The literary program of the 37th Grad Teatar festival continued last night with the guest appearance of Snježana Banović, director, theater expert, writer and full professor at the Production Department of the Academy of Dramatic Arts, University of Zagreb.
The moderator of the evening was Janko Ljumović, a professor, writer and producer who said that the theatrical approach and research into the history of the Croatian national theater is an important element that connects Snježana Banović with modernity.
"Then we come to that important activity of hers, which is activist and public, because Snježana, both as a publicist and a columnist, works very publicly in the area of Croatia and the region. That activism and Snježana's connection not only within the academic community but also within civil society is extremely important. The books, studies and texts authored by Snjezana Banović enter the field of theater art, theatrology, cultural studies, cultural politics and the culture of memory in a meaningful, innovative, brave and lucid manner."
Banović thanked Ljumović for the compliment, the audience for visiting in large numbers this evening, but also pointed out that this is her fifth time in Budva.
"I am simply overjoyed to have such an audience, colleagues, and the administration of the City Theater, to whom I thank for the invitation. I highly appreciate this festival and it is an honor to be on the jury for awarding the "City Theater" award, she said, after which she spoke about her book "The State and its Theatre".
"That book came out of a necessity and my frustration. When I started thinking about a doctorate, it was a phase in my life when I decided to stop directing forever, I started a doctorate and it was difficult to find a topic. I was against the mentor assigning me a topic, I believed that I had to find a passion within me that would pull me for at least five years while I was writing my first book in my life, with which I would receive that academic title. This is where my frustration is very important, because Croatian theater has one big problem, it likes to keep quiet. Carpets are a favorite prop, let's put as many under the carpet as possible when we have a problem. Especially when it comes to the issue of certain communities and things involving Serbs, it is a favorite thing in Croatia. Then during socialism, which was extremely fruitful in terms of theatrology, theater history and history in general, there was a tacit agreement to include the time of the NDH in some encyclopedias so that it is skipped. We somehow understood that there was nothing in that period and no one got hold of it. I told my mentor that I wanted to work in the theater during the NDH, because it was then the central institution for propaganda. The same people who worked there in 1941 continued to work in 1945 and I only know that some drama happened there that had no victims, no one lost their life, but some did. They were punished in some courts of honor and we had those few sentences in our textbooks and theater books, and the best ones were from Nikola Batušić, at that time my mentor, the grandson of Branko Gavela, who played a very important role in that period of Croatian theaters", said Banović and added that at the beginning of writing, she only had myths instead of literature, so she had to visit the archives.
"The theater is most dependent on politics in Croatia, because Croats are very obedient and the theater has been obedient to them through various periods. I was looking for moments of rebellion and there were only a few of them, and the important one happened precisely during the time of the Croatian National Theater in 1942, when that group of actors led by Vjek Afrić rebelled and left "Faust" after the premiere and said "let's go to the partisans" . That was interesting to me, because I knew that there was something going on there besides Nazi propaganda, that is Ustasha propaganda. We are no longer in socialism when I write this, but in the new Croatia, in which Franjo Tuđman and his elite have an ambivalent attitude. They would like something, but they must not say what. And they wouldn't, because Jasenovac was there, if we say something, the Serbs will mention Jasenovac, so we won't give it to them, come on, we won't talk about it either. They asked me why I write about the theater during the Second World War because it was a dictatorship, and I think there was more than a dictatorship. That's how I see through conversations that no one will read that book of mine. However, Batušić passed away, but he told me that I would come across a letter from his grandfather in which he wrote to Pavelić and proved to him that he was a real Croat. That's how I got to the archives, because there was simply nothing. I started digging and I spent three years in the archives, and it was the most beautiful time of my life, besides my marriages," said Banović.
For the writing of the second book "Crisis Theater" the "culprit" is a colleague whom Banović did not name, but she revealed how the meeting took place during which she got the idea for writing.
"He was terribly disappointed when he found out that the book about the Ustasha theater was not an apology. He is a right-winger and a director, he met me on the street and told me that he had read it. Then he told me that I had a debt and that I should write just as critically about my partisans. He put a bug in my head. They weren't my partisans, but okay, that's how he arranged it in his head. In Croatia, everyone puts people in drawers, I'm in the partisan drawer, I didn't know. He wanted to provoke me, but he gave me an idea and I came up with an idea for a new book during a year's break between two books. So not every bad intention is against you, sometimes bad intentions motivate, such as his provocation. For five years I lived with that book about the theater of the first period 1945-1955. in Yugoslavia. At that time, Đilas was the most responsible person for culture, and Zogović for literature and the whole complex surrounding socialist realism, why it was impossible to implement it in the theater, why everyone interpreted in their own way how to act and direct in a socialist realist way. My book is dedicated to four young actors who somehow perished in that period in 1941 for many reasons, mostly because they were either Serbs or Jews or communists. They died for their beliefs and lives. I only realized that my book made sense when I presented it to my students, because they understood that this system, this Tuđman democracy in which they were born, will never say or admit that all this happened. And the fact that I did not write an apology for the Ustasha, but a critical scientific work. Right-wingers can't forgive me for that, while leftists, on the other hand, can't forgive me for not being very hostile. I became a scientist with that book, I had no role models except Batušić, who wasn't around then, I wasn't even interested in these others because they didn't teach me anything."
Banović said that Croatian theater is extremely conservative.
