La fondazione di nuova memoria su Vukovar: Vukovar-Final cut di Janko Baljak

I materiali di quella propaganda, così pressante e nefasta durante le guerre degli anni '90, sono stati riutilizzati in tempi più recenti per creare un nuovo lavoro su Vukovar, e vivificare anni dopo la memoria di quello che è successo. Nel 2006 Janko Baljak, documentarista e docente alla facoltà di arti drammatiche di Belgrado, ha realizzato il film Vukovar - poslednji rez (Vukovar - Final cut), prodotto da B92, storica emittente di protesta contro il regime di Milošević. Si tratta del primo documentario di coproduzione serbo-croata su Vukovar, realizzato grazie al lavoro congiunto di due squadre di giornalisti, una serba coordinata dallo stesso Baljak, una croata gestita dal giornalista Drago Hedl68_{. Il frutto di questo lavoro congiunto è visibile soprattutto nella struttura:} attraverso le testimonianze da entrambe le etnie, il film ricostruisce gli eventi, i passaggi e i cambiamenti che hanno portato una tranquilla cittadina multietnica alla guerra. Il punto di vista sui fatti cambia continuamente, le voci si alternano, insieme alla grande mole di materiali d'archivio che gli autori hanno dovuto visionare e selezionare per il montaggio finale. Ho incontrato Janko Baljak a Belgrado, durante il mio periodo di ricerca lì, e gli ho chiesto perché un documentario su Vukovar a 15 anni di distanza. Il regista ha sottolineato come tale distanza storica dai fatti

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Lorraine Mortimer, Goran Dević and Zvonimir Jurić: The Blacks (Crnci, 2009), in Aida Vidan, Gordana P. Crnković (a cura di), In contrast: Croatian film today, New York-Oxford, Croatian film association-Berghahn books, 2012

67 _{Jurica Pavičić, From a cinema of hatred to a cinema of consciousness: Croatian film after Yugoslavia, in} Aida Vidan, Gordana P. Crnković (a cura di), op. cit., p. 58

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Andrea Rossini, La notte di Vukovar, in Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 27 febbraio 2006 https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/layout/set/print/content/view/print/32589 (ultimo accesso: luglio 2017)

permettesse finalmente di fare un documentario obiettivo, rispettando i diversi punti di vista sulla vicenda e superando l'impostazione della propaganda di stato (serba e croata):

«At this point it seemed to us, the producer of the B92 and I, that 15 years was a historical distance long enough to allow the making of such a documentary. Before that, a lot of documentary films concerning Vukovar were made both in Serbia and in Croatia. Unfortunately, these films were made without this historical distance. Some of them were created very quickly, even during the war itself. And what was called “documentary” on both the Serbian and the Croatian side was actually an ordinary war propaganda, state propaganda; on one side, Croatian propaganda and on the other side Serbian propaganda.»69

Con una certa distanza dai fatti accaduti è stato possibile anche riflettere su cosa rappresentasse Vukovar per entrambe le parti coinvolte e, solo grazie a un lavoro congiunto di entrambi i punti di vista sulla vicenda, si è compreso come la città sia stata utilizzata dalla propaganda dei due stati:

