#8 Some theoreticians, like Brian Mchale, look at the writing problem as closely related to the phenomenon of death. For a few, the writing is a runaway from the death, and not transcendence. But Mančevski is among those postmodernists who try to picture the transcendence, they even go over the imagined boundaries of the death itself, they try to project a discourse in death, a posthumous discourse, a fiction. The answer of the question “where do our voices go when we are gone” is facing, overstepping the ontological boundary, facing death. The writing about the death often converts into writing about the writing, depart from the Self through the metaphor of fiction. The posthumous discourse Mančevski realizes imaginary and ironically. Through the ironic standing he postpones the death of the main character Angela a few times and she, in the movie, postpones a few times the death of her main character, Luke, i.e. she strikes over the recent course of the diegesis, and starts over, continuing, no matter the non–logic of that. The phantasm is an imaginary world in which the artist-neurotic has plunged. He joins the diverse into an unique narration text, according to the Lacan’s understanding of the phantasm as an unconscious script. The phantasm has two levels, a tableau, the one that can be seen and described, and a hieroglyph, the unspeakable, the shortage, what’s lost, a hole. The phantasms at Mančevski (mostly in the scenes where Lilith shows posthumous), are a try to cover that hole, to present the unrepresentative, to create a discourse which would try to create what’s lost. The phantasmic discourse Mančevski explicitly separates from the rest of the text and schematizes it; all the scenes in which Lilith shows up are pictured in white and black technique, with slow-motion camera, with eliptic framing and with short and middle length cuts. The part of the story concerning Luke can be considered as an untypical Manipeic satire. The plot is typical as for the Picaro’s novel, so a Picaro is included, Luke, who gets into a lot of adventures, but this Picaro is a sole adventurer, he doesn’t ask himself the final questions, as it is in the Picaro’s novel and the Manipeic novel. Luke stays on the surface, he has a criminal behaviour, he makes a social (head–hunter) and sexual (incest) excess, but he doesn’t look for a utopia or a better social order, on the contrary. A thorough carnivalization of the second story has been made, the joyful relativity of things has been shown (Hasan), through the grotesque, moronic behaviour of the Turks in the dramatic moments and a desemantization of the ideological categories (Šeleva), the portraiting of the mythologicalized but unbold Teacher and the portraiting of the “ill at the Bospor” as a top European decadent.
One of the Mančevski’s main narration strategies in “Dust” is the sense of schisophrenia, realizing the spaciousness of time or, as in one of the rare voice-overs is said “Macedonia is a country in which the centuries gile up and live one to another, not like in the West, one by one”. Surely, this segregation and schisodesigning of Macedonia is one of the most difficult and not defendable mystifications of Mančevski which he himself doesn’t quite succeed to elaborate in the film as he should. That is, as mentioned above, self-representation in the discourse of the other. The linear, the progressive, modernist mind has a need to see himself as a teleological creature, opposing everybody else as schisophrenic and unable of telos. Mančevski accepts that kind of self-stigmatization, forgetting to present that the USA, (e.g.) are not less schisophrenic then the Balkans at the same time, at any time and everywhere. The centuries gile the way the ideological and the discourse pattern conceptualizes them, for the postmodernists panschisophrenic, anytime and everywhere, for the modernism as a telos, but only for the privileged. From the other side, even that Mančevski’s delusion is not quite elaborated by him in the movie except through the Manaki’s short fiction films; the complete other display of Macedonia looks modernist compact, in the limits of renovations of cubism, as an effort for once again expressing of that time “choreography of violence”. How Mančevski realizes the “Macedonian Guernica” with a specific reduction of characters and their approaching to one category: slaughters. In the movie everybody uses violence, severe and fascinating. As a matter of fact, their show up at the film screen consists only of preparation for murder and murder. Picasso’s cubism is created of multiplicity of view points. The camera, hyperrealistically, i.e. introducing the reality in the most miniature details, but on such a believable level regarding the technical and the visual methods, that creates a new level of reality, hyperreal, more real then the reality itself, (Epstein), it follows the character’s destiny, all the way to his dying. In the composition of the frame, all the limitations of the character’s view of the world enters unrefined. The viewpoints change through the speed the characters die or get out from the battle.
