They've chained my heaven with wire//They're drawing schemes on my brain//They want another copy of themselves//To use it to retrieve lost time//But I'm not giving up on my ideals// And I will eat dreams instead of bread//I'm taking my happiness with me//It is a piece of free heaven (Sky, Električni orgazam)



We can hear the verses of the song Sky by the new wave punk band Električni orgazam in the most popular film by the Serbian director Miloš Miša Radivojević The Promising Boy (Dečko koji obećava, 1981), and they represent a clear image of the two great topics that the author deals with in his entire opus – which are, even if it may sound arrogant – freedom and love. The Zagreb retrospective of this excellent and artistically uncompromising film author consists of nine films and begins with the screening of the film How I Was Stolen by the Germans (Kako su me ukrali Nemci, 2011). This is his newest, sixteenth altogether, film and is an autobiographical drama as well as being the final part of his trilogy whose other parts include Awaking from the Dead (Buđenje iz mrtvih, 2005) and The Reject (Odbačen, 2007). All three films feature the brilliant actor Svetozar Cvetković, who also produced the last film in the trilogy.


Miloš Miša Radivojević is a TV and film director and professor at the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. He was born on November 3, 1939 in Čačak. He began to study philosophy, but in the end graduated from the College of Dramatic Arts in 1966, as the first film directing student from the class of Aleksandar Saša Petrović, with the medium-length feature film Adam i Eva 66. He began his film career as an assistant director to Puriša Đorđević, with whom he collaborated from 1961 to 1969.


The fact that Miša Radivojević, who has been involved in film for more than a half of a century, first studied philosophy is quite important. As the author explained himself: “In a way it was very attractive to be involved in pure philosophy; great teachers, Veljko Korać, Mićunović, Životić, Ljuba Tadić, young Mihailo Marković, excellent professors. Fantastic. We had the opportunity to listen to possibly the smartest and most brilliant people, who were in their dissident phase, at their peak. And that pure philosophy had an influence on me. It taught me a certain approach to things and in a way purified my confusing and insufficient knowledge and education, which one always brings with him after high school. We had great professors, whom we loved and followed, but in fact in its essence our school was catastrophic, we were lied to about history, about everything… And this is the outcome, my films are an outcome of illusions that I was exposed to as a young man. It is not that our professors were liars; they lied to us all and were hired under the condition that they teach according to programs which were mendacious.”


Radivojević's debut feature film was the film This Crazy World of Ours (Bube u glavi, 1970), starring Milja Vujanović, Dragan Nikolić and Slobodan Aligrudić. The excellent Milja, with authentic acting talents, was a former Miss Yugoslavia and became famous in Želimir Žilnik’s Rani radovi. She dominates the film, starring as a girl facing existential anxieties. Radivojević described her: “In essence, she knew very little about acting, but she had talent and looks! When I say ‘looks’, I don’t mean just her body. She had a strange emotion and a unique combination of a sort of a beauty and forlornness, freshness and abrasiveness. And that was crucial for the role in This Crazy World of Ours. And she did a great job with that role.” Also excellent was Dragan Nikolić, who starred as a boyfriend with whom she could not find happiness or peace. This film depicts the 1970’s irresistibly well and also reflects the influence of the French new wave with its open story structure, insisting on playful elements of acting, spontaneity and improvisation. The author talks about his influences: “The first infection, the most serious besides the genre films, was being exposed to two doses of films – the first the American noir film and the second the French new wave. It was very uplifting and encouraging, because up to then, if one looks at the history of film in, for example, the 1950’s, the picture was quite fuzzy. Of course, I do not mention the neorealist directors, who were close to us. We had Italy very close, so that was no news to us; we regarded it as something of our own. Especially the older neorelists - Fellini, Rossellini...”


The crucial driving motivation in the psychology of Radivojević’s characters is their lack of adjustment, isolation and rejection… A truth-loving, open-minded and talented individual is not useful to anyone - at least in the eyes of diligent law enforcement officers. Radivojević answers the question of whether a man should bow to the system: “A man must ignore worlds that have gone astray. I have no reason to live in such a world that has already missed its purpose.”


