Speech at the occasion of the opening at Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 8.9.2005

Nobody asks any more why, for example, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway or Jasmila Žbanić, considered as film makers, function in parallel in the film and in the visual art context; what is it, that is more than film that defines these authors both film and visual or video artists. These questions related to, let’s say, expanded media phenomena have been resolved through art theory and museum practices in the last 30 or 40 years. Yet, each author is a case in him / her, depending on the field of his / her exploration both in terms of the form and of the content.

Today in Galerie im Taxispalais we have a “case” embodied in Jasmila Žbanić’s videos. My young colleague Nebojsa Jovanović says that the answer to the question: why Jasmila Žbanić’s films attract such an attention of curators seems a very simple one: “It is because her films do not count on the standard film consumers. Besides, the careers of young Sarajevo film directors have been marked by their struggle to get the first feature film done. All their early works (both the short features and documentaries) were nothing but their waiting or “warming up” for the “real thing”, means for the long feature film. With the films of Jasmila Žbanić the situation is totally opposite – her short feature and her documentaries were not the steps leading toward a big goal, but rather the goal in itself and for itself. While her colleagues were searching, Jasmila succeeded to find. Each of her films has been another such ‘finding’”.

Jasmila’s intellectual and creative interest goes beyond film. She moves with equal freedom and sovereignty when exploring theatrical language as well. She says that she had learned more about theatre when she worked for several months with Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theatre, than in all years of studying at Sarajevo Academy of Dramatic Arts.

As one can see, the spectrum of Jasmila’s interests, exceptional visual culture, unconventional and untraditional film procedé, are reasons enough for her works to be introduced in a much broader space then the cinema halls. That is why Jasmila is here tonight.
The themes and the main characters in all her films, including the three works selected for this presentation, are focused solely on women, on the re-examing of relationships between women’s subjects and war experience, the traumatic knot which Jasmila keeps revisiting persistently, questioning it again and again, always from a new angle.

Let me tell you some more about the three videos Silvia Eiblmayr has chosen for this exhibition. The first one is After, After, made in 1997 as a student work, which appeared that same year at the First Annual Exhibition of the new founded Soros Center for Contemporary Art (today Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art) that I still manage. This Annual Exhibition, entitled "Meeting Point", was composed of two parts. The first consisted of more than 30 site specific projects – installation, performances – installed one after another during the whole summer, in the space of the remnants of the 16th century Turkish bath (hamam) in the heart of Old Sarajevo called Bascarsija.

The other part of the exhibition was the first public screenings of home video, made during the siege of the city and immediately after the war. Two of Jasmila’s works were in that selection: Autobiography, a purely introspective art video, made in the winter of 1995/6 when peace agreement was signed in Dayton. That is when the shelling of Sarajevo ceased and when Jasmila realized that she had survived the war; so in this video she ritually celebrates her rebirth. Her other work was the documentary video After, After. The author leads us into the autistic world of the girl traumatized by the war, who begins attending the school and re-socializing, whereas the symptoms of her trauma still remain obvious. We become aware of them in their full intensity and malignancy when we recognize them as a part of collective children’s experience, whose consequences we see in the violent games her school mates are playing. A brief dialogue at the very end of the video represents for me the most terrifying and the most painful picture of a war trauma. To Jasmila’s question: ‘Do you have any wishes? What do you wish?’ the girl is silent for a while and then answers: ‘Nothing’.

I mentioned this first Annual Exhibition of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art for two reasons. The first one is the emerging of a new, post war art scene, and the new generation of artists. That was where an anonymous student, Jasmila Žbanić, appeared in public for the first time, just like most of its participants, who would later become recognized and whose further art production and distribution has been continuously enabled or supported by SCCA. There is one anecdote related to the awards given at this exhibition. In the course of final selection for the first award, the Jury members – Sanja Iveković, Kathy Rae Huffman and Mike Stubbs – could not decide between the two works: the art video Autobiography and the documentary After, After, failing to notice that the author of both is the same person. When they realized that this is Jasmila, she became the winner awarded not for one but for two videos.

The second reason is connected with one important international exhibition called “Zone of Disturbance” held in Graz, just after above mentioned Sarajevo “Meeting Point” in 1997. “Zone of Disturbance” was curated by Silvia Eiblmayr who invited the beginner Jasmila Žbanić to participate with her After, After. This was the first step Jasmila made at the international art scene.

In her second film Red Rubber Boots, Jasmila follows with her camera a team of forensic experts exhuming mass graves in their search for the remains of the war victims. The camera focuses on the young woman, the mother of two missing children. The procedure is the same as in the previous film After, After, when the camera finds the traumatized girl and starts following her. This time the woman is searching for the pair of red rubber boots that are the only thing belonging to her kid she could recognize among human remains. Unlike other film makers who are less skilled and less sensitive in treating this horrible theme, Jasmila remains distant from the “pornographic” fascination with the piles of bones in every shot.

This – for me the most film-like film of Jasmila’s opus in the terms of dramaturgy, directing and editing, emerges again in a rather conceptual than ‘film making’ way, like other works she made. There is not a previously fixed scenario. There is an idea, a theme, a problem she is personally very much preoccupied with. What will emerge as a story, as she says, she knows subconsciously and got a form during the shooting, while the final structure of the film is shaped in the editing room.

Images From the Corner is part of the film trilogy produced by ZDF and initiated and supervised by Zoran Solomun, director of experimental and brilliant documentary films, who left Belgrade in 1991 and has lived in Berlin since. This omnibus is a generation statement composed by three stories of three young film directors (Sarajevo, Belgrade and Skopje) who emerged after the wars in former Yugoslavia.

With Images From the Corner Jasmila tried for the first time to articulate the trauma of her own experience. The film focuses on the search for in situ information about the girl from her neighborhood whom Jasmila knew and who had been wounded. That was the first of Jasmila’s experience of the war and the first direct confrontation with death and destruction, with her own mortality.

There is the moment in this film that re-confirms Jasmila’s particular authorship and her director’s courage. In one shot Jasmila uses a fixed camera to film a part of the empty pavement on which that bloody day in 1992 her friend Biljana was lying wounded by a mortal shell. The duration of this static shot, while in the off there is the sound of clicking of photo camera, determines the time needed to use three photo films. That is, ironically speaking, Jasmila’s homage to the famous French photo-reporter, who happened to be at the site and who, instead of helping the wounded girl, decided to shoot, very professionally, the bloody scene for which he used three rolls of film. Such a long, static, seemingly empty but extremely tense shot is something that a single “true” – to be ironic again – film director would allow himself to do.

Women’s experience of the war related trauma is still the central motive of Jasmila’s work. In her just completed long feature film Grbavica, two main characters are trying to cope with the legacy of this war; a woman is trying to leave behind the rape-related trauma, while her daughter is facing the truth that she is the consequence of that very rape.

From the first moment Jasmila, still a high school student, learned about the crime of planned and organized raping of Bosnian women in the last war, she has been obsessed with this theme. This film, which she has carried in her mind for years, she did not dare to shoot until she herself has become a mother.

Directing her first long feature film for Jasmila is only the continuation, not the climax of her opus as an author, which differs her from her male colleagues mentioned in the beginning. I do agree with those who consider Jasmila Žbanić not only the most productive, but the most important woman director in the history in Bosnian cinema.

Dunja Blažević is the director of the Sarajevo Center of Contemporary Art

© Dunja Blažević and Galerie im Taxispalais