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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm

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Who's Singin' Over There? (Ko To Tamo Peva 1980)




WHO’S SINGIN’ OVER THERE“ – One of the most brilliant Serbian films of all time
Slobodan Šijan’s highly paced cult debut Who’s Singin’ Over There? (written by famous Serbian playwright & screenwriter Dušan Kovačević) revolves around a group of bus passengers heading towards Belgrade. The story is set on the 5th of April 1941,  one day before the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia by bombarding Belgrade. The unlikely voyagers on the rusty bus seem to come from all parts of the kingdom – there is a World War I veteran, a TB-infected, moaner, a pop singer eager to attract the attention of a fellow female passenger, the woman’s husband, an unlucky hunter, a Nazi sympathizer, and finally the bus crew – father and son (conductor and driver), who are careful to “comply with the rules” until one of the passengers dares them to drive two kilometres blind-folded without crashing the bus.






        1. 8.8/10IMDb4.1/5Letterboxd

    1. Initial release: January 1, 1980
      Director: Slobodan Šijan
      Music by: Vojislav Kostić
      Written by: Dušan Kovačević
      Serbo-Croatian: Ko to tamo peva


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Dusan Kovacevic IMDb








The Iconic Passengers

The film is an ensemble piece where each character represents a different archetype of Yugoslav society:

  • The Conductor (Pavle Vuisić): A greedy, rule-obsessed, yet strangely sentimental man.

  • Miško (Aleksandar Berček): The simple-minded son and driver, famous for his father’s boast that he can "drive two kilometers blindfolded."

  • The Singer (Dragan Nikolić): A dandy and wannabe crooner who spends the trip trying to seduce the young bride.

  • The Germanophile (Danilo "Bata" Stojković): A stickler for "order and discipline" who constantly praises German efficiency, unaware of the destruction they are about to bring.

  • The Veteran (Milivoje Tomić): An old man obsessed with his past military glories.

  • The Hunter (Taško Načić): A clumsy man with a shotgun that poses more danger to the passengers than any game.













  • Impending Doom: The movie is a masterclass in tension. While the passengers argue over bus tickets and missing wallets, the audience knows that the historical "end of the world" is only hours away.

  • Social Satire: It critiques the narrow-mindedness, xenophobia (the passengers eventually scapegoat the Roma musicians), and the stubbornness of the various social classes.

  • The Ending: Without spoiling the final moments, the arrival in Belgrade coincides with the start of WWII in Yugoslavia. The transition from slapstick comedy to harrowing tragedy is one of the most famous tonal shifts in cinema history.







Legacy

"Ko to tamo peva" is arguably the most quoted film in the former Yugoslavia. Phrases like "Vozi, Miško!" (Drive, Miško!) and "I tata bi, sine" (Dad would too, son) have become permanent parts of the regional lexicon. In 1996, members of the Yugoslav Academy of Film Art and Science voted it the best Yugoslav film made in the 1947–1995 period.











MARATHON FAMILY (

Maratonci trce pocasni krug 1982) 





Slobodan Sijan and his writer Dusan Kovacevic, whose first feature was the similarly themed but not as effective “Who’s Singin’ Over There?,” are telling us right off that an era is ending. At the same time, the ceremonial pomp and circumstance in the newsreels is so elaborate and stupendous as to be amusingly self-deflating, thus providing a prologue for the demolishing humor to come. By its end, “The Marathon Family” has skewered not only timeless human greed and folly but also foreshadowed the unparalleled barbarity so shortly to sweep over Europe with World War II. Yet Sijan and Kovacevic’s ability to find something funny in the absurdity of evil never falters.













Balkan Spy (Balkanski špijun 1984)


  2. MORE ABOUT FILM 
Balkan Spy (Balkanski špijun) is a 1984 Yugoslav comedy movie, directed by Dušan Kovačević and Božidar ‘Bota’ Nikolić.

Ilija Čvorović, a former Stalinist who spent several years in a prison on Goli otok, is contacted by the police to routinely answer questions about his tenant, Petar Markov Jakovljević, a businessman, who spent twenty years living in Paris, and now has returned to Belgrade to open a tailor shop. After only several minutes, Ilija is free to go, however, he is starting to suspect that his tenant might be a spy. As the movie goes on, his paranoia increases and more people gets involved: his wife, his daughter, his brother, Jakovljevic’s friends.


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