988. That is why it lands. The miracle weighs the same as the mud.
Everything hard about Time of the Gypsies is inside that shot.
The world moves so he doesn't have to
Perhan's gift is telekinesis, which means he is the only person in this very loud film who gets what he wants without moving. He looks, and the object travels. He is still; the world does the work.
Deleuze has a name for that, and it comes from an unlikely source — he found it watching musicals. Sometimes a character stops being the one who acts, and the movement passes over to the world around them: the dancer isn't dancing anymore, the dance is carrying the dancer. He called it the movement of world, and it only happens when the ordinary circuit has failed. Perceive a situation, act on it, change it — that chain is the engine of most films ever made. Perhan has no access to it. He can't cure his sister. He can't out-argue the family that won't give him the girl. He has no money, no father, no country. So the film gives him the one power that is exactly shaped like his powerlessness: he can make things move, and he cannot make anything change.
This is why the levitations aren't decoration. They are the precise form his situation takes. Read them that way and the film stops being "Balkan whimsy" and becomes something much colder.
The floating passages also do something Deleuze separates carefully from the flashback. A flashback is dated; it says this happened, then. What Perhan sees isn't anchored to a retrievable memory — Deleuze's word is the onirosign, the dream-image, a circuit that opens without ever touching down in a former present. Andrija Zafranović's cutting is built to protect exactly that. The reveries don't arrive as rupture. They are let into the same continuous world as the domestic scenes, which means you can never stand outside them and call them unreal.
What's underneath the settlement
The other half of the film is the opposite of weightless. Deleuze built a whole category out of Stroheim and Buñuel that he called naturalism, and its logic is this: a recognizable social setting turns out to be the crust over an older, savage world of pure appetite. He called the crust the derived milieu and the thing underneath the originary world. Šutka is the milieu — houses, a grandmother who heals, a courtship, a wedding. The originary world is what Kusturica never lets out of the frame: rain, standing water, mud, animals moving through human rooms as if the distinction were provisional.
Ahmed is that world wearing a suit. Bora Todorović plays him with real paternal warmth, which is the whole trick; what he is actually running is the trafficking of children into begging and theft, the documented abuse that Kusturica took from journalism and made the film's spine. In naturalism, characters don't have arcs, they have a slope. Deleuze called it the line of steepest descent, and the original title says it plainly: Dom za vešanje, House for Hanging. Perhan goes down it. The deaths follow, and the ending folds revenge and self-destruction into the same gesture.
The wire matters
There's a theoretical stake in how those levitations were achieved. Bazin's argument for neorealism was that the camera's dumb honesty about what stood in front of it was a moral asset — that a film earns belief by not cheating the space. A digital levitation is a claim about the image. A wired one is a claim about the world: that body really was in that air, in that yard, with those people. Kusturica keeps the neorealist contract and smuggles the impossible through it. He casts largely from the Roma community, shoots mostly in Romani, coaxes behavior rather than performance out of non-actors — and then floats a bride, in the same unbroken space. The documentary undertow is what makes the magic disreputable in the best way. You can't file it under fantasy, because the ground is real.
The chapters before and after
The template was Aleksandar Petrović's I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967), which put non-professional Roma speaking Romani on location and invented the Yugoslav Gypsy film. From Los Olvidados (1950) comes the exact move at issue here — Buñuel dropping an oneiric, floating insert into documentary slum poverty — and it's worth saying that Buñuel is one of the two directors Deleuze built the naturalism concept out of in the first place. Pasolini's Accattone (1961) supplies the grammar for framing sub-proletarians with iconic gravity and letting music elevate them; Pasolini also gave Deleuze the notion of free indirect discourse, the camera that sees with a character rather than at him, which is what Kusturica's magical realism is doing when it renders Perhan's interior as the film's own visual register. La Strada (1954) contributes the itinerant carnival road and the plaintive recurring motif — Bregović's "Ederlezi" does for this film what Rota's theme did for that one. Amarcord (1973) gives the crowded grotesque-comic fresco. And The Godfather (1972) hands over the architecture whole: patriarch, corrupted initiate, climactic wedding-and-reckoning.
That last debt is the most interesting, because Kusturica installs the crime saga's engine and then removes its payoff. In the large-form gangster film the decisive act transforms the situation; Michael's massacre makes him Don. Perhan's reckoning changes nothing, costs him everything, and lands him back among the objects that float. The form is borrowed and voided.
A people that has to be invented
Deleuze's late argument about political cinema is that modern filmmakers can no longer address a people that already exists, because for the peoples who most need addressing, there isn't one — no state, no archive, no unified voice. What's left is fabulation: catching people in the act of legending themselves, making the story that will have to stand in for the nation. It is hard to think of a case that fits better than the Roma, and hard to overstate what it meant to hear Romani carried for a whole feature in 1988.
Which leaves the question the film can't close. "Ederlezi" went everywhere after this, and the authorship of that melody — traditional, pre-existing, credited to a composer — became a genuine dispute. A people with no state also has no standing to own what it made. The film is about children being sold; its most famous export is a song whose ownership is contested. I don't think Kusturica engineered that irony. I think the film sits inside a condition that produces it.
Watch it again for Perhan's hands. He almost never uses them. Then watch the ground — the water, the mud, the animals — because that's what the miracle has to lift itself out of, and what it always comes back down to.
Concepts in play
- movement of world — Perhan's telekinesis: he stays still and objects drift, the veil and the bride rise into the air — movement passes from the character, who can change nothing about his sister's illness or the thwarted courtship, to the world around him.
- onirosign / dream-image — Zafranović's editing integrates the reverie and levitation passages so that, per the dossier, 'the fantastic does not arrive as rupture but as an extension of the same continuous world' — dream circuits with no dated memory to anchor them.
- impulse-image — Ahmed's enterprise: Bora Todorović's mixture of paternal warmth and predation, an appetite running beneath the social surface, trafficking children into begging and theft rings.
- originary world — Šutka staged as 'a crowded, animal-filled, mud-and-water environment' with turkey and geese moving freely through human scenes, recurring rain and water — a savage substrate under the domestic milieu.
- derived milieu — The settlement's ordinary social surface — the healer grandmother's household, the courtship thwarted by class and family suspicion, the wedding — presented as the crust over that churning originary world.
- line of steepest slope / degradation — Perhan's irreversible descent from 'tender, gawky adolescent to hardened, then broken, young man,' ending in a violent fatalistic convergence of vengeance and self-destruction; the original title is 'House for Hanging.'
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — The St. George's Day riverside feast and the wedding set-pieces staged as 'elaborate choreographies of bodies, music, and motion' — ceremonial bodies carrying the film's duration rather than advancing its plot.
- the Open — Filač's deep, crowded compositions and roving camera threading through animals and extended families produce 'the sense of a world overspilling the edges of the image' — the frame never containing the whole it belongs to.
- free indirect discourse (political) — The magical realism operates as 'the interior register of characters whose material circumstances are otherwise merciless' — Perhan's inner vision and the film's own visual signature fused into one image, the Pasolinian construction Deleuze names.
- the people are missing — A stateless, dispersed people addressed through one of the earliest sustained uses of the Romani language in a feature, cast largely from within Roma communities rather than spoken for by an existing national cinema.
- fabulation / legending — Non-professional Roma performers directed toward 'sustained, credible behavior rather than trained performance,' shot in Šuto Orizari, producing a story that stands in for a people with no state to represent it.
- large-form action-image — The Godfather architecture of patriarch, corrupted initiate and climactic wedding-and-reckoning is imported wholesale, but the decisive act transforms nothing — vengeance and self-destruction converge instead of resolving the situation.