The Filmmaker as Historian, Above and Below Ground - Emir Kusturica and the Narratives of Yugoslav History.

When the Bosnian director Emir Kusturica's film Underground was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1995 a number of critics claimed that the film was propaganda for Miloševic's Serbia. Kusturica, in contrast, describes the film as an obituary for the former Yugoslavia. This paper examines the way in which Kusturica has used the metaphor of the Underground to shed a parodic light on the official narrative of Yugoslav history and to offer its place a version of the nation's past that highlights the spirit of ordinary Yugoslavs as they toiled, however misguidedly, in the basement of the bunker of state communism. I examine the foundation myths of Yugoslavia and argue that within the three sets of contemporary debates about ex-Yugoslavia and the war, Kusturica's film most appropriately fits within a discourse on collective memory and the politics of remembering and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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