«Vukovar was a turning point in the, let's say, military conflict between Serbia and Croatia, between what was left of Yugoslavia and the Croatian forces, so that even then Vukovar represented more than an ordinary town where military operations were held. It was a kind of symbol. For the Croats a symbol of resistance, and for the Serbs who conquered the city, that is for the JNA units, it was a moment of triumph, because the fall of Vukovar changed the course of the war, taking it into direction and making it possible for the Serbs in Croatia at that time to construct what was then called Republic of Serbian Krajina, that is their own authorities. So the battle for Vukovar was a turning point in the war between the Croatian armed forces and the Yugoslav army and paramilitary volunteer troops from Serbia, and the size of destruction of that city was almost epic. […] Vukovar had great weight for both sides. But all these films that had been created in the Serbian and Croatian production were a kind of propaganda films, which spoke on behalf of Croatian regime… and in Serbia giving only ones own truth about the events in the city. So, our idea was that 15 years was a sufficient historical period, it turned out it was not completely like that… That passions were somewhat subsided, the head cooled down and that it was possible to make a serious film in which both Serbs and Croats would participate, a film that would not pretend to be the complete truth about this city, but to be the first objective attempt of Serbo-Croatian co-productions to tell the true story about the events of Vukovar. The whole idea arose from the fact that the journalistic team was involved in its implementation, primarily in research, in that part of the work that you are now doing. Initially we conducted a serious investigation that lasted a year before the script was written… before I wrote the script… We spent one year investigating the extensive documentation and subject matter: we had journalistic teams in Croatia and in Serbia and we would meet every month or two to exchange information that we had gathered in the meantime related to some key events, to some key actors in the whole story. And so through this research work, which lasted a year, we were actually collecting material for what was going to be the script of that film, material which to me was valuable… Since, in the beginning when we started to work on the film, we really had a very clear picture, on one and the other side, about things that had taken place and we could exactly have a good list of people we wanted to talk to, archival material which we wanted to come to in one way or another, and then we started to assemble the dice to this mosaic, we started to record. We went on recording for six months. After that the editing was very extensive because we had more than nearly 30 hours of archival material that we collected in the meantime on the Croatian and the Serbian side ...»70

La ricostruzione di Baljak non si ferma alle soglie della guerra, procede nella dettagliata ricostruzione mettendo a confronto le interviste dei personaggi politici e militari con le

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L'intervista è stata realizzata a gennaio 2017 a Belgrado. La stesura completa è in Appendice. 70

testimonianze delle vittime civili, ricomponendo così "dall'interno" un quadro civile della guerra e delle sue conseguenze. Oltre alla ricostruzione attraverso i diversi punti di vista, ritengo che il pregio maggiore di questo lavoro sia il riutilizzo dei materiali prodotti dalla propaganda per creare un documentario che finalmente parli per tutti sulla vicenda. La selezione e il montaggio diventano qui strumenti consapevolmente messi al servizio dei processi di selezione e ricostruzione tipici della memoria.

Il corpus di materiali che il regista e i suoi collaboratori si sono trovati a gestire era costituito soprattutto dai video dei notiziari televisivi serbi e croati, che all'epoca erano stati usati dalla propaganda per veicolare un preciso messaggio: "la caduta di Vukovar" per i croati e "la liberazione di Vukovar" per i serbi, due interpretazioni opposte della stessa battaglia. Le medesime riprese delle vittime civili erano mostrate come serbe o come croate in un notiziario o nell'altro, questo rese molto difficile definire quali materiali potessero essere documenti e quali pura propaganda. Alla fine, spiega il regista, decisero di usare solo video di fatti verificati anche con altre fonti, inoltre intervistarono alcuni testimoni presenti nei notiziari dell'epoca e, con la tecnica dello split screen, misero a confronto le interviste attuali con quelle passate:

«We had a problem in the sense that all these materials were mainly materials belonging to this vast propaganda corpus, something that was news program on Serbian and Croatian television, which interpreted the same news and the same event in a completely different way. So, even the terms were different. Croats called the operations in the city and what was happening “the fall of Vukovar”, while the Serbs used the expression “the liberation of Vukovar”. You can already see how this is a diametrically different understanding of the war. Also in the crowd of archival material the same civilians, the same civilian victims were shown in one news programs as Serbian, and as Croatian in other news programs. It was difficult to define what was propaganda, and what was actually true. We tried to make use only of verified documents, and in this sense we were helped by witnesses on both sides who interpreted the archival material. Likewise, we had an extremely interesting method, as you may see by watching the film: if we found an interesting person in an archival material that is related to a particular event, whether it's the Vukovar hospital or the Ovčara massacre that happened after the fall of Vukovar, we tried to find that person, and in parallel with the material in which this person appears, we also got the testimony of that person 15 years later. So we used that split screen, a split screen system, and when those civilians who talked about how they were sent away, we can see those materials and also the person who talks about what was happening. We tried to have as many paired events as we could in order to compare the archival material with the testimony of a living person who survived those events, meaning that was one of criterions we used.»71