A slap in the face of hypocrisy


In that sense, Radivojević’s films are consistent, from his early works to the later ones, with strong film expression and an evident inclination towards a fragmented form that reflects a fragmented individual (especially evident in Bez, 1972, and Testament, 1975). Dragan Nikolić, Neda Arnerić, Dunja Lango, Snežana Lipkovska and Dušica Žegarac star in Bez, and Testament is dominated by the excellent Danilo Bata Stojković. We again encounter a misfit hero who literally rises from the dead after somebody shot him and who cannot speak – even though at the key moment in the film, while struggling in a muddy swamp, he tries to make a sound. As a voyeur, he peeks into other people’s lives, tries to find his way among them and make contact, but does not succeed. In the end, he goes into the wilderness but fails to find peace even there, and fails to express himself. A comment on one of the forums says: “Bata Stojković carried the burden of the entire film so well that I wanted to scream and applaud from delight. I have never seen him in such a wacky role in which it is hard to picture him. He did everything just by acting! Without a word! I was so touched!”


Radivojević’s film Breakdown (Kvar, 1978) is a story about a journalist Saša (Aleksandar Berček) with the student rebellion of the 1968 in the background. He is married into a nice bourgeois family that became Communist only because of the privileges that it granted them. Neda Arnerić is excellent in her portrayal of the young wife Nada, who cannot escape her father’s authority. In his TV news pieces, Saša finely and delicately exposes the system and its negativity, which brings him into conflict with his boss (Ljuba Tadić). Finally he gets suspended and goes on a short trip in search of his own identity. He meets a woman (Milena Dravić), a free-spirited misfit, similar to himself. This short affair gives him the strength to start over, so he gets a divorce and leaves the bourgeois cocoon he has been living in. Even though he has left his wife, she had left him much earlier, although not physically, a fact to which she admits in one of the final scenes, expressing her sadness that the two of them drifted apart so much. Thus, Breakdown is a critique of the worst part of socialist society - the so-called better families, from which some of the leaders came from because someone from such a family was always politically important and at the same time a servant of the horrible authoritarian government. Berček, Arnerić and Dravić created outstanding roles, and even though the film might be a bit shallow in its narration, it managed to preserve excellent author permeability. However, what makes this film an outstanding piece of art, and according to the humble opinion of the author of this text, an even better film than The Promising Boy, are the fine nuances of its characters. The audience could easily think that the author of the film is some wise old man who stopped dealing with absolutes, does not idealize his protagonist or demonize other characters. At the end of the film, it is comforting and smart to see that the hero does not know what to do with his newly acquired freedom, because it was easier to break away from his chains than to learn how to live alone and free.


Radivojević said that this is “one of his favorite films that he has done. One of the most fatal, one of the most truthful.” When it was first released in theaters, it was seen by 80 - 100,000 viewers, but when it played on TV, “a miracle happened” as Radivojević put it. “Letters started to arrive in the mail, There were protests, people wanted to lynch the editors on television…” It was a proof of the difference between theatre and TV audiences. Radivojević had a hard time, partly because of his political subversiveness, as well as because of the scene when Berček’s penis appears in a close-up. The reason for such a scene is that the hero experiences his first conscious irritation with the system and his environment on a symbolic level and as the phrase goes in Serbian “everyone climbed on his dick”, while in fact he has genital herpes. Radivojević commented this: “I had to sleep in parks and stay away from my house at times. I received terrible threats; it is unbelievable what happened after the screening of this film on public television. This was the time when families had only one TV and all the members watched films together. So, the children and the parents were ashamed, and I think it is good that the film provoked it. Of course there was a close-up shot of a penis. I was always frustrated by the hypocrisy in films; the hero sees something but the director and the producer regard the viewers as too immature to see the same and merely describe it euphemistically. As if it is too horrible to see it ourselves. This was my way of being subversive, my rebellion, and my slap in the face of a bourgeois viewer, of which Yugoslavia was full.”


