From the old town of Belgrade, you can see the USCE Tower in the new city, and the one on the right was once the office building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which had been bombed by NATO. (Edamame/Photo)
In September 2019, I sent this message to a Serbian documentary filmmaker named Mila Turajli in a Facebook text message:
Dear Mira,
Greetings from Northern California. I am a travel writer and film fan. I was born in Shanghai and now live in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2011, I watched your documentary Film "Cinematography" at the 54th International Film Festival in San Francisco, which impressed me, as did avala Film, the former Yugoslav film studio mentioned in the film.
When I finally came to Belgrade for the first time last week, which to me was more like a city that existed in the film, the first thing I wanted to know was: "Is avala Film Studio still there?" "Very fortunately, on the last day of my visit to Belgrade, I was able to come to the Avala Film Studios. For me, it was a dream come true. I just want to write to tell you how much I like your work.
In fact, your documentary made Avala Studios the most important reason I wanted to visit Belgrade! As a Chinese kid who grew up watching Yugoslav World War II guerrilla war films, it was a very special and nostalgic reason, and it reminded me of the screen time I spent with my brother in front of a nine-inch-sized "Hero" brand black-and-white TELEVISION. We went out of our way to line up: "You see, what do these bridge arches look like?" "Like ... buttocks. Oh, like, hips! Mr. Colonel..." We would also wear triangular hats of the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army, made of newspapers, each occupying a head of the bed, hiding behind a "trench" stacked with pillows, throwing grenades made of slippers at each other, and making all kinds of exaggerated explosions in our mouths to spend the long holidays.
Standing in the costume and prop warehouse of the Avala Film Factory, the long and vague childhood enthusiasm is transformed into the embodiment of the vicissitudes in front of the eyes, and the sense of surreal interlacing of time and space is indescribable. Thanks to the armor of those medieval fighters, the boots of Serbian soldiers in World War I, and the dust on the hats of the Partisans of World War II, if it were not for the smell of dust, I am afraid I would be dreaming. Thank you again for recording and preserving those past times with your heart.
It was a greeting that was eight years late. And this time, Director Turalic didn't make me wait too long. Four hours later, I received a warm reply from her, and she was excited by the sound of her voice in the vast sea of people.
At the Avala Film Studio, the author holds a nameplate of Tito's hometown name. (Edamame photo/photo)
<h3>Hollywood, Eastern Europe</h3>
On May 2, 2011, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the day bin Laden was killed, I finished watching my debut as a Serbian documentary director called Cinematism. Director Tularic, then 32, brought it to the festival.
In 1946, Marshal Tito, then President and Prime Minister of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, founded the Avara Film Studio, the second largest film studio in Europe, and he wanted to build an Eastern European Hollywood in Belgrade. In addition to building Yugoslavia into the richest country in the socialist camp in Eastern Europe, the political strongman also wanted to leave a unique page in the history of world cinema: Belgrade, a city that had experienced 115 battles and was razed 44 times, to create a new film genre: Partisan Film.
In our limited childhood cinematic environment, Yugoslav films are under the impression that the quality assurance of the so-called "war films", as long as Bata Zhivoynovach, who plays Walter, appears, it is to play the triumphant song of victory for the victory of the battle, so that when I was young, I had the illusion that world war II was won by these guerrillas under the leadership of "Walter", which was the reputation of the film products under Tito's personal leadership. He learned the power of film from the Soviet Union, and introduced many Soviet films in the early years of the founding of the Country, until after the confrontation with the Soviet Union, he began to build his own film dream factory.
<h3>Hardcore movie fans</h3>
It has to be said that this hero who loves Westerns, loves the bravery of guerrillas, loves Kirk Douglas and John Wayne, and looks like the provost of a public college is a true fan of the film. In the documentary "Cinematism", it can be learned that between 1946 and 1980, Tito watched a total of 8801 films in addition to governing the country. Halfway through the documentary' filming, Turalic was lucky enough to find Tito's personal projectionist, Leka Konstatinovic. The dedicated veteran served Tito for 32 years, showing a film to the leader every night.
