BELGRADE (21 page)

The beginning of modern Serbian theatre, like music, emerged from Sremski Karlovci in the eighteenth century. The freedom of Serbia in the first half of the nineteenth century encouraged theatre people to cross the border into the principality ruled by Knez Miloš. Joakim Vujić (1772–1847) founded the first theatre in Kragujevac in 1835 of which he was manager, producer, actor, translator and director of dramatic works, staging plays by mostly foreign playwrights.

The premiere of the first public dramatic performance in Belgrade was in late October 1841, attended by the young Knez Mihailo Obrenović. The event was an entertainment with acting and singing based on the folk ballad “Prince Marko and the Arab” (Kraljević Marko i Arapin) held in one of the ground-floor warehouses of the Đumrukana, the customs warehouse on the Sava quayside. This was Belgrade’s first professional company and only lasted one year but in that time performed some 55 plays, including one by the most accomplished Serbian dramatist of his day, Jovan Sterija Popović.

Popović was born in Vršac, and attended grammar schools in Sremski Karlovci, Timişoara and Pest before studying law. He returned to his home town where he first taught Latin and then opened a law practice. Like many intellectuals from Vojvodina, driven by patriotic feelings, he decided to work in Serbia. Spending the years 1840–48 in Belgrade, he taught in the newly opened Lycée and then transferred to the Ministry of Education. He was active in the cultural life of the principality, supporting among other projects the founding of the Society for Serbian Literary Education. He was recognized as one of the leading educated Serbs of his day, following in the footsteps of Dositej Obradović, and remained in contact with all other major figures involved in the cultural development of the young country such as Vuk Karadžić. He wrote textbooks for the first generation of pupils in grammar school, essays, literary criticism, poems, stories, novels and plays. He also wrote historical tragedies with more than a hint of Shakespearean influence in his combination of court intrigues and struggle for power with familial rivalries. Many of these works were based on figures from Serbian medieval history such as his
The Death of Stefan Dečanski
(Smrt Stefana Dečanskog), first performed in the Đumrukana in 1841.

The critics welcomed each of his serious works, but were less enthusiastic about his comedies, although they are the part of his repertoire that has remained popular today. He had a talent for spotting the comic element in human failings and placing this in a context where a tragic undercurrent flowed just below the surface. He clearly owes a debt to Molière, many of whose plays he translated into Serbian. The topicality of his vain, ambitious, self-serving, characters in a society beset with great historical changes has kept returning to the Belgrade stage, each generation finding in his bitter-sweet portrayals elements of contemporary life.

In one of his later plays,
The Patriots
(Rodoljupci), he turns to the attempt by the Serbs of Vojvodina to come out from under the shadow of their more powerful Hungarian neighbours in 1848. He depicted the failure of the revolution to be a result of false patriotism, political lies and the manipulation of the national ideal by men greedy for wealth and power. He was rational and satirical in equal measure, showing both the farcical and tragic features of his own time.

Belgrade’s theatre-going public had to wait a long time for another singular talent like Popović, until the arrival of Branislav Nušić. He dominated the Belgrade stage for much of his life, and his work is still in demand by theatre audiences. He was born in Belgrade and began writing before he reached his twentieth birthday. In his youth he was not only a prolific writer but also earned himself a reputation as a political dissident, a supporter of radical reform. The authorities took exception to some of his writing and he spent a short period behind bars. On his release he was sent out of the way, as consul for Serbia in Macedonia and Kosovo, still provinces of the Ottoman Empire. He worked in these offices for some ten years before returning to the capital, no longer a man of the opposition but transformed into a supporter of the establishment. He found it easier to get his work published and performed, and to find employment such as dramatist and assistant to the Director of the National Theatre in Belgrade, Director of the National Theatre in Novi Sad, and librarian in the National Assembly.

Nušić’s early work was noted for its satirical social comment and criticism of the establishment, largely absent from his later phase. He also wrote humorous stories and comments on daily life in the capital as a columnist for the daily press. Such writing probably only served to reinforce the views of the official critics that he was, in fact, a superficial talent. During the First World War he retreated with the army on their dangerous route through Albania to reach Corfu, as did many intellectuals from the capital who did not wish to remain in an occupied city.

