Work (Sorrow for Guerreνικα)
#2 The reception of the movie, at least as the reporters say, divided the recipients into two gangs: the one that liked the movie and the one that didn’t like the movie. I would put myself in a new gang: among those who both liked and disliked the movie i.e. who neither liked nor disliked the movie. I have to admit that the rigorousity i.e. the extension of my judgement was created directly from the increased horizon of expectation that, above all, the author gained with his work in a longer period of time and of course with the high status that his previous art text, the movie “Before the rain” achieved. The same as the author quite obtrusively wished in an interview, I also expected to see the “Macedonian Guernica” in ”Dust”, but no matter the focusing and the benevolence I had, that kind of epiphany was left out. The film regarding the level of a textual segment, the one that one critic metaphorically called “choreography of violence” is quite successful, even brilliant, intermedial ecclectic renovation of the Picasso’s cubist masterpiece. But that’s not enough for forming judgement on the category work. The film (the text) ”Dust” from an aesthetic aspect can’t be disputed. That’s, above all, because the postmodern aesthetics to which the film belongs isn’t normative but it’s inclusive, even radically opened, ”anything goes” (this last one doesn’t relate to the category work, i.e. the binary of value good/bad but to the category text, there is no proscription which can and which can’t enter in the textual, sign relations). From another point, the postmodernist theory, which I consider to be the most adequate for a critical analysis of a film that belongs to the postmodernistic aesthetics, does not have clear, consensual opinions what is and what isn’t postmodernistic aesthetics. The things that some theoreticians don’t approve, others approve. E.g. almost everybody hails the deconstruction of the subject, one that is brilliantly made in “Dust”, but some of the most significant theoreticians of the Postmodern, as is Linda Hutcheon, holds the return of the subject for a legitimate postmodernist strategy. The film ”Dust” can be disputed, above all, from the aspect of poetics, wherein the poetics is a fusion of art and art theory of Postmodernism.
Concerning the poetics i.e. the self-consciousness for the art, the director of the film, Milčo Mančevski, above all, consciously i.e. confusingly uses avant-guard – modernist concepts: he speaks of destroying cliches as a “mean of progress”; whilst the postmodernistic poetics markedly speaks about renovation, eclecticism and art between the cliches, and the idea of progress is the most disputed modernistic topos; he makes scandals and causes shocks strongly defending the partition of high and low art, whilst the Postmodern blatantly eliminates the modernist dichotomy and plots for a peaceful “polycentric coexistence” (L.Miodynski), and Aleš Debeljak defines the Postmodern as ”Modern minus shock aesthetics”; Milčo Mančevski highly values the category author and his autonomy ironically saying that he has become a director so as no one touches and changes his scripts, and exactly the authorship, through the widely spread intertextual practice, is flagrantly disputed by the Postmodern. Another generally accepted definition for the postmodernism is that it’s modernism plus self-consciousness. I.e. Postmodernists are only those who are conscious of the delusions and the limits of the modernism and who are self–conscious about their postmodernist belonging. The unconsciousness, the mixing and the vagueness regarding the Modern and the Postmodern, which results in significant presence of modernist elements in ”Dust” and which the inclusive postmodernist poetics allows, the benign theoreticians (Misko Suvakovic) #3 call Modern in the Postmodern or Modern after the Postmodern and that’s a strategy through which, together with using the modernist and the postmodernist expressive methods and techniques, modernist goals are accomplished. But concerning that the unconsciousness, the vagueness and the mixing of the Modern and the Postmodern is not a conscious Habermas’ return to the abandoned ”unfinished project of the Modern”, but it is literally what it is, a discrepancy between the ”cultural strategy and the artistic tactics”, I would accept the malicious understanding of the Polish macedonist Lech Miodynski who, studying the similar tendencies in the Macedonian postmodern prose in the eighties (whose authors, later, reviewed their poetic standings a lot); concludes that’s a product of not having a historical continuity, ungrounded environment in the western discourse (more about the last in Branislav Sarkanjac’s latest book “Macedonian Catehrezis”). Anyway, with this kind of poetic myopia, I’ m not inclined to consider the phenomenon “Dust” as a great work of art.