The footage of the documentary follows the elderly Konstatinović slowly into Tito's mausoleum, he places a garland on the marble tombstone of his old superior, and in tears, he murmurs: "Comrade President Tito, I have been your projectionist for 32 years, and I am grateful for every year." The old man, dressed in a suit and tie, carefully stood to the left of the bronze colossus of Tito: "The superior must always stand on your right, this is the rule of the troops." The top of his head was only five centimeters below Tito's shoulder, and Tito tilted his head, and his gaze fell directly on his projectionist's face, and his expression seemed to ask: "Reika, which movie are we watching tonight?" ”
Konstatinović remembers Tito's memory very well, he once put on a movie, Tito immediately pointed out that the movie was seen, it was seen five years ago, and after checking the notes, it was exactly the same. Sometimes it is three o'clock in the middle of the night, because the film has to be returned the next day, he is also willing to stay up late to watch, watch five thirty, and at six o'clock in the morning, he is picked up by a car to go to the meeting. The die-hard movie fan often revises the script himself and happily comments on it, such as" or "I don't have to appear here" or "This didn't happen." Konstatinović remembers the scene of his "finale" in this post: halfway through the screening of the film, Tito says: "Stop, my leg hurts and dies". Then he was taken to the hospital, and then he never came back.
It was 1980. After that, Yugoslavia, like a cruise ship jolting out of the historic dock, the captain died, and it skewed against the wind.
In 1991, the 39th Pula Film Festival failed to kick off, and tito was required to attend the country's most important film festival every year during his lifetime. Audiences enjoy a feast of Yugoslav cinema at the site of an ancient Colosseum, where all the domestic films of the year were screened, sometimes with Sofia Roland sitting next to Tito. The suspension of the Pula Film Festival is also a precursor to the imminent end of Yugoslavia, for which the decline of the film industry is the decline of the country.
It was in the summer of 1991 that Yugoslavia began to disintegrate and the country fell apart. The following year, Kervavac, the director who had filmed The Bridge and Walter Defends Sarajevo, died in Sarajevo, starving to death. Underneath the nest, there are no more eggs, and the film studio in Avala, once known as the Park of Rome, no longer has a boiling voice, no camera is shaking, and it becomes like a ghost town.
In front of the props and costume warehouse of the Avala Film Factory in Belgrade stands a uniform of the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia. (Edamame/Photo)
<h3>Intimate "comrades-in-arms"</h3>
In September 2019, when I decided to go to Belgrade, the first destination I wrote down in my travel plans was avala Studios. However, for such a film factory that has long since faded from the stage of history, Serbian locals do not know much. Although my local informants are also well-connected, one of them is Ivan, the son of a prominent Yugoslav journalist, who last heard from the studio: after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Avala was partially privatized, and finally declared bankrupt in June 2011 due to accumulated debt of 111,000,000 dinars, and the government plans to sell the company's real estate, clothing, props, studios and film ownership in the spring of 2013.
Just when I felt that I had little hope of visiting Avala, a film director named Milan Smiljani got in touch with me. Thanks to Smijanić for posting a travel experience called "History of Serbian Cinema" on the Airbnb Experience platform.
Then my "informant" sent me a tip that he had carefully investigated: In 2015, a Czech company called SEBRE bought Avala from the Serbian government. Their vision is for this 40,000-square-meter abandoned cinema to be recreated as the "Cinecittà" of Eastern Europe. If they are unable to operate successfully, they may sell the land to a property developer. But it seems that the Czech company has a good intention, and they have repaired the film archive and 27,000 prop costumes. The nascent Avala plans to bring some of the most famous American film production companies such as Netflix, HBO and Amazon to Avala's studios for film production. Currently, they lend the studio to a local TV and music production company.
Smiyanich even found the email of the new owner's Director of Business Development for me, and when he learned that my email had not been answered a few days later, he was more anxious than I was, and threatened to call in person to ask for questions. He found me an email again encouraging me to write again to get in touch. I feel like my Operation Avala is already a transnational operation and it has to succeed. Thank you Smiyanich, we have never known each other, but in the text messages that come and go, we seem to be close comrades-in-arms.