After the war he returned a broken man, having lost his only son in the fighting. This sense of loss moved him to retire from public life for much of the 1920s but he bounced back and again followed a writing career toward the end of his life. In 1933 he became a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts where in his acceptance speech he spoke mainly about the work of his predecessor Jovan Sterija Popović, acknowledging his debt to the great man.

In Nušić’s best plays humour and comedy are always mixed with some satirical feature, as is often the case in Popović’s works. One of his first plays was
The Member of the National Assembly
(Narodni poslanik, 1883) in which a candidate for the government and a candidate for the opposition find themselves not only under the same roof but also about to be joined through marriage as father-in–law and son-in–law. The election campaign and wedding plans proceed apace, interfering one with the other. Another of his more famous plays is
Mrs. Minister
(Gospođa Ministarka, 1929). The plot concerns Živka Popović whose husband unexpectedly becomes a minister in a rapid change of government. She is not used to the high life and most of the comedy comes from her making a fool of herself.

Nušić provided a preface to this work in which he describes his dramatic intentions, and which is included in the English edition of his plays
Three Comedies
. He wrote that there is a line cutting across society that marks the limits of normal behaviour. Some people rise above this line and contribute great things to the social good, while some fall below the line and commit crimes against the general interest. Those who rise above the norm or fall below its expectations live life in a heightened state of emotion and excitement, and it is these people who usually generate dramatic form. The majority of us, however, live in the middle ground, hovering around the line where not much happens to stir the blood. He finishes by saying, “Well, I have taken by the hand a good wife and housekeeper from this middle ground, Mrs Živka Popović, and led her suddenly and unexpectedly above her normal way of life. For such people, altering the weights in the scales of their normal lives can cause them to lose their balance so badly that they can hardly stay upright on their feet. Therein lies the content of
Mrs. Minister
and the whole simple reason for the problems it reveals.”

While theatre came late to Belgrade, film arrived relatively quickly. It was only a matter of months after the first moving picture show in Paris by the Lumière brothers that one of their representatives, André Carré, arranged the first screenings in Belgrade in 1896. One of his evenings was attended by the king himself, Alexander Obrenović, and his mother, Queen Natalija. Carré returned to Belgrade a year later where he made the first films in the Balkans. These films were not made as dramatic enactments but simply by putting a camera in front of people moving in the street and capturing them going about their everyday business. The whole idea of being able to watch oneself, or one’s fellow-citizens, on a screen was in itself a sufficient novelty. Carré’s films were of people walking in Kalemegdan, of trams on Terazije, and of workers coming out of a tobacco factory. Unfortunately, none of these has survived down the years. His films were screened in kafanas and in tents like at a fairground, with the first permanent cinema opening in 1909 soon followed by others.

The oldest surviving film from Belgrade in the early twentieth century is of King Peter’s coronation in 1904. It was made by two Englishmen from Sheffield: Arnold M. Wilson and Frank Mottershow. Wilson was a solicitor and the honorary Serbian consul in the northern steel town. He was invited to the coronation and took with him a local cameraman. Mottershow was one of the founders of English cinema as a dramatic art, but at this stage of his career he was, like most of his contemporaries in the early world of films, a maker of documentaries. No filming took place inside the Cathedral where the coronation took place, but there are many images of the parade before and after the event with the great and good of the military, Church and government winding their way through the city streets on foot, on horseback and in carriages. The short documentary concludes with a military display where Peter appears very regal astride an imposing white horse observing a mock cavalry charge.