The first narration line contains all the aspect of a realistic story. In it, cynically, using parody, spectacular, by simulation, an entrance in the hyperreality of the urban megalopolises is made. The film starts with a long sequence (some say it’s an auto-quotation, though that’s an old Altman’s trick) in which the simultaneousity and the variety of living are catalogued (attributes according to David Lodge).
Here Mančevski again breaks the realistic discourse with a few postmodernist techniques (according to David Lodge): contradiction (a sentimental thief, a strong granny), a short circuit (a slash between the world and the text), permutation (refusing the obligation of choice, giving more, all the possibilities). He breaks the characterization cliches, but also supports them: ruthlessness of the doctors, the black as small thieves and the white as an organized mob. If the music is looked from the aspect of the homologous following of the thematic – genre model, and that’s the main thing it gets all the honours for, we’ll have to disagree and admit that from that aspect it functions only half-successfully, i.e. to say, the point is missed. Far more adequate would be the correlation between the rap as a music expression and culture of the black’s neighbourhood to which Edge belongs with “Teskoto”(slow macedonian folk dance) from the memory world of Angela, then the correlation between the “techno” and “Teskoto” which in the movie functions (as it is done) only with the marginal calling of the girl in the plane.
* * *
#9 The postmodernism shows that there is not an original and genuine work, but there are only transformations and displacing of the already known language creations (quotations of the quotations, transfigurations of the quotations, language traces). The history of art and culture shows itself as a grid and a map of the ”language traces” which the artist arbitrary uses so he can produce momentary, unstable and open representations. (Mishko Shuvakovic)
Translated by: Biljana Ognenova
–––––––––––-
Reference library:
Waugh, Patricia. (1992). “Stalemates? Feminists, postmodernist and unfinished issues in modern aesthetics” in: Modern literary theory: a comparative introduction, (ed. Ann Jefferson). London: B.T.Batsford ltd, pp. 341-360
Debeljak, Alesh (1989). “Postmodern Sphinx : Continuity of the Modern and the Postmodern”. Celovec-Salzburg: Weiser foundation
Epstein Mihail. (1998). Postmodernism , Belgrade: Zepter book world
Zlatar, Andrea. (1988). “What’s modern in the modern literature” in: Postmoderna. Zbornik, Sarajevo: Radio Sarajevo -Third Program, pp.92-98
Ivekovic, Rada. (1988). “The empty place of the other in the postmodern thought” in “The Postmodern – a new ere or a delusion”, (Ivan Kuvacic, Gvozden Flego, ed.) Zagreb: Naprijed, pp.107-118
Owens, Craig. (1989). “The discourse of others: Feminists and postmodernism” in: The anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture, (ed. Hal Foster), Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, pp. 57-82
Lee, Alison. (1990). Realism and power: Postmodern British fiction, London: Routledge
Lech Miodynski. (1996). “The new radicalism of macedonian literature” in: Postmodernism in Literature and Culture of Central and Eastern Europe, Katowice, pp. 189-200
Lodge, David. (1988). “The ways of modern writing”, Zagreb: Globus
Mchale, Brian. (1987). Postmodernist fiction, London and New York: Routledge
Sarkanjac, Branislav. (2001). “Macedonian Catehrezis”, Skopje
Habermas, Jurgen. (1989). “Modernity-an incomplete project” in: The anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture, (ed. Hal Foster), Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, pp. 3-15
Hassan, Ihab. (1987). “Pluralizam u postmodernoj perspektivi” in: Quorum, br. 3-4, Zagreb, pp. 23-42
Hutcheon, Linda (1995). A poetics of posmodernism. New York: Routledge
Jameson, Frederick. (1985). “Postmodernism or a cultural logic of the late capitalism ” in: Radio Beograd-Third Program, num. 64, Belgrade, pp. 181-228
Janks, Charles. (1985).” The language of the postmodern architecture”, Belgrade
Janks, Charles. (1990). “Vrednosti postmodernizma” in: Delo, num.5-7, Belgrade, pp. 130-198
Šeleva, Elizabeta. (1996).”Comparative poetics”, Skopje: Feniks
Suvakovic, Misko. (1995).”The Postmodern -73 clues”, Belgrade