<h3>Old dreams of light and shadow</h3>
Five days later, I was sitting in an Airbnb apartment in Dor ol, Belgrade's oldest neighborhood. In addition to shooting some commercials, he helped manage 10 homestays. For Director Si, making a movie is still a distant dream, but the homestay business has given him a way to live as a creative worker.
There is a monitor on the sewing machine against the wall in the room, and director Si will use that display screen to take me on a tour of Serbia's century-old film history, to follow the old dreams of light and shadow in a country that no longer exists.
After the completion of the Avala Film Factory, the Yugoslav film industry reached its climax with tito's generous government financial support. These guerrilla war films sometimes cost even more than Hollywood at the time, when Yugoslav filmmakers were so arrogant that everything was "Nema Problema," or "no problem." The display recreates the grand scene of the Battle of the Neretva River, which represents the pinnacle of Yugoslav guerrilla cinema. The 1969 Oscar-nominated film took 20 months to shoot, dispatched 6,000 soldiers, 16 tanks and trucks, threw 20 fake cannons into the river, and blew up a real iron bridge. Unfortunately, the smoke from the explosion was too large to be seen in front of the camera, and it exploded in vain, and the "sacrificed" broken bridge remained in Jablanica in Bosnia. The English version of the film's poster was designed by Picasso, who declined to pay, saying that he would just give him a case of the best Yugoslav wine. This is the aura of the golden age of Yugoslav cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.
Because of the great success of The Battle of the Neretwa River, Tito agreed to shoot the Battle of Suterska with him as the protagonist and hired Richard Burton, a British actor who was very friendly with him, to play himself. He would visit the class and watch it smiling on set, and his wife would see him in the film with a broken arm and tears. Tito also often personally revised the script, because these were the anti-fascist wars in which he had participated, and he had the right to speak.
After an hour and a half of clips of a wonderful chapter in Serbian film history, we went to the open-air café outside the apartment for coffee. It was a visit by the President of the Czech Republic, and from time to time there were very low-pressure fighter jets roaring through the air, deafening, as if bombs could be dropped at any time, reminiscent of 1999. On March 24 of that year, NATO began bombing Belgrade, and there was an urgent announcement on the radio that we only saw in World War II movies: "Attention! note! Belgrade air raid sirens! The citizens of Belgrade immediately went to the nearest air defense facility. Open the windows, pull down the curtains, turn off the power and gas..."
The Prague-born mixed Czech and Serbian man was lucky enough to survive the 1999 bombing. He only moved to Belgrade ten years ago, "now that my mother's Czechoslovakia and my father's Yugoslavia are separated, I feel like I'm 100 years old.".
Director and homestay host of Smiyanich. (Edamame/Photo)
<h3>butterfly effect</h3>
It was a wonderful butterfly effect, as a 2011 work by a Belgrade documentarian shook the wings of a Chinese childhood memories and finally embarked on a journey to Belgrade.
Female director Tularic became a documentarian perhaps influenced by her mother. His mother, Srbijanka Turajli, a well-known Serbian intellectual, spent the second half of her life as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Belgrade, in addition to teaching, but also with the political fate of her homeland.
She stood at the forefront of the anti-war marches at the outbreak of the Yugoslav Civil War in 1991; she stood in front of the march to overthrow President Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 2000; and after Milosevic stepped down, she also served as deputy minister of higher education at the Serbian Ministry of Education and Sports from 2001 to 2003. She never lamented why she was so unlucky to live in this era, and she used resistance to change the situation. The mother's sense of responsibility has given her daughter the courage to be a documentarian, recording echoes of past times in order to compose the music of future society. Cinematism, a political narrative documentary recreating socialist Yugoslavia, became her PhD graduation work at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom.
The documentary took five years to make, and Turalic also tried to reconstruct the Yugoslav film archive during the filming process, using electronic scanning to digitize 270 films. She also built a database of Yugoslav films, finding 320 of the 758 films the country had made.
<h3>The hills are desolate</h3>
I was leaving Serbia the next afternoon, but I still didn't receive an email from Avala. Smiyanich magically got a phone number, and I actually gave up hope, but I couldn't bear to brush up on Director Sz. It was this phone number that led me to Marina Ivanovi, who confirmed that I could go on a tour.
My "Operation Avala" will be launched on the last day of my departure from Serbia!