Radivojević’s cult film The Promising Boy (Dečko koji obećava, 1981) is in a way a logical sequel to Breakdown. In it we follow an even stronger, louder and more radical breakaway from all kinds of boundaries – family, love and career… It is a story about a young student of medicine, Slobodan Milošević (Aleksandar Berček), a man from a good and successful family. He is dating a girl from the same milieu but his life changes suddenly after he has an affair with a Swiss woman, when his own girlfriend Maša (Dara Džokić) hits him over the head with an oar. Radivojević likes these kinds of metaphors – blows on the head or penis diseases – that point to the mental states of his heroes as well as the society as a whole. Slobodan finds refuge in the world of music – the combination of new wave and punk – apart from listening to soundtracks by bands such as Idoli, Azra, Električni orgazam, Pekinška patka, Šarlo Akrobata throughout the entire film, we also watch Koja as Slobodan’s musical buddy. Naturally, he soon suffers a misfortune in the musical world and returns to the shelter of his former life, gets married… and in the end, literally bangs his head against the wall from horror. One cannot disregard the almost prophetic coincidence that the main character’s name is Slobodan Milošević. Nebojša Pajkić (co-screenwriter) wrote the lyrics for the song “Free, free, I want to be free“, a song that dominates the entire film and that is so brilliantly performed by Berček. At one point in the film, the hero gets arrested by the police and has to state his first and last name… The author commented this coincidence: “Like all directors, I did not give my hero his name by accident. My mother’s maiden name is Milošević! My grandfather was Miloš Milošević, he was a communist from Vukovar and I have a serious relationship with him.” This grandfather appears in the director’s other film Living Like the Rest of Us (Živeti kao sav normalan svet), as well as in his last film, How I Was Stolen by the Germans. Radivojević continues: “He was a striking man but unfortunately got killed. He was the wonderful kind of a leftist, the pre-war sort of an idealist, and altogether a completely different kind of a communist. So when these communists arrived and started to kill, he was murdered in 1945 while telling them that they were worse bums than the ones before them. As a communist, instead of becoming the man in charge, becoming a mayor, he was murdered and my family again became the opposition and had to struggle. These were the kind of people who did not want to abandon the truth for anything in this world. There was no trade-off with them, so in that sense my grandfather was my idol. As regards the name in the film The Promising Boy, I absolutely would not change it. I am interested in my grandfather, not in Slobodan Milošević!”


Living Like the Rest of Us (1982) actually takes another step further in comparison to The Promising Boy – even though its hero Radoš (Svetislav Goncić) studies classical music and is not interested in subversive rock’n’roll. Radoš is a nonconformist, an idealistic young man from the provinces. At the academy in Belgrade he meets snobs, unproductive authors and rigid formalists who refuse and are not able to accept him for who he is. The girl Radoš falls in love with is played by the genius Sonja Savić, with unbelievable spontaneity and authentic film bearing. She was an actress who shone, and against whom all other actors seem bleak and unconvincing. Sonja Savić – who unfortunately passed away in 2008 after an overdose – was not just a great actress but also a star in the classic meaning of the term. This was even more evident in the Una, another film by Radivojević based on the novel by Momo Kapor. Regardless of whether she starred in a drama or a carefree comedy, Savić was always a hundred percent “there”, ready to bear herself completely and give her best, as if it was her last role and the last chance for self-expression.


In the mid-1990’s Radivojević directed the film Ni na nebu, ni na zemlji (1994), a story about three thirty-year old friends living in Belgrade. Each of them is trying to find his way and meaning in life: an unemployed architect works on the black market, another is a smuggler and the third, a professor of literature, survives by gambling. Each experiences an unpredictable destiny. The main actors are Svetozar Cvetković, Colorna Maljević, Dragan Nikolić, Zoran Cvijanović, and the screenplay was written by Dušan Jelić.


After this film, Radivojević did not make a feature film for ten years, and then returned with a symbolic title - Awaking from the Dead (Buđenje iz mrtvih, 2004) starring Ljuba Tadić and again Svetozar Cvetković – who was not only an actor, and a sort of a trade mark of the second part of Radivojevićs opus, but also his closest partner and producer of the director’s films, because he truly believed in Radivojević and his vision of the world. Radivojević wrote the screenplay for this film himself and it tells of the problems tormenting Serbian society (not just Serbians) and about how the conflict between fathers and sons is carried down through generations.


