Historical Narrative and the East-West Leitmotif in Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain and Dust (Critical Essay‪)‬

For the decade and a half since the fall of the Berlin wall, Balkan films (1) have presented to international audiences images of life and death--in cities under siege, in burned-down villages, in underground tunnels and cellars--amidst war and devastation, in what Dina Iordanova has termed a "cinema of flames." Given the conditions of the civil war, the depth of physical and spiritual wounds, and the fiscal strains if not outright deprivation in which recent films were made, the successes of the past decade have been remarkable. They include, most notably, the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film for Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land (2002), the Cannes Film Festival Palm d'Or for Emir Kusturica's Underground (1995), and the Venice Festival's Golden Lion for Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain (1994). But as the filmed inferno of the Yugoslav wars has brought cinematographies into prominence and won their authors international awards, it often confined them to a predictable range of anticipated representations. The Western recognition came at the price of misrepresenting or manipulating Balkan history (compounded in part by select Balkan artists' deliberate self-colonialization or self-marginallization), although not always in ideologically clear-cut ways. The Western embrace of the Balkan cinema, especially of Emir Kusturica's films, (2) occurred during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, the Western political and media construction of a "frozen image" of Balkan nationalism solidified (Todorova; Goldsworthy). A place of seemingly "un-European" brutality and destruction, the Balkans became a definitive pejorative term and "a powerful symbol conveniently located outside of historical time" (Todorova 7). Numerous authors of Balkan origin, but most prominently Maria Todorova, have provided in response detailed challenging accounts of the entangled multi-national histories of the region's "imagined communities" and their embeddedness in Europe (3-37).