The film provides a valuable visual record of Belgrade at the time. It opens with a long panning shot over the district of Savamala, looking over the Sava and following its course towards the confluence with the Danube. Then, interspersed with the parade, Mottershow captures images of ordinary people as they walk through the streets to attend and watch the spectacle. Curious passers-by stop and stare into the camera, doff a hat or smile broadly as if consciously acting for the cameraman from Sheffield. The people on the street represent all social groups and all sections of the community. Well-dressed gentlemen and ladies whose suits, dresses and fine hats would not have been out of place in any other European capital walk alongside other people dressed as if just arrived from a village: men are in homespun clothes with loose-fitting shirts and baggy trousers called
čakšire
; women wear heavily embroidered skirts and headscarves; both sexes have
opanci
on their feet, long pointed shoes curling up at the tip. These scenes offer images of the city on the cusp between tradition and modernity.

The first Belgrade film producers were also the owners of the first cinema houses, supplying themselves with material for screening to their paying customers. Their work consisted of not much more than taking a camera into the street and shooting events as they happened. In 1911 one of these producer-owners made the first feature film. Teaming up with Louis de Berry, a French cameraman, Svetozar Botorić financed and screened a movie based on the life and exploits of the leader of the First Serbian Uprising, Karađorđe. The veteran actor, Čiča Ilija Stanojević from the National Theatre, directed the enterprise and took the starring role. Other members of the cast were also drawn from the National’s company. The story as told in the film is taken from a number of sources: a play by Miloš Cvetić, historical and biographical works about the Serbian leader and the folk poem “The Start of the Revolt against the Dahijas”.

The film includes all the narrative motifs associated with the leader’s life and death. Karađorđe kills his first Turk while still a boy and shoots his father for refusing to cross the river into Habsburg territory when an earlier rebellion failed. He eventually returns to Serbia and initially refuses the leadership of the 1804 Uprising. The Dahijas draw a bowl of water from the Danube which they take to the Nebojša Tower and foresee their own grisly fate in it. The rebels are successful, but they are finally defeated and there is only one possible end; Karađorđe is murdered by agents of his rival, Miloš Obrenović. The actors and directors were heavily influenced in their craft by their experience in theatre performance, although there are interesting moments when dramatic tension is heightened through the use of editing and cutting techniques to show dream sequences or simultaneous actions.

The film had its premiere in Belgrade on 23 October 1911 and its last recorded screening was to Serbian emigrants in the United States in 1928 after which it disappeared without trace. It was rediscovered in the Austrian film archives, Vienna, in July 2003 by Aleksandar Erdeljanović and Radoslav Zelenović on behalf of the Yugoslav Cinema Archive (Jugoslovenska kinoteka). The film was re-mastered and broadcast on Belgrade television, giving an opportunity after many decades to see one of the milestones in the development of cinema in the Balkans.

Other producers of early Serbian cinema were the Savić brothers, responsible for the next feature film to come from the nascent Belgrade studios in 1912,
The Woeful Mother
(Jadna majka). The home community expanded its scope in the production process and moved on from providing finance and actors to the technical side when Slavko Jovanović became the first Serb cameraman and worked on projects with Botorić and the Savić brothers. The First World War and occupation of the city brought a halt to Belgrade’s film industry. The Serbian army, however, in its camp on Corfu developed its own film section, which was later used for propaganda purposes after launching its offensive from Thessalonica and advancing north into Serbia.

After the First World War Belgrade was the centre of film production in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, although filmmakers faced fierce competition from abroad. Imports from France, Germany and in particular from the rapidly expanding Hollywood studios were of superior quality and cheaper. To combat the problem, a new law was enacted in 1931 to oblige cinemas to show a proportion of home products, stimulating domestic studios with the release of, for example, Mihajlo Al. Popović’s 1932 feature
With Faith in God
(Sa verom u Boga). Nevertheless, foreign imports began to creep back in their former numbers. The issue of
Politika
published on the day of the German bombing of Belgrade in 1941 contains numerous advertisements from Belgrade’s cinemas showing Hungarian, Russian, French and Hollywood films—with not a single Serbian film available. Influence from abroad went much deeper, and many of the city’s picture palaces have westernized names like Luksor, Koloseum, Siti (City), Rex, alongside the more Slavonic-sounding places like Slavija, Avala, Balkan and Drina.