È molto interessante ciò che il regista precisa riguardo allo spirito con cui lui e tutta la troupe hanno affrontato il lavoro per questo documentario. Dare una versione completa e obiettiva dei fatti di Vukovar è stata una prerogativa che implicava non solo la professionalità, ma anche motivi legati ai ricordi di quel tempo e al vissuto personale dei membri della troupe. Il regista per esempio racconta di come all'epoca dello scoppio della guerra si nascondesse a Belgrado per evitare la chiamata alle armi e la possibilità di essere mandato a sparare a degli sconosciuti. Il coinvolgimento personale nei contrasti tra serbi e croati è stato una delle motivazioni che ha spinto

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l'indagine su cosa sia realmente accaduto alla popolazione della cittadina croata, caratterizzata da una convivenza pacifica per cinquant'anni:

«One more thing was also interesting to me related to the mutual relations between Serbs and Croats and to our own private relations with this topic, my attitude to that topic: I was hiding here in Belgrade at the moment of these events trying to avoid being mobilized and sent to war in Vukovar. Those events were kept in my memory under the light of the fact that I did not want the military police to take me to some fields near Vukovar to shoot at people I do not know. A number of people who worked on this movie, apart from the desire to investigate and to make as objective and truthful the story as possible, had some personal motives. It is very interesting and important to me, in the circle of evil that is repeated between Serbs and Croats, to investigate the story of what was again awakened from the box after 50 years. It was quite clear to us that in the collective consciousness, in general, in the propaganda that was here on state television above all, the Serbs were instructed that the Vukovar operations and all that was happening in Croatia, was somehow the revenge of the Serbs for everything that happened 50 years before, a retaliation for the crimes committed in the Second World War and what happened at the Jasenovac camp. It is as if the Serbs now had their five minutes to rejoice over what had happened 50 years before. For me it was completely incredible to see that this circuit of crime was in exactly the same way, through the same models, with only a lot of propaganda media that greatly contributed to this amount of destruction and the amount of evil and crime… I think the media bear enormous guilt, primarily on this side, but the media in Croatia are not innocent either of their hatred in the state media. I was interested in seeing how that spirit from the bottle was awaken and how the people who had lived normally, one by one in Vukovar, that can somehow be seen in the film, … in Vukovar, one of the most peaceful, richest, middle-sized towns in Croatia, where no one cared which Christmas was celebrated - the Catholic or Orthodox one, suddenly, through this war husk and propaganda, above all, became mortal enemies and shoot at each other and committed those monstrous crimes. What made me anguished … Here we are now talking 25 years, 26 years after that, 10 years from the movie, is that a lot of things did not change if you look at the context of Serbian-Croatian relations. You will now see these same models, that nowadays, some children who were born at the time this all was happening in Vukovar and did not participate in it, still feel the same level of hatred towards Serbs or Croats. It means that it is a collective myth that is passed from generation to generation and that, from time to time, in the interest of the leading political elites in Serbia and Croatia, submerges because it is very profitable for the account of nationalism and the development of these most striking passions. Of course I did not have any illusion that the movie would change and that the movies could change the world altogether, but I would like to say that 10 years after the film was created, I am still anguished when I see what is happening with the Cyrillic signs in Vukovar, when I see that they are broken… There are still separate school classes, for people who speak practically the same language – Croatian and Serbian are more or less the same language – who learns different history, the one learns one, the other learns the other, who even have different bars. As long as this kind of division exists, this movie will be current, unfortunately, and it will always be a good bet and a good hunch that this evil does not repeat itself in the way it is repeated.»72

Uno dei punti più importanti dell'intervista, raccolta a Belgrado, è stato la descrizione fatta da Baljak sulle reazioni del pubblico croato e serbo alla visione del documentario. Il film ebbe la sua première al festival croato Zagreb Docs e dopo pochi giorni fu proiettato in Serbia al festival belgradese FEST. Baljak osserva come la reazione dei due pubblici fosse identica: uno shock. Dopo i primi minuti, alla fine delle proiezioni, ci fu solo silenzio in sala, nessun applauso e nessuno che riuscisse a conversare con il regista. In Croazia sorse una campagna che definì il film pro-

