A note about two partisans

When I first encountered dramas Train Fosea, his significant pauses seemed somehow familiar to me. No, it wasn't him Chekhov, it is not Beckett, it was an experience beyond literature. And then, in the first conversation with him, it dawned on me - that's how he speaks Bozo Koprivica. Different from the way he writes.

You had to be able to keep quiet when talking to him. Then Bota, continuing this unusual conversation in silence, would follow some trail of his luxurious associations. Looking at you with his eyes Garage Finished from the movie Exactly at noon, while he visits Hadleyville. In his texts, which are always autobiographies about others, he is violent, playful, witty, cynical, passionate. His sentences are dribbles and volleys, and, above all, double passes. Texts by B. Koprivica, and everything is, in fact, one big Text, one exercise book, are composed according to dramaturgical principles: between seemingly distant fragments there is a connection that works both ways, like a bow and a lyre. In this imaginative play opened by the (un)expected hypotext, new layers of meaning are born. The quote takes on the function of an invisible cut, a transition between two frames, between two contents. Rhythm is the most important here; in the text, as well as on the stage.

Rhythm as an imprint of a gift.

You could meet him in Nikšić, Belgrade, the Cinematheque, Karver, the theater... In the theater, Bota could be everything: stage manager, prompter, and actor. Just as football is first learned on the street, so mise-en-scène is first learned in the square, on that perfect stage. That's how, he said, Nikšić's Mediterranean market.

You need to know how to conquer space. And how to shorten it. And then forget everything and surrender to the game. “The game carried him where walking would never have taken him,” says Andrić.

In his Games to book, writes that he would like to play two silent roles in the film we are preparing: one in Constantinople, the other in Cetinje. We were thinking that it would be a good idea to go to Constantinople by boat, not because of the instructions Thomas Mann about Venice, that you have to enter the city from the sea, because entering from the land is like entering a palace through the back door, but because of the inscription Nicholas I: On my way here to Istanbul, I thought about how many troops had crossed this same sea to Montenegro. How many remained there, how many returned here, wounded and exhausted.

After he received the award Veljko Mandic, we talked about the (im)transience of the art of acting, the importance of division, pauses and syncopations. About the film Elvira Madigan's Big Love, Good Viderberga, and the most beautiful suicide scene. And then about the movie Ran, Kurosavin Lira (Veljko would be the perfect Lear), in which, after a series of bloody battle scenes, death comes again as a sound...

***

Faster than sound, the news of death spread Duško Vujošević, the legendary coach of Partizan. I worked with him on a film about Voj Stanić, about his spirit and work, his century... Thanks to Duško, we have come across paintings that have long been in private galleries, accessible only to a narrow circle of friends. With the same fervor he displayed by the basketball court line, he spoke about Vojo's painting and the gift of friendship. "I consider myself privileged to have been able to sit with him and enjoy his humor and wisdom. I don't know how I deserved that privilege, but I am aware that I had it."

Play is an important element in Vojo's paintings. Perhaps this is why, as well as the colors of the endlessly extended Mediterranean day on his canvases, he claimed that his first encounter with Vojo's paintings at an exhibition in Belgrade in 1988 changed his life.

In his brilliant memory, which stored a large catalog of Vojo's works, Duško knew when each painting was created, when he first saw it, what its further fate was. As well as in which of Vojo's paintings balls are an important part of the props. Because a ball, as Bota knows, has a perfect, divine shape.

***

Both Bota and Duško were partisans, both in that and this era. And they knew how to raise their voices when necessary and in a way that made their voices heard. I'm a partisan, I'm proud of that, not everyone can be that.

They also knew that every true dilemma is a moral dilemma, and every choice is to be or not to be.

They knew how to choose.