Please note; this essay was written for a history department and, with that in mind, there was an assumption of complete unfamiliarity with cinematic analysis. As a result it covers some ground which is probably familiar to you. However, rather than interrupt the flow of the essay by removing such material, I have decided to leave it in. It never hurts to have a refresher.

One may even speak of a culture, in which senseless killing and violence now belong to the Serbs’ sense of themselves: as a wounded people that keep on wounding themselves, and even their best friends and neighbours. We can apply Mark Seltzer’s notion of America’s “wound culture” to modern Serbia. The wound stands paradigmatically as a metaphor for a culture that is traumatized by endless war and everyday violence, and morbidly obsessed with it.

-Igor Krstic, Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. p. 101

The social and psychological impact of genocide on a people is undeniable. In the wake of such a catastrophic event, the mind must attempt to process the hows and whys of what has happened and find a way to live in the aftermath of those events. The pain and suffering of the genocide become a part of the cultural identity of both victims and perpetrators and the evidence of this newfound component of their cultural identity trickles down through all levels of society. An excellent example is the media which a culture produces in the wake of genocide. The artists who create these creative works are not any more or less affected by the genocide than any other members of society and, deliberately or subconsciously, their works of art will reflect the changes that have occurred in the wake of genocide or other devastating cultural event. In this paper we use Srdan Dragojevic’s Rane(which translates as “The Wounds”) as a case study to explore the role of film and media in understanding the advent and consequences of genocide to a people. Due to the restriction of space, we will assume that the reader has a general familiarity with the Bosnian genocide, though all information pertinent to the examples given from the film will be included. While, optimally, we would spend a thousand words on both the Bosnian genocide and critical film theory, this would prevent us from achieving the level of analysis required to answer the question. We will also assume that readers have seen Rane and a copy has been included with this submission. Let us begin with a short summary of the interpretive methods we will use to analyse Rane.

The first thing we must acknowledge, when critically examining a film, is that it is completely constructed, an artifice which has been created through an enormous process of deliberation and arrangement. Each component of a film has been placed there to the exclusion of thousands of other possible choices. From the soundtrack to the lighting, the character names to what appears in any given shot, every detail has been deliberately placed before us on the screen. In the academic jargon of cinema studies, this construction is referred to as mise en scene. This stems from a French phrase which literally means “putting into the scene” and was first applied to the practice of directing plays. It was adopted by film scholars to describe the director’s control over what appears in the film frame. Secondly, we must briefly outline a key concept in cinema studies, that of the auteur. Like photography, when film first appeared, it was considered too industrial to be an artistic endeavour.  It used machinery to reproduce an image and studios mass produced films for public consumption. As a result, film makers were relegated to the category of technicians, rather than artists. At the very least, particularly in France, a distinction was drawn between commercial film (typically American) and the European Art Film movement. This changed in the mid-1950s, when a group of young French filmmakers published a number of articles in Cashiers du Cinema, a prominent French film journal, which asserted the idea of the film director as artist. They argued that, of all the hundreds of people who contributed to a film, the director had the most broad-reaching control and, thus, authorial voice. They claimed that, over the career of particular directors, we can see certain trends or preoccupations in their films and it is these directors that can truly be considered artists or auteurs. It is very important that we bear these two concepts in mind because, in our analysis of Rane, we will be regarding Srdan Dragojevic as an auteur and referring to his manipulation of mise en scene to educate his audience about the Bosnian Genocide. Now, without further delay, we will examine what we can learn from Rane about the cultural legacy and impact of the Bosnian Genocide on the Serbian and Croatian people.

At its heart, Rane is a film about what happens to a generation of young men who are disconnected from their cultural inheritance of masculinity and community, and the new cultural practices which they introduce to replace those which have been lost. Using the classic structure of a Hollywood Film Noir (two friends, torn apart by a femme fatal and a corrupt world) Rane presents us with a picture of progressive social and economic deterioration in Serbia between 1991 and 1996. It follows the descent of two young Serbian boys, Pinki and Svaba (which loosely translates to ‘Kraut’) into the expansive criminal underground which arose in Serbia during the Yugoslav wars. The film is almost obsessive in its exploration of the disappearance of Serbian traditional folk culture and its replacement with kitsch trash culture and, particularly among young men, wound culture. We will begin by exploring the idea of the rise of trash culture in Serbia during the 1990s, we will then explore the idea of wound culture.