Awaking from the Dead is the sort of film in which the author wants to say too much with too much intensity. Therefore, while the film is brave and honest in its intentions, in practice it turned out to be weaker than Radivojević's best works. The story does not have a coherent plot – it takes place during the NATO bombing in Belgrade and in a small town in late March 1999. Forty-year old Miki (Cvetković), an unsuccessful writer, is a disillusioned professor at the art academy and a discouraged democrat and columnist who got fired from the daily newspaper. He gets killed, but soon comes back from the dead and within 48 hours tries to do everything he has not managed to do for himself or the community while he was alive. The characters are not “alive” but rather metaphors restored to life, the thesis seems to be more powerful than the emotion and the story itself, and the film structure is quite fragmented.


Afterwards he directed the film The Reject (Odbačen, 2007), in which depression and despair provide the framework for the story. The way out is nowhere to be seen, but the struggle continues! The screenplay was again written by Radivojević, and Svetozar Cvetković plays the hero. Serbian critics received this film warmly and praised its film literacy as well as the fact that the director managed to make a film with such a small budget. Radivojević described his relationship with Cvetković and other actors in general: “My authorship feeds on excellent actors and personalities. Cvetković is a very disciplined actor and sometimes he even goes against himself in order to satisfy my demands!” Indeed, Radivojević always had a way of choosing his actors well and he liked working with the same people – Dragan Nikolić, Aleksandar Berček, Bata Stojković…. As he himself said: “the only one [he] did not manage to collaborate again with was Šerbedžija…” He also worked with some great actresses in his films: the late Sonja Savić, Milena Dravić, Dušica Žegarac, Neda Arnerić, and now Jelena Đokić. The author commented: “I know from whom I can expect the most, to give their full potential. In that sense, Cvetković is an essential part of this last cycle of four films in which he became sort of my alter ego. He plays the essential role in these films, a depressive, lost and often not very charming or magnetic hero, who attracts mostly trouble and wears the halo of a loser, lost in time and space. That is a very ungrateful role. So you simply have a miserable guy, sort of a misanthrope, and a frustrated and unhappy man. In his essence, he is not a bad man, behind the exterior there hides another person and I think Cvele did a great job in portraying what is essentially me.”


In The Reject, the second part of the trilogy, he does so directly in the final part, the film How I Was Stolen by the Germans (2011). After the heavy Awaking from the Dead, Radivojević has Cvetković play another misfit whose micro-world is in decay in The Reject – this time he is a man ground up and rejected by the corporate world.


Unlike Awaking from the Dead, in which Cvetković's character gets even with his father, in The Reject Cvetković, as if hedonistically playful, but in fact already rejected and fired from his position as a highly positioned bank officer, has only himself to get even with – the most painful thing that can happen to a hero. In Radivojević’s films it is always in fact the same character – Berček’s in The Promising Boy, or the journalist in Breakdown, a misfit and a rebel in the world of yes-men. Nevertheless, he lacks a vision that could bring him closer to a higher quality life and destiny. The author’s handwriting is more playful in The Reject while the maturity and wisdom of the position of an artist with great life experience is reflected in the author’s treatment of the topic - faith in the transformation of the soul exists even when it is somewhat unrealistic to expect it. We do not require a banal and direct comparison to everyday life to understand Cvetković’s rejection, his voyage au bout de la nuit. An artistic, radically authorial approach enabled Radivojević to create a wonderful panoply of losers, characters in search of a minimal meaning and happiness, among whom we encounter a daughter who, because of her need to be loved, wants to become a whore when she grows up, a botox-riddled ex-wife in the arms of her female lover, a philanthropic secretary, a prostitute wanting to be kissed, and others. In short, it is a world of live people whom the author understands even though the world that he depicts is often irrational and devoid of all humanity. Svetozar Cvetković, who indeed carries the entire trilogy as the main actor, comments on the support of the environment: “There is no systematic success in our cinema. We simply cannot bear the fact that someone else is successful and unfortunately experience more joy when someone fails as an author rather than getting praise from the critics. This is a loathsome environment.”


The film How I Was Stolen by the Germans is not just the final part of the trilogy but alos a completely autobiographical piece of work. It is a mature and poetic film, probably Radivojević’s best film and definitely a great success, not just at festivals and among informed audiences and critics, but also with the general public, which for an author unwilling to compromise, is quite a compliment. In most of his films, Radivojević dealt with the (im)possibility of freedom, while in this film his main topic is love. This is an author whose maturity has produced the best work, because he is willing to forgive, he is not angry anymore, yelling at the world or those who have hurt him or loved him.


