1
Two recent Julys mark my humble service to the Zeta rulers Balšić - the one last year, when, courtesy of the State Archives of Croatia in Dubrovnik, I recorded 14 charters, sent by her hand to the people of Dubrovnik from 1368 to 1397, and this July 2019, when I, in Heb, Czech Republic, on near the border with Germany (Germans call it Eger) filmed a part of a feature film with the working title "Balšići Catalog".
I stuffed the raw film material into my backpack and with a small crew started to retreat across Germany to Montenegro. The space between two Julys is filled with doubts, about which I want to say a word or two further, with the intention of showing the working version on August 8 in the Maritime Museum in Kotor as part of the exhibition "Balšići Catalog/Film Exhibition".
2
In a purely artistic sense, I am attracted to men who have experienced the ups and downs. That's why I decided on Balša II (reigned 1372 - 1385). An educated man who is forced to fight bloodthirsty and simpletons around him - is there a heavier burden on earth?
During those thirteen years of power, he understood everything. That may have crossed his mind at the time when he fell cut by a saber, on Saurski polje, on the banks of the Vojuša River, but I didn't get there.
Did he enjoy the music? Was he gentle with his wife and daughter and sometimes spoke Greek with them? Did he overlook the evil in his heart, like all men, or did he accept it not as lax morals and overpowering but as a point of view?
Why does he move from Ulcinj to Prevlaka, as long as he is fascinated with the mirror and with the invention of glasses, how does he see the wonders of his time? What does love, friendship, politics mean to him, what are the Mlečići and what are the Turks - those were my doubts.
3
Who are the Balšićs, I thought as I crossed the Danube near Regensburg, and would they even recognize themselves in this heavy glow of rye and wheat ahead of the upcoming harvest, which is a little late in northern Bavaria?
Certainly, I think, they would recognize themselves in the German or any other European grain, in the heavy shine of the rye classes drooping under the weight of their deadly ripeness, as in Greek or Turkish, because they were worldly people of their time and perceived the world as a cultural whole and not as ethnographic exuberance and habit.
Admittedly, they did not live at the height of the most global empire, the Byzantine, where as a Levantine or an Egyptian, a Seljuk or a Balkan, a Jew or a black Ethiopian, you had the same chances as a Greek or a Latin in the middle of Constantinople, if you were loyal and capable - (it was a long time ago that Byzantium was for the Balšićs) - they had already tasted the rot of the empire, so they enjoyed the privilege only culturally. It hooked me and I got attached to what a movie story is looking for - a man who takes off and falls.
4
On the small land of today's Montenegro, a dozen languages crossed paths in ancient and prehistoric times. Three of them are world languages (Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic). When you add Romance and Western languages, and the Slovenian vernacular, with its epic and dialectal delta, a small tower of Babel rises.
The film is a gentle language of attraction and a brutal language of conflict between two or more people.
The young Balšić experienced the former with Princess Komnina of Valona, the latter with so many opponents who address him in the heavy folk tone of bloodbaths and battles.
The dilemma of how to reconcile all this with local and foreign actors disappeared the moment they spoke in their own language. This discourse likes diversity and every film, if we're honest, takes place in several languages, at least on the working level.
Wittgenstein is right, language is more spacious than the world.
5
Princess Komnina Balšić is played by the Czech actress Karolína Jägerová, who at my request learned some Montenegrin words and sentences, and Vojisava, the duke's half-sister, about whom I still have doubts, is played by a young Prague actress who will quickly become famous - Klára Marxová.
To Vuk Čelebić, who plays the master of Zeta, I said briefly and clearly: "Keep your wits about you, Balšić, in this budget poverty, a weak actor would be too severe a punishment for me!"
Izabela Aria, who represents the little princess Ruđina Balšić at the age of six, and Ester Claire (Ruđina at the age of eleven when her father tells her she is old enough to marry and betroths her to the Serbian nobleman Mrkša Žarković) are a special page and decoration of the Balšić catalog. When she was a girl in Zeta, Ruđina had no idea that, thirty-three years after her father's death, she would get control of Budva and eventually escape to Dubrovnik with the Budva treasury (1418).
6
How did the Balšićs feel among foreigners at their court - a German doctor, an astronomer, for example, a Portuguese, an Italian engineer, a black or mulatto cook, a Jewish financier, a Hungarian falconer - did they enjoy dinner at a table where multiple languages were spoken, in bed with a woman coming from another speech?
In the film, however, this is no longer a dilemma but something normal, a discourse.
The genres of novels and films demonstrate their full power right there, in their fullness, in their worldliness, in their cosmopolitan urge towards wholeness, and that's why I like to see them as the pillars on which modern culture rests (I see Balšić as the pillars of national consciousness).
7
Why did I combine the incompatible charters of Dubrovnik to the Balšići and Balšići to the Dubrovnik people from the 14th century with the film and how, in general, did I create something as brutal as the film's story? In other words, how do you knead a scone made from a handful of rye?
