settima

serbia

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.

Nevinost bez zaštite [Innocence Unprotected] (Dušan Makavejev, 1968)

May

25

Tap Dance Day

Nevinost bez zaštite (1968)

A woman tap dancing on top of the raised barrel of a very large cannon in a circus tent. This scene, lifted from Цирк [Tsirk / Circus] (DPs: Grigoriy Aleksandrov & Isidor Simkov; DPs Vladimir Nilsen & Boris Petrov, 1936) inspired Dragoljub Aleksić – a trained blacksmith – to build his own cannon to shoot people out off. DPs: Branko Perak & Stevan Mišković.

Nevinost bez zaštite is a treasure trove. Of fantastic people, feats, footage, and genres. We sit down to watch #Serbia's first feature talkie, also named Nevinost bez zaštite (1943), and are joined by the people who created it.

“Dragoljub Son of our native land! Teeth and muscles, Tried and true All our hearts go out to you!”

While they speak, and occasionally burst out into song, about living in Yugoslavia under Nazi, then communist control, we meet Dragoljub!, the movie's lead with the jaws of steel. A man of great works, humanitarian and other, demonstrates his iron will. And while so, we all, starstruck and in love, sing:

“When they hammer your head, The skull is hard, And never cracks, Mother's little babe of steel! Dragoljub Son of our native land!”