How I Was Stolen by the Germans tells the story about Miša Radivojević’s childhood. At first we follow a boy, Aleks, and later the grown up writer and screenwriter played by Svetozar Cvetković who has retreated to a small seaside town and does not want any contact with the world. He talks about his childhood to a girl – who might be his own daughter – whom he is driving to an orphanage, after his former girlfriend brought her to him with the request to take care of her for a while. But, during the drive and his story in which he reminisces about his own childhood and loneliness that he then experienced, Aleks decides to adopt the girl. In flashbacks, intersected with Aleks’s serious talk as a grown up (that is hardly understandable by a child any yet clearly emotional), we learn about a relationship that developed between a five-year old boy and the officer of the Third Reich during the occupation in WWII. Aleks felt abandoned as a boy because his mother was always busy with her work in the communist resistance and his father, who never really lived with them, was away fighting with Partisans. So, a German officer, thrown into a war that he never wanted and now living in the boy’s family house, becomes the only person who offers the boy any love and affection.



Against historical logic


Radivojević’s intimate film is a story about an abandoned boy who never recovered from the rejection that he experienced as a child, and whose family members, especially the mother, were always busy with the “international revolution”. Emotional pictures of childhood and the perspective of a child in a way vaccinated the author from being overly ideological, because in the world of emotional reminiscing, ideology is not crucial. “My view as a child is not rational; it is emotional, and ostensible: I had only memories at my disposal. The rational aspect was acquired later by inquiring who the German was, when he came to our house and so forth. I remember all the people and events really well. But I didn’t know what war was, I didn’t know that I was harmed by being neglected because my parents were too engaged in changing the world, taking part in the revolution, anti-fascism; these are all thing that I realized later. Working on this film, neither I nor my collaborators allowed any historical ideology to enter into it. The historical series of events and the so-called historical testimonies are full of lies, and I decided to rely on emotions. This is what I saw. A child cannot lie. And you can only believe me that I did not manipulate memories, so these are all my memories and then there are many mistakes in how these memories are explained later,” says Radivojević.


This means that Aleks or the author himself is the so-called unreliable narrator and that provides one of the greatest values of this film, the fact that the author allows that his position is not absolute. Radivojević explains: “On the other hand, there is the hurting of myself; I experienced a sort of a purgatory and do not depict myself as a perfect child. What I am trying to do is express some fundamental emotional truth, only what I felt. In the film, Cvele often talks about people around him, about the mother, grandfather, grandmother, sisters, brothers, uncles in one way, when in fact he is not saying correct things. That is, he does not have the right assessment, because we have the picture that I remember and that cannot lie. So often the picture and his verbal account are in conflict. That is the basic and most complicated endeavor in this film – for him to say his truth and what he feels. That is what I feel as a grown up, speaking about my parents, my experiences and my society. And the picture shows that it is not really so! And that maybe he is wrong, and that he has prejudices about these people! So that is what is wonderful about this film. He talks about his mother in a bad way, in her essence, but she is in essence a wonderful character. I mean, he is not a man who arbiters, that is him, that is me in fact.”


Also, in How I Was Stolen by the Germans the author comes to grips with the relationship of the two most important topics of his entire opus: love and freedom. Radivojević says: “Love is taking hostages, love is passion, love is a calculation in which you have to make compromises; when you love you do not make decisions only for yourself. Freedom implies something different. Freedom is within you, it most personal. Choosing freedom, your universe is complete and, finally, why would it, damn it, even matter whether you are happy or unhappy if you are free.” From Tolstoy we know that no great art has ever come from a happy family, but regardless of his accounts, it is clearer than ever before from this film that the strongest yearnings in life are for love and acceptance. Maybe they are on the other side of freedom, but without them an artist cannot even feel a glimpse of happiness. So, for the author there are no alternative freedoms.


We hope to see more films from Radivojević, while he says of himself: “It is too late for fame for me. I made my point through some kind of a subversive art, I squeezed through and for me the biggest success is that I am still alive and managed to make sixteen films. I think they will be solid witnesses.” (Alemka Lisinski)