Over the course of any protracted conflict a great number of people die. When we add genocide to the mix, the number greatly increases. Let us consider for a moment the demographic most likely to engage in, and die as a result of, warfare. On both sides of a conflict it is the 18 to 30 year old males who fight. In the case of Serbia, not only did many men die during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, many had died during the Yugoslav People’s Liberation War (which occurred during World War II in Yugoslavia). The natural effect of this was that many young people growing up in Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s did not have fathers or grandfathers from whom they could inherit their cultural rites of passage, celebrations or religious practices. Even when these rites or events were observed, such an observation became a pale, superficial imitation of the original practice. The result is the amalgamation of traditional Eastern European folklore with popular culture which fills the void left from the severed familial link to the original beliefs and practices of the culture. This cultural heritage is replaced by a “trash culture” which is “replete with signs, commodities and symbols of kitsch, camp and trash” (Krstic, 98). We can see countless examples and representations of this trash culture in Rane, in fact the mise en scene is relentless in its depiction of the new Serbian culture of the 1990s.

The most immediate example of trash culture presented to the viewer in Rane is the blaring Turbofolk soundtrack which assaults the audience during the opening credits and continues as a prominent feature of the film’s soundtrack. Dutch anthropologist, Mathijs van de Port describes Turbofolk as an amalgamation of text, vision and music which draws upon the traditional and modern. Classic folk melodies are used to sing about contemporary topics such as “foreign currency, weekend romances, tractors and bio-energy” (Mathijs van de Port, 57). The traditional meanings and significance of the songs are lost, discarded in favour of the trappings of modern, commercial life. There are several clues which suggest to us that Turbofolk serves a greater function than merely acting as a soundtrack or audio context for the film. Significantly, if we look to Kure (which is an affectionate shortening of a Serbian name, the loose equivalent to “Dickie” or “Sammy”) and Suzana (Pinki and Svaba’s first mentors in the ways of the Serbian criminal underground) we find stellar examples of Turbofolk culture. Suzana herself is a Turbofolk singer and both her and Kure surround themselves with the material symbols of trash culture; gold crucifix pendants, a BMW and brand clothing and shoes. Kure wears a crucifix, but doesn’t attend church or express any faith in the film. The crucifix has ceased to be a symbol of Christianity and become a symbol of Serbian cultural heritage. Similarly, while shooting heroin Kure demands that Pinki and Svaba sing Serbian folk songs not because he believes in the message of the songs, but because (like his crucifix) they are one of the handful of things he has to connect him to his culture.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find Svaba’s grandmother who lives in an urban apartment, surrounded by chickens and living in the glow of her television screen. Fed copious amounts of narcotics by her grandson, she exists in a twilight world in which the modern and traditional merge, where she recounts stories of the massacres of the Second World War in a fairy tale narrative format. With the exception of her grandson, Svaba, all of her family are dead (or at least absent) and her only connection to the world is through the trash culture lens of her grandson and her television. We can see from this that Rane presents us with a society which is experiencing a cultural vaccum, which is in part being filled by trash culture. Trash culture, however, is not the only thing which fills this void nor is the primary concern of the film. There is a darker consequence to the cultural void left by the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide; Wound Culture.

From the very first scene of Rane, Dragojevic presents us with a world dripping with violence and the after effects of violence. This violence and violent culture is often intimately paired with the images of trash culture which we discussed above. For example, the film begins in (and spends much of its time in) a graveyard, which houses both graves and the rusted chassis of old cars and buses. This amalgamation of scrap-yard and graveyard images suggests a close link between the mass-production and consumption of trash culture and death. Similarly, while Kure does push-ups and watches Puls Asfalta (a television show in the film in which criminals are idolized and interviewed) we can see an image of the Last Supper in the background, another marriage of the religious or spiritual simulacra of trash culture and the death and violent crime which were rife in 1990s Serbia. The very first image we see in the film is a crucifix pendant (complete with crucified Christ figure) which is immediately paired with the introduction of the main character, Pinki, who is nursing what appear to be grievous gunshot wounds. Repeatedly, Dragojevic pairs the cultural vacuum of trash culture with death, injury and pain. Perhaps the ultimate instance of this pairing occurs in a scene in which Kure engages in a titanic brawl (in which he wields an entire spit roasted pig as a bizarre bludgeoning weapon) in the club in which Suzana works, while she weeps and sing a Turbofolk song as the fight rages beneath her. While the mise en scene of Rane contains an abundant amount of pairings between the violent and the kitsch, suggesting a cultural centrality of violence in 1990s Serbia, we need not limit ourselves to the subtleties of mise en scene to understand the film’s message about Serbian wound culture; we need only look to the film’s protagonists, Pinki and Svaba.

