Kusturica responded to the Serbian film liberal who was opposed to the monument from the Russian master
Liberal Serbian film director Goran Marković called the monument to the founder of Serbian statehood Stefan Nemanja by Russian sculptor Alexander Rukovišnikov, which is going to be installed in Belgrade, a “tasteless pile”.
In response, the famous Serbian director and musician Emir Kusturica asked his colleague to stop fighting “the malignant Russian influence.”
The reconstructed Sava Square, where it is planned to install a 23-meter monument to Stefan Nemanja, should become the largest pedestrian area in Belgrade: its area will be 12 thousand square meters.
Project of the monument to Stefan Nemanja on Sava Square in Belgrade.
The monument itself, made by the famous Russian sculptor, has already arrived in Serbia from Moscow. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic personally plans to open the new square and monument.
At the same time, the project caused negative responses among Serbian pro-Western liberals, among whom was director Goran Markovic, who wrote an open letter to the jury member who approved the project, his colleague Emir Kusturica.
“I don’t understand how you aren’t disgusted by that 23-meter-high pile of meaningless cast iron?” Markovich wrote. – And why didn’t you run away from the jury that will bring this pile of bad taste to the former station. You yourself know that any dictatorship prefers to put pressure on the little man in this way. From the times of Nazism, when muscular men with eyes to a bright future were exhibited, to the gems of socialist realism, such as the 24-meter high Stalin monument in Stalingrad (Volgograd), which at that time was the largest monument in the world….
There are hundreds of other similar examples of delusions of grandeur... I'm sure you don't like what you chose, but at least say it loud and clear. Otherwise, where will your soul go?”
Emir Kusturica's response to his liberal colleague was no less harsh.
“You are asking me to morally distance myself from the monument, and from the author who created the monument to Lennon in New York, the Russian Tsar in Moscow, and there is no point in listing all the beauty that the Russian artist and academician Alexander Rukavishnikov installed around the world. If I were asked to publicly urge you to change something, I would insist that you stop fighting “malign Russian influence”….
Instead, I urge you to focus on the suffering of Christians in Kosovo and Metohija and Montenegro. Not only because of Christian culture, but also because of secular civil politics, which, unlike me, you are engaged in... It is not good when an atheist mentions the soul in the context of "where will my soul be" if I do not distance myself from The jury's decision, which supposedly will destroy Belgrade, is the arbitrariness of a director whose creative baggage has dried up, who has avoided politics in films for years. Now politics has become your destiny...,” the director urged.
At the same time, he notes that Markovich hardly believes in the immortality of the soul, since at one time he made a film about the eminence grise of the color revolutions, Bernard-Henri Lévy, who ideologically served the Afghan Mujahideen against the USSR, the Bosniak and Kosovo separatists in their fight against the Serbs, and the Georgian aggression against South Ossetia, the Syrian and Libyan opposition, the Maidan in Ukraine, “political violence in Russia” and the current Belarusian protests.
“A person who makes a film about Bernard Levy loses his license as an artist, and has no right to formulate moral standards, let alone take an interest in the fate of someone's soul and worry about its movement. So, your cry for my soul was a recognition of the emptiness in which one soulless type lives,” concludes Kustrica.
Alexander Rukovshnikov near a fragment of the monument to Stefan Nemana.
Goran Markovic is a Serbian film director who has received recognition in Europe and around the world, having repeatedly become a prize-winner at prestigious film forums. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, he made mainly politically engaged works in the Western liberal spirit, such as “Tito and I” (a satire on socialist Yugoslavia), “Cordon” (which glorified the protests against Milosevic) and “Tournai” (a film in which the Serbs are exposed as the main culprits war in Yugoslavia).
Goran Markovic.
English version :: Read in English Kusturica responded to a Serbian film liberal who opposed the Russian master's monument