Also in the programme, but not screened on the day, Rotraut Pape Nicht nur Wasser/Not Just Water (25.47 mins Deutschland,1995)
Dragana Zarevac
Ocaj-Le Deuil / The Despair
Yugoslavia, 1996 (05.20)
Extracts from an Interview with the Artist at Ostranenie, November 1997.
I came across the material in this film accidentally. It was meant to be training material for the Yugoslav army and it was about the war in Croatia. My husband was asked to make some copies of it by some friends. He came home and told me he had seen a terrible thing and that I must see it. When I saw it, I couldn't sleep for weeks and I wanted to make some work about it. It is connected to my previous work in some ways and on the other hand it is not. I started as a performer of electronic music and with video about 11 years ago. I mostly deal with traditions. What I like are the common points between different cultures and traditions and I really am enchanted to see the same or similar cultural traces in different cultural traditions and that is mostly what I deal with and study. I also have an education as a singer but I have never been an opera singer or a traditional or classic performer. I always do the music for everything I do as a performer or on video. I make music, do the singing, record it etc.
The topics I have usually dealt with have been the topics of traditions as well and this is why this piece is rather different as well. It deals with a contemporary topic but it is also connected to the tradition because I use this traditional way of singing/ mourning there and I use the lyrics of medieval Serbian poetry. The lyrics are about the woman who saw her nine sons dead in the war with the Turks. It's a very powerful sad epic song. So I put these different elements together and cut out all the elements that would show the present moment or national belonging or particularity in the sense of situating it in this time and space. I just took elements which would show suffering - looking over the dead, mourning the dead. It's not just something I feel , it is a fact that mourning the dead is common to all traditions. We have always had two groups of people fighting over one piece of land and that is what wars are all about. That is what I also felt at this time. On the other hand, our war, there was a terrible suffering. I could not be in all the spots at the same moment, but I know Serbians were also killing Serbians, Muslims killing Muslims , Croatians killing Croatians, not only other nationalities. Everybody suffered and everybody committed crimes and that was terrible and too many people were in this situation. So this is the suffering and paint I wanted to express- it goes through the centuries but is found in the present day. The training film last 45 minutes and shows different pieces of film of people being terrorised, tortured and killed. Different people in different places but also it shows different funeral in totally another context and with another text accompanying it. So I took parts from this 45 minute documentary and took one scene from 1941-1942 of people from a concentration camp at Yasanitza in Croatia. This is the only image from the past. This is not to highlight the suffering of Croatia but a general historical image of suffering. It is a link across time, not a link with a place. You see the image vanishing and it is like any piece of land people fighting over a piece of land. I wanted more to make that connection through history so to say we have the same suffering repeated over the centuries. You would not know where it was from except that it was not from Africa.
The film emphasises the mourners but I wouldn't like to put a different value onto the different sexes but I do see the differences especially the different roles in the tradition. Men fight the wars women mourning and burying the men. It is another sort of general view of death, but in this film there is also a man mourning, a father. That is another archetype alongside the old women dressed in black and mourning.
Copyright © : N.Paradoxa,1997
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5, November 1997