From the start of the film, we know that violence, and in particular wounds, are central to the film. When we are introduced to Pinki and Svaba they are in a car, driving through the tumultuous anti-Milosevic protests of 1996, Pinki nursing some grievous wounds. The violent and frenetic aesthetic of the riots (much of the footage we see of them is archival) suggests a general violence and destabilization in the characters’ environment, while Pinki’s wounds (and the casual way in which he relates to them) firmly grounds that violent aesthetic in the realm of the personal. We then flashback to the previously mentioned graveyard / scrapyard in which Pinki and Svaba play Serbs vs Croats (essentially cowboys and Indians) with their friend Dijabola. Teams are not chosen, but are allocated based on the ethnicity of the boys fathers, this means that Pinki and Svaba default to Serb and Dijabola defaults to Croatian. We know from the dialogue that these boys have grown up together and consider one another friends, but now one of the ways in which they ritually relate to one another is to throw rocks at each other because of their ethnic differences. When Dijabola cries and asserts that he isn’t a Croat, Svaba replies “Serbs don’t cry like pussies”. This may seem like an inconsequential moment, which could be attributed to male adolescence, but in the context of the ethnically motivated stoning of Dijabola and the arbitrary system of categorization we are given a window into the bizarre nature of the Yugoslav wars. These boys have no reason to hurt one another, but they do, ritualistically, as if it were expected.

Earlier, when discussing the rise of trash culture, we noted that one of the central factors in creating this cultural vacuum is the absence of paternal figures and this is central, perhaps even more so, to the rise of wound culture. As mentioned above, Svaba’s parents are completely absent and he lives with his grandmother in an urban apartment, completely devoid of a father figure. Pinki lives with his parents and, while he has a father, he’s somewhat of a buffoon. While Pinki loves his father it is clear that he does not respect him however, unlike Svaba, he at least has a male role-model. Svaba substitutes his absent father with one of the only prominent figures of masculinity in the neighbourhood, Kure. Kure never fought for any cause and places little or no worth in traditional Serbian culture. As we have described earlier, Kure is the poster child for trash culture and a gangster. Svaba introduces Pinki to Kure and the two begin to work for him, dealing drugs. Svaba is the most loyal and zealous to Kure’s lifestyle and philosophy. He eagerly engages in violent crime and Kure’s initiation ceremonies (such as running headlong into Kure’s fist repeatedly as a measure of withstanding pain) while Pinki remains distant. This resistance to the violent lifestyle and philosophy of Kure and Svaba abruptly ends when Pinki’s father kills himself. He joins Svaba in a spiralling descent into drugs and violent crime, and even explicitly states “Torture helped me forget my stupid dead father”. The two become obsessed with being gangsters, not with the profits of crime, but the status of it. Ultimately, however, there is no greater example of Wound Culture and the results of a cultural vacuum from a war than the chilling final scene of the film.

After a dispute over a lover Svaba shoots Pinki five times. Pinki prematurely leaves hospital, finds Svaba and the two travel to the graveyard to complete an unspoken pact. There is no malice or hatred between the two boys, just an understanding that in order to level the score, Pinki must shoot Svaba five times. They even stop at a pharmacist to get bandages and gauze so that Svaba won’t bleed to death. For these boys this is the only way to resolve the situation. Dijabola arrives with an automatic weapon and, in a grim parody of the opening scene the boys play out their Serbian vs Croatian game, this time with bullets instead of rocks. The result is a harsh condemnation of the Milosevic regime and its effects on subsequent generations, particularly the young men of those generations.

To conclude we can see, even from this brief overview that Dragojevic’s Rane is completely fixated on the cultural devastation which occurred as a result of the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide. More than exploiting a moment in history for dramatic effect, Dragojecic shows us the consequences of the loss of patriarchs from a traditionally patriarchal society. We can see that when Serbia lost its connection to its traditional, cultural heritage a cultural vacuum was created, which was filled with trash culture and wound culture and Dragojevic is a true auteur in the sense that he has a clear agenda to educate people about post-Tito Serbia. At every moment he meticulously manipulates the mise en scene of his film to communicate the trappings of trash and wound culture. There was, unfortunately, much we did not have space to cover and this author encourages you, and anyone interested in the cultural impact of the Yugoslav wars, to look closely at Rane. It is a powerful and convincing model for the things we can learn from fictional films which explore historical events.

Bibliography and Further Reading List

• Benson, L. Yugoslavia: A concise history. Palgrave MacMillan. London: UK. 2002.
• Bordwell, D. & Thompson K. Film Art: An Introduction, 7^th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York: New York. 2004.
• Gabrino, J. Beyond the Body Count: Moderating the effects of war on children. In R. Lerner (ed) Handbook of Applied Developmental Science. Volume 2. Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks: California. 2003.
• Krstic, I. Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. In Horton, A. (ed) The Central Europe Review: The Celluloid Tinderbox. www.ce-review.org published 2000. Viewed on 5/10/2009.
• Leavitt, L. & Fox, N. The Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale: New Jersey. 1993
• Mcleod, M. Saw and spectre of 9/11 in contemporary horror. Published 10/11/2008 www.pleasantfluff.com/saw viewed on 10/10/2009.
• Norwell-Smith, G. (ed) The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1^st edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford: New York. 1996.
• Rane, Srdan Dragojevic (dir), Performances: Dusan Pekic & Milan Maric. DVD. First Run Features. 2000.
• Van de Port, M. Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation in a Serbian Town. Amsterdam, 1998.

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