From the postmodernists, or rather among them, I learned to combine the incompatible. I am excited by dangerous connections (I borrow the term from Miloš Forman, and he borrowed it from a French writer from the Napoleonic era named Choderlos de Laclos) in literature, film and life. I am familiarizing opposites to the limit, to bursting. That's how I dream about the difficult maturity of the whole, which for a long time resists shaping and torments me, just as Vojisava, the duke's half-sister torments the virtuous Balšić with scandals of infidelity in the film.
8
From the highway Linz - Vienna, in Lower Austria, by the Danube, the road leads to a monastery that I have been wanting to visit for a long time. - It is one of the most famous in the world: Melk.
The Benedictine library was already famous to him in the 14th century and Balšić could have known about Melk through one of the foreign scholars at his court in Zeta. He was made more popular by the young monk named after him, Adson of Melk, in the movie "The Name of the Rose" based on the novel of the same name by Umberto Ezzo (the young man is played by Christian Slater).
I won't get lucky this time either. The sky in the mountains above Melko is darkening and a storm is coming... Gentlemen of Balšić, pull your bonds in the sky, which you have certainly acquired as exemplary Christians of your time!...
9
Of the eight Balšićs: Balša I, Stracimir, Đurđa I, Đurđa II, Balša III, Ivaniš and Gojko (died young before 1403), Balša II is the closest to me and I honestly could not explain why, if not because he I observe from the point of view of evil and good but from the point of view of tenderness and fate.
Despite everything, I can't finish this movie until I see his right hand on the battlefield slicing an opponent in half.
10
Komnina: "What is troubling you, my lord?" Balša: "The Turks." "What else?" “The mirror.” "What more?" "More Turks. I have to seriously assess their strength.” History says that the prince underestimated the strength of his opponent. The author of this film thinks otherwise. He believes that Balšić just fulfilled his destiny. In the mirror of history. Like a star.
11
What were the women of Balšić like?
The film raises questions of this kind so that they are comprehensible to all of us, through tension, mystery, surprise, in contrast to philosophy, which questions the same but in a way comprehensible to mostly educated people.
12
It seems paradoxical, but the fourteenth century in our country is covered in the light of one woman with the power of her shadow: Jelena Lena Balšić. Everyone knows who she is and an over-explanation would be aggressive. I've been writing plays and screenplays for so many years - I'm not used to keeping quiet about my life or the lives of others - but I would hardly find a woman like Jelena Balšić in Europe, let alone our environment - she is so strong.
Mrs. Lena married Đurđe II Stracimirović, a year after the death of Balša II, gave birth to an heir, Balša III, led diplomatic negotiations (she negotiated with the Mlečići in Venice in 1409) and left a significant literary mark in her correspondence with her confessor Nikon of Jerusalem - but who are the other wives of Balšić, what is the feminine aura of these brave men who spent more time on the battlefield than in bed?
13
Balša's fate is followed by two women, wife Komnina and daughter Ruđina, both of whom ruled after the prince's death (they got ius civiliansRepublic of Dubrovnik 1397). Komnina led politics and wars shortly after the death of Balša II, and her daughter longer, after the death of her husband Mrkša Žarković, from 1413 to 1417. when she sold her Valona to the Mlečićs for 10.000 ducats.
After the era of Balšić, women in this area had a worse and more difficult time, measured by the arshins of their time, in relation to the technological and cultural situation of the Petrović era, for example, or the new century, with less legal power than during the time of the Zeta masters - that is not excluded either. miracle?
In this constellation, even the 20th century does not promise too much, when a woman is forced to hard work, ideological and patriarchal terror, to concentration camps, to a stalemate in the politics of both family and society - or is the impression deceiving?
14
"Is the repression of sexuality really a historical record?" - asks Michel Foucault in his History of sexuality. "Is it just a blueprint or, on the other hand, the realization of the regime of suppression of sexuality since the 17th century? (...) Are prohibition, censorship and contestation really general forms of exercising power in all societies and not least in ours? (…) Is this critical discourse, which turned to repression, directed against it in order to block the path of the mechanism of power - which until now functioned without resistance - or is it an integral part of the same historical network?" (see Histoire de la sexualité, Gallimard, Paris, 1984, 17).
15
Yes, the Balšićs are one of the pillars of the modern Montenegrin state. How much do we even know about them?
Not too much. This is where the biggest doubt lies.
Our historiography does not offer God knows what from the time of Yugoslav knowledge, chewed up, let's not lie, in the disabled limping for modern knowledge. A scientist who would eventually penetrate the spirit of the Montenegrin dynasties must know at least one of the classical languages - Greek or Latin - and at least two of the Western languages.
What was the daily life of Balšić and Crnojević like, what did they sow and what did they reap, what did they eat and drink, how did they see the wounds of their souls and bodies, how did they love and how did they bleed? What did a woman, faith, word, devil, sin, art, glory mean to them, what was heaven and what was the grave?
In European historiography, there is a lot about the land where the Balšićs rode and sailed, but the field needs to be crossed.
16
Despite their ignorance, here, so many people pound their fists into their chests and their mouths are full of Balšić like oatmeal.
“Oooooh, yes!” - what would the ruler of Zeta say in a conversation with his Venetian advisor (Effective Auditor) in the film.
Bonus video:
