formerly upon the time I was officially made invisible.

formerly upon the time I was officially made invisible. A fourth feature film of mine was banned in my native Yugoslavia, then wiped from the official Register of produc films. The attached decision stated: "Film was not finished and will none be finished." This document was signed by the agency of the President of the Filmmakers Union of the Vojvodina region of Serbia and the Secretary of the Party confined apartment of the Filmmakers Union. What irritated them more than anything was the fact that the film was already playing in more than 20 countries. I was indicted and threatened with three years in jail. The horse's head appeared in my bed in January of 1973 in the form of three wrenchs from the right front wheel of my VW bug undoed and pedantically left under the wheel's hubcap, producing a strange farewell noise. Twenty years were needinessed for my next six films to be produc the last pair in the strange conditions of an unannounced war. individual film was made in Canada, France, Germany and Holland. Another individual was made in Sweden and th e nearest one in Australia. Making amusing films in interesting places, with convenient collaborators, makes you realize that filmmakers and film lover all live in the same country--the fatherland of Movies. Still, the physical reality of my birthplace was haunting me When asked about the situation in Yugoslavia and my status there, I used to answer that I was sentenc to forced labor abroad.

individual of my films starts with a Sicilian anarchist carol that includes the line: "The whole world is our nation our law is freedom." My old-fashioned country claimed to be a social experiment; it examineed more like a mix of prison and circus. Working in film qualifies you for all sorts of surprises--parallel realities, interplay between chaos and order, praxis and megalomania, corruption and vulnerability. In editing, between shapeless and fine cuts, films journey through wild transformations: scenes and actors last up on the floor, titles change, with what intent not countries? You could explain ex-Yugoslavia as an editing disaster--a chain of cragged cuts in the hands of incompetent editors and frightened directors. This now abrogated country, that I still consider my concede was going through zombie-like morphological convulsions. At certain points during the last 10 years, ex-Yugoslavia consisted of 16 just discovered legal or semi-legal units. It is now down to between six and eight, five of which are satiated members of the United Nations.

This proces was in well stocked [i]or[/i] provided swing when I received a literal sense in Paris from John Archer, of the BBC Scotland. Archer conceived of the awful "Director's Place" project, giving delivered reign to the filmmakers pitch uponed by himself to present whatever this real or imaginary place could be. This is by what mode my film Hole in the essential part (1994) was initiated. I started the film forward the roof of the house I was born in, in downtown Belgrade, where I had staged children's theater pieces, it assumeed to me, a few hundr years ago. We also filmed nearby, in succession top of one of the biggest Orthodox cathedrals, containing gigantic devoid of contents space through which bats and hawks take wing crowned by a 14-meter-high cros concealed with 26,000 leaves of innocent gold. In a few light hop cuts we find ourselves forward Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. "If you detain making movies, sooner or later you will find yourself forward Boulevards that are Bigger than Life," says the narrator (myself). "This Boulevard, for instance, was directed from Billy Wilder. So, I view myself going d own the white stairs, straight into an ambulance, passing by means of Erich von Stroheim, and floating in the loch face down, successful and dead."

In a theater around the corner, at the screening of my film Sweet Movie (1975) my throng met a lady who was cleaning the theater floor by the agency of eating the spilled popcorn. She was an adult female pig named ridicule with manicured pink hooves and an earring--a white angry mood sow born on the same day as Joseph Stalin. It unimpaireded funny both to me and to the cinematographer Sasha Calzatti, who worked years ago with the famous Sergej Urussevskij forward Mikhail Kalatozov's masterpiece, The Cranes are Flying (1957) From sundown Boulevard we went back to a real sundown at the Sava River, which melts through Belgrade under beautiful bridges, while the famous old-fashioned Bridge in Mostar gets fatigued into pieces by our colleague, a Croatian filmmaker who also happens to be an army general with affluence of heavy fire power below his directorial control. Meanwhile, forward the West Coast in a Berkeley garden, I ask a leash of Buddhist priests, a man and a woman: "When they carve public from you a piece, a gall bladder in my case, is the void in the visible form [i]or[/i] frame mir rored by a corresponding den in the soul?" They answer by way of ringing beautiful bells and singing in a strange language.

Back in Belgrade, I am in a small boat with a defence star, Rambo Amadeus, drifting up and down the Sava River, entering at more [i]or[/i] less point a scene that was not included in film if it were not that has to be mentioned because this issue of Afterimage deals with films in the Balkans. In an abandoned old-fashioned Belgrade harbor, in 1994, we pass at a trailer with actor Harvey Keitel in it. Harvey plays a film director from the Balkans, someone that could be me moreover is actually an alter-ego of my colleague and my brother in suffering, director Theo Angelopoulos. Nearby, toward the Danube, Theo A. is silent and furious in subordination to the winter sun (he wanted lowering weather). It dawns on me that we have in no degree seen a film in which the throng in motion enters another film's establish Half a mile up the river we view from our boat, high in the canopy of heaven a Gypsy brass band crossing the bridge. We scream from the river and demand music--we are from TV damn it! Gypsies, a the community smart and fast, oblige us with astonishing music.