Avala is located in the Koutnjak forest south of Bay City, about 6 km from the city centre. After taking the bus to the arrival station, I followed the map on my mobile phone and was caught off guard by the sight of "Avala Film", a banner with yellow letters on a red background. In the documentary, when the film city was built in a big way, it was still a desolate hill, and more than half a century later, it was surrounded by various buildings, and the film city became desolate.
Its concierge is the same as China's state-owned factories of the 1980s. Entering the factory area, I was greeted by a very familiar sidewalk tree Metasequoia, which is not common in the West, and it always reminds me of strict institutions such as research institutes and academies of sciences with a long history in China.
Ivanovich was waiting for me at the end of the Metasequoia. She was completely different from what I imagined, a slightly fat figure, a black dress, fleshy and rosy face, like a kind-eyed grandmother, at first glance I knew that her most important quality was patience. The middle-aged programmer now works as a business development manager at the 16-person company.
Ivanovich took me on a simple cruise, and now the studios that are in use are only filmed here for some local reality shows, MTV or commercials, and the expected Western production companies have not yet arrived.
It was on this hill, in its heyday, that Marco Polo, starring Alain Delon, built a 13th-century city of Beijing; and Anthony Hopkins' War and Peace... Now, the outlines of these ancient cities, built from wood half a century ago, are still faintly visible, with markets, churches, Colosseums, and gallows, just overgrown with weeds, as if they were a scene for a disaster movie.
Ivanovich leads the author into the props and costume warehouse. (Edamame/Photo)
<h3>Avara Sonata</h3>
What I'm most looking forward to in the whole movie city is the warehouse where props and costumes are stored. Ivanovich carefully opened the wooden door, and I have to say that when the mottled white door "squeaked" open, a montage shot appeared in my mind: in the summer of 2014, there was also a person who opened a door for me. It was in Jablanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the broken bridge on the Neretva River was located, and there is a memorial there. When I arrived it was already five o'clock in the afternoon, and the memorial closed at four o'clock. Mr. Elder Of the Museum made an exception and opened the door for us, he introduced us to the story of the broken bridge, and played the video of the movie, although he did this no less than a thousand times, he was still full of passion, as if the war had happened yesterday. I told the old gentleman that it was a dream come true, and that I was here for my brother because we had watched these war movies together as children, and that was the sweetest part of our childhood memories. The old man immediately sent me a postcard, "Send it to my brother!" ”
The two doors stacked up five years later, and I was like the little girl who sang "Goodbye Friend" in a trench made of quilts and wore a triangular military hat made of newspaper, entering a tunnel of time. In the slightly dim light, in front of you are rows of armor of soldiers of the medieval Roman Empire, boots of Serbian soldiers during World War I, the tweed uniforms of Nazi Germans in World War II, the military hats of Ustasha, the kettles of the Yugoslav Partisans (the original left by the Tito guerrillas during World War II)... The whimpers of the times are superimposed on each other in time and space, playing the Avala Sonata.
The messy stacks of props and costumes in Cinematism have been carefully arranged, and even the neckline of each piece of clothing is sewn with the logo of "Avala Studios", "We have a colleague in the prop room who is responsible for stepping on the sewing machine to repair the costume", Ivanovich is full of affection for these clothes. 10 years ago, under Turalic's lens, a former staff member with a handlight fumbled through the power-out film warehouse, and now the processing of the film conversion to 4K is being carried out in an orderly manner.
Ivanovich told me that Tularic would be back here, the place that inspired her for her first documentary. She continues to open one time capsule after another, allowing Yugoslav history and cinema to continue to reunite. Her third documentary, which is in post-production, is still looking for footage in the film archives, depicting filmmakers who are in charge of political powerhouses.
Various military hats in the props and costume warehouse (Edamame/Photo)
There is also the leather coat of the SS in Nazi Germany (Edamame/Pictured)
The late summer breeze in Belgrade blows through the tall Metasequoia, which is warm and wide. I looked at the time, 18 o'clock. At this moment more than thirty years ago, Tito would walk into the screening room and ask his projectionist, "Reka, what are we going to see today?" "Then, start spending the most enjoyable time of the day.
Edamame