settima

Roko

Moć [Power] (Vlatko Gilić, 1973)

Jul

25

Threading The Needle Day

Moć (1973)

One of the men, threading the needle. He's young, bearded, and shirtless and in what appears to be a cave or cellar. DP: Ljubomir Ivković.

Slobodan Ćirković aka Roko was (or is? I cannot find a lot of information online) a Serbian hypnotist capable of making people painlessly self-inflict torment. In Vlatko Gilić's short and rather disturbing Moć, Roko initiates a large group of men to thread a needle and slowly, going from him to the next to the other, connect the one thread through their bodies until all of them are stitched into one.

 

Strangely homoerotic and determinately violent, Moć feels deeply rooted in the #Serbia​n psyche. There's beauty and an unflinching élan-vital under the skin, a tenderness that comes with great, unmentionable #pain, love and death.