Yvette Biró

Sarajevo, Back to School after War

There are thirteen of us in the narrow, almost empty library of the Film Academy. Future directors and screenwriters. I came to Sarajevo to work with them, trying to further their attempt to return to a normal life. Unmatched chairs, a makeshift table and broken windowframes make do for comfort. Huddled together within the damaged walls, they are ready to jump into work. We will be discussing and writing a lot, exercises and short scripts, all to reanimate their imaginations. After forty-five months of siege they now have to open themselves up, rethink everything, understand and reconsider what they have lived through, and also what they had wanted, had conceived of before. What may remain of the past? How to transform an unrelenting history into a story? How to express without empty rhetoric all that has been so endless, monstrous and yet so unbearably banal? No one could unerringly define the borderline between overused déja vu and honest confession, showing where the commonplace ends and authentic experience begins. We have to start from very far back, or, on the contrary, from as close as possible, to attack the mind in the most personal way. Let them not speak about the war or the recent situation but about their own selves. What I am asking is who are you. Not in factual data but in your desires, your emotions, your unique, appropriate universe. I encourage them to think or inhabit their fantasies in a totally free way, to launch themselves into their imagination. I invite them to play, to dress for a masquerade, so that they express themselves without fear or inhibition. And the manoeuvre works. Equipped with their note-pads and cheap pens, they leave the stifling room, install themselves on the rubble of bricks in the ruined courtyard, and start to write.

Yes, the school building, like the whole city, is in ruins. On the staircases and the corridors the debris, the smithereens of windows mixes with the dust from the slow, barely begun construction. Destruction and hesitant reconstruction vie with each other. Certainly, this reconstruction has nothing to do with the enthusiasm portrayed in socialist realist works. There is no shining happiness to be found. The vitality is uncertain, accompanied by faltering efforts. Suspicious expectation and lack of faith imbue what they are doing, if not the wry fatigue of the losers and the disenchanted. Even if there is window-panes and running water tomorrow, what will the new order of things be, after such murderous injuries and the victory of universal indifference? In the shadow of the plastic window-panes, marked with the initials of UNHCR, or sitting on the terraces of the crowded pavement cafes, sipping their daily one DM fixed price coffee, what kind of life, what chances for work and pleasure await these students? And since we are here among filmmakers, what kind of films will be needed, financed or expected to be made?

No way to be smart enough here. "Nobody bears witness for the witness," Paul Celan reminds us. Nobody could or should pretend to become the spokesman for their pain. It is up to them to speak up, in their most troubled and uncontrolled way, in a transfigurative form if necessary, to reveal what they have stored and repressed during those somber years.

[...]

Sarajevo, July 1996

Yvette Biró

is Professor at New York University's Graduate Film School. Her books include A rendetlenség rendje (The Order of Disorder, 1996) and, with Marie Genevičve Ripeau, Egy akt felöltöztetése (To Dress a Nude, 1996).