"It has always been conservative, it has that in its backbone, it likes to be conservative. When someone steps forward, it is difficult for him to resist. It was not easy for Branko Brezovac, he decided to be himself, to endure and not change, he had support but he came from the student theater. The proof of my hypothesis, which is actually not even a hypothesis but the truth, is the Croatian "Croatian Faust", a drama by Slobodan Šnajder. The Croatian Theater could not find the strength to show that drama in Zagreb, and that drama speaks of everything that my book is about. Schneider went through the same research about NDH as I did, with the fact that he published that drama in the eighties, and I published two thousand. In all this time, that drama has still not been performed in Zagreb. He was everywhere, but after the nineties he was no longer. That's fear," said Banović and added that she has the impression that she is always fighting and that no one will publish her.
"There is only one portal, but I have to be careful because they are about to be canceled because they are too critical. And they are financed by the Ministry of Culture, headed by a person whom I would not like to talk about. I drag everything I do into its origin, I look for the cause of every phenomenon in Croatian theater that disgusts me and then I write, but I must always return to the cause, because I believe that in Croatia there is this great movement of the non-culture of forgetting. I am ten years younger than Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić and all those "witches from Rio". I got fired from HNK exactly ten years after Mira Furlan, but since I wasn't a star and it wasn't the time, my dismissal didn't ring a bell. I didn't let it ring, I fought to the end with those structures. I went through all these experiences and it doesn't worry me at all, I almost reached retirement and why would I worry if I would write something and if I would resent someone. They all complain and say "she is the one who writes her books", that's what they call my books. Let's see those "booklets" of theirs and compare them, if only by pages, and that's some kind of analysis."
Speaking about her latest book, Banović revealed that it is about her personal history of the city of Zagreb in the eighties of the last century.
"There is also (Stip) Šuvar and Ljubiša Ristic and (Džonij) Štulić, that is my personal history, the history of my city of Zagreb and my country of Yugoslavia. I cringe at the term former Yugoslavia, when they speak of the former NDH and the former Austro-Guarska, then I will also speak of the former Yugoslavia. It is a mapping of my growing up in the family, rock and roll in Zagreb in the eighties which was crazy, about the new wave of Croatian theatre. There were many interesting things there. My entry into that temple, that's the name of one chapter "entering the temple", a world that changed everything in my life and I would always repeat that decision even though it was difficult. Inside there were people I knew and met, and I thank them for the fact that I learned a lot from them, from Djoni (Štulić) to Ljubiša Ristić to Stipe Šuvar, Igor Mandić and all those people I met as a young girl. There were also a lot of anonymous people from whom I learned a lot, who are no longer there. There are more dead than alive, too many.”
Questions from the audience followed, during which academician Siniša Jelušić called Snježana Banović the Hannah Arendt of Croatian theater and asked her how she views contemporary Croatian theater and whether there has been any progress. Banović replied that she had no friends in the Croatian theater, nor did she have any desire to return to it.
"I think the problem with Croatian theater is that it is deeply petty-bourgeois. There are individuals and projects that shine, but it is like snow on warm ground. It doesn't last, these people don't support themselves, they starve, they have to change jobs. It is a system that eats its children and it is terrible. The Ministry of Culture does not care about its artists, they have the impression that they cover everything quite diversely. There is no strategy, but as it comes, as who is obedient. Croatian theater lives in fear, I can't praise any of it. Obedience, coupling with politics for money, fear and that's it. Unfortunately, I don't think I will see that paradigm shift."
Theatricologist Ivan Medenica was interested in what the student scene gave birth to, and what is still vital in the Croatian theater today, and how to map the achievements of the student scene. Banović said that everything took off in 1968.
"In Zagreb, wings unseen before, and unimaginable today, have developed. Today we don't have any student troupe, it doesn't exist. And the existence of some institutions that developed that potential within themselves, for example ITD Theater and Vjeran Zuppa. Today, it is unimaginable that a person at the age of 26 gets a theater to run. Just as it was unimaginable for a person at the age of 35 to become the head of the National People's Congress, as Marijan Matković came in 1949, a great Croatian writer, playwright and critic. Today they are children, they are our students when they return to their master's degree. The whole financial situation, city structures, policy change, general democratization. It has nothing to do with 1971, only the students protested. It was all student affairs that ended up in prison, it wasn't their parents. The student theater developed there naturally, it suffocated itself in the late eighties, and definitely in the nineties. There is nothing left but Brezovec, who still directs his plays in his own way and in his own manner, that is already thick mannerism. The man has energy, he is now directing in Bitola. That's actually the only man from the theater I hang out with.”
The audience's questions on Poets' Square turned into a conversation, and Siniša Jelušić was interested in what was happening with Krleža, and Banović said that he had become institutionalized.
"He led some big projects, he even came up with some. He was involved in cultural politics, his influence became significant for some people because he founded institutions that still live in our country today. He rebuilt Zadar after the bombing, he had concrete jobs and he cared about having a good relationship with Tito. There is the secret of his retreat in the sense of that voice in the wilderness as he would say, which was no more. He wanted to be good with Tito and he was until the end. In this new book "Chronicle of happy moments - excerpts from the crazy eighties" I convey that "in memoriam". We have somewhat forgotten what kind of propagandistic "in memoriam" Krleža, a man of such style, writes in two sentences when Tito dies. It's something incredible. Bela Krleža played her part there with her aspirations to be the champion of the Croatian National Theater, until she was sixty-something she played Baroness Kasteli. There are myths that will never be broken. I tried to count everything that the two of them, that is, she acted during the NDH. It's a never-ending sequence. What did she have to do in HNK in front of Pavelić in order for them to stay alive and continue to live in their salon. And then they moved to another salon. Those illustrations of her celebrations during the post-war poverty, when they celebrate and have fun. And they were poor as mice when they got married, they had an umbrella. Igor Mandić has a great title that says "The tick from the head to 1945".
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