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serbo, a Belgrado gli autori furono accusati di essere traditori a favore dei croati, ma queste reazioni per Baljak sono state un buon segnale. Significa che il film non ha trovato alcun consenso tra i nazionalisti, che il metodo utilizzato per la comparazione delle fonti aveva davvero segnato una rottura con i canoni della propaganda. Se il film non soddisfa entrambe le parti è perché queste non vi riconoscono lo schema propagandistico a cui erano abituate vedendo gli stessi materiali, si tratta di un lavoro con una visione nuova, morale e obiettiva:

«What was most important to us as authors was that the film had its premiere in Zagreb, at the Zagreb Docs Festival, which is held in the month of February, and three days after that, it had a premiere in Belgrade at the FEST festival… that the reaction was completely identical in both Belgrade and Zagreb. After the movie and during playing of the closer and when the lights were turned on, there was absolute silence, no applause, an absolutely dejected audience, and the shock that seemed to me was felt after the end of that movie. For the first 5-10 minutes they were not able to talk to the filmmakers. The film takes some time to be digested and to suppress the shock before a person can even say something. The reaction was identical in both cities and what was interesting to me was that the film did not consent to nationalists on the one side nor on the other. In Croatia there was a group of people who ran the campaign claiming it was a pro-Serbian film, and in Serbia we, as authors from Belgrade, were accused of being traitors and of having made a pro-Croatian movie. When this happens to a movie then it is a good sign that you are on the right track of some morality and objectivity and that you have done a good job. This is always a good signal if no side is satisfied with what they see because they are adults, because they grew up thinking that… And because they are accustomed to a pattern I was talking about and which was, above all, closely related, propagandistic.»73

In una riflessione sull'uso delle immagini d'archivio, Aleksandra Milovanović74

sottolinea come il film di Baljak riveli i meccanismi di costruzione delle notizie e dei reportage televisivi usati all'epoca. Quegli stessi materiali costituiscono, ormai a qualche decennio dai fatti, un archivio visuale sull'evento storico. Come abbiamo visto nella prima parte, Derrida75 e Foucault76 denunciano l'aspetto meno manifesto della costruzione degli archivi, ma che è alla base del loro funzionamento nel tempo: l'istituzionalizzazione di una narrazione memoriale precisa, per cui ciò che è archiviato è ciò che va ricordato. Chi controlla la formazione degli archivi, storici o visuali che siano, controlla la memoria di una società, di una cultura e di un fatto storico. E l'esempio di Vukovar non potrebbe essere più esplicativo, dove i ruoli di memorie e di contro-memorie si alternano e si scambiano a seconda della posizione etnica e nazionale rappresentata dalla narrazione principale. Solo attraverso la messa a confronto di memorie e contro-memorie sullo stesso fatto, il lavoro di Baljak smaschera quell' "archive effect" (concetto ripreso da Jaimie

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Vedi intervista in Appendice.

74 _{Aleksandra Milovanović, Images of Jasenovac: rethinking use of archive footage and voice over narration}

in documentary films, in Nevena Daković (a cura di), Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media, Belgrado, Diskurs, 2014

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Jacques Derrida, op. cit. 76

Baron77) che questi materiali avevano sempre avuto sugli spettatori, e da qui l'esperienza scioccante alla visione del documentario Vukovar-Final cut.

L'uso politicamente condizionato di filmati, fotografie, testimonianze, citazioni da documenti e esperti, voce fuori campo di un narratore onnisciente può influenzare ampiamente il modo in cui la storia è riportata e ricostruita nei film, soprattutto nei documentari che possono amplificare l'effetto di realismo e affidabilità da parte dello spettatore. L'"effetto archivio" è quel senso di lontananza nel tempo e nello spazio che l'immagine e il suono possono dare se inseriti in un nuovo contesto filmico, come abbiamo visto negli esempi di finzione. Inseriti in un nuovo contesto i materiali però assumono anche un nuovo significato che è più difficile da cogliere a causa di una doppia