There is something irresistible in Kiril Cenevski’s filmography, something that makes his film oeuvre special. It is the concentration of films and the events surrounding them in just 14-15 years of his life, from 1971 to 1985.
Kiril Cenevski, although born in the middle of the Second World War (Kriva Palanka 28.1.1943), is a member of that generation of Macedonian artists and intellectuals who, following the pattern of Western European culture, we can freely place in the so-called “baby boom” generation. Born “in time” to feel the blessing of some kind of economic well-being in the format of former socialist Yugoslavia from the second half of the sixties, and the opportunity to witness the last quixotic attempt to change the world, as the students tried in 1968. The French sociologist Edgar Moren says in The Spirit of the Times that the Paris Sixty-Eight Revolution actually resulted in only a minor reconstruction of higher education in France, but the spirit of freedom that had been unleashed among the masses of young people in Europe and the United States could no longer be put back into the bottle of conservatism.
Perhaps the claim that one of the faces of that 68-year-old spirit in Macedonian culture is Cenevski will sound pretentious, but his filmography somehow confirms it. Don’t look for classic documents and facts: rather trust Bob Dylan that the answer to what the revolutionary spirit was – “…blows in the wind”, as in his anthemic track “Blowin’ in the wind” (1963).
And precisely the appearance of Cenevski in Macedonian cinema is like an unusual strong wind, for whom it was claimed at the time that he came from “nowhere”. If the autodidactic approach and participation in film amateurism, without the diploma of the institutionalized film schools, can be defined as an entry into a national cinema from “nowhere”, then the entire French “new wave” and a good part of classical and “new Hollywood” would be outclassed at the very beginning of any analysis with such an approach.
On the other hand, in support of the mentioned claim, there are also some lapidary criticisms and echoes of Cenevski’s films: like that lucid remark from 1975, after the participation of JAD at the Pula Festival, that the author with the story about the Bogomilites in Macedonia, in fact, made a film about the “hippies of the 11th century”! In fact, you can love or hate Cenevsky, but you can never be indifferent to his films and aesthetic or political views. But let’s go in order.
“In the seventy-first year, one of the most significant film achievements in Macedonian film for its entire history of existence, including today, will appear on the screens. It is the first attempt, crowned with absolute success, to conquer the genre of the ancient tragedy on an almost contemporary material, it is the film with an astonishingly rounded style, mood, asceticism of the direction and the acting. We are talking about Kiril Cenevski’s film debut, BLACK SEED (1971), which at first glance seems to be another film about a camp theme, which was known to the Yugoslav filmmaker a long time ago, and is very well known to the film world, as one of the most successful models for researching the aesthetic, psychological, ideological motives of human behavior in extreme, borderline situations – let’s mention the convenient term of the existentialists – in the face of imminent death in a closed space, among similar prisoners, who are experiencing the same pains and sufferings, the same internal conflicts” – with these selected words the Russian film critic and researcher Miron Chernjenko in his book “Macedonian Film” (Macedonian Cinematheque, 1997, Skopje) sketches the appearance of Cenevsky. The filmologist and researcher Miroslav Chepincic, on the other hand, in the second book of the capital work “Macedonian feature film” (Kinetoka na Makedonija, 1999, Skopje), reminding that “Cenevski at the time of his debut with BLACK SEED was already a director with a great synesthetic culture, who had absolved the traditional forms of film expression on a conceptual and theoretical level and unreservedly open to the then new formal currents in terms of film aesthetics”, says: “Cenevski approaches the film as an indivisible constant of his contemporaries, as an inalienable and very significant existential motive. The consistency of his determination we can follow her through each of his films. Each of his four films recorded so far is a kind of dialogue with reality, but at the same time with its viewer.
It is an unexpected attack on the viewer’s readiness and on his habit of seeing and experiencing some faded celluloid picture book, which will slow him down and not overly excite him. This long-cultivated trait in the viewer’s psychology, guided and caused by the desire for entertainment and fun, turns into astonishment, and even increasingly intense indignation in contact with the works of Cenevski” (“The Macedonian Film”, book two). The television screening of BLACK SEED in the program schedule of the then Yugoslav Radio and Television (JRT) did not go without opposing views: some TV critics even noticed that JRT was showing a film full of violence in prime time?! The film about the suffering of Macedonians in the Civil War in Greece in the period 1947-1949 is a film about the very essence of evil, so it is no coincidence that BLACK SEED is a kind of
a Freudian litmus test that dogmatic representatives of the government in the former SFRY were wary of, because in the Pula Arena it evoked associations with the not-so-distant Goli Otok. It was no coincidence that a few weeks earlier, similar ideological representatives in Moscow, at the International Film Festival, where a Macedonian film participated for the first time, watched BLACK SEED as a “summer version” of the Siberian Gulags, camps in which more than 20 million dissident citizens of the Soviet Union ended up in the period from 1936 until the death of their ideological architect Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in 1953. The Soviet press kept quiet about BLACK SEED’s participation in the Moscow festival, but film critics practically “invented” an award to express their positive attitude towards Cenevski’s film.
SEME also has another dimension, the pioneering role in the use of PR (public relations). Today, PR is a ubiquitous communication tool, but what can we say about the fame that arose around BLACK SEED even when the film was in the pre-production phase? Namely, Cenevski and the artistic director of “Vardar Film” Ante Popovski had a meeting with the famous Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis in Bucharest, and then the proclaimed leftist accepted in principle to write the music for the film, but later backed out (Cenevski ultimately decided that the film should have no music, but only noises and sounds). The Greek actress Melina Merkouri also responded with interest about her possible engagement in BLACK SEED, but the collaboration did not materialize (her alternation for the only female role was the Slovenian actress Manca Kosir, but later Cenevski decided that the female role should be dropped from the script). There was also the idea of the famous director Costa Gavras (also of Greek origin), then an icon of European politically engaged film set in Paris, being the supervisor of the film, but regardless of the fact that none of these three famous names were hired, BLACK SEED received incredible media attention even before the first film clap fell. The fame of the author of a new style and a film with avant-garde aesthetics was born. That is why the Skopje premiere of BLACK SEED on September 17, 1971, already crowned with awards in Pula and Moscow, passed with publicity and interest from the audience that we unfortunately do not witness today. The premiere took place in parallel, at the same time, in as many as three cinemas: “Vardar”, “Kultura” and the Club of Members of Parliament.
The acclamatory reception of BLACK SEED opened all doors and financial resources for Cenevski for his next film project, JAD (1975), but the expectations of critics and audiences were now enormously increased. The story of Cenevski would not be special if the standard maxim of success per aspera ad astra (through thorns to the stars) were inverted in his case, so that it could read – per astra ad aspera (from stars to thorns).
JAD is only a ostensibly historical film from the late 11th and early 12th centuries, when the Slavic population in Ohrid, on the ruins of Samuel’s kingdom, strongly resisted Byzantine rule and Christian dogma. This resistance was expressed through the Bogomil movement. Pointing out that Cenevski took the film’s title from a real inscription in the so-called Bitola Triod (triptych) from the 12th century, on which an unknown artist drew the strange words Peace, Contagion, Sorrow (Pokoj, R’ci, Jad), and then Forgive me, Chernenko sees an ideological clash in the tragic schism – with which the newly spread Christianity in the Balkans will be divided into the Orthodox Church and the Bogomil sect. The Bogomils have a Manichean-communist orientation with which they oppose the feudal-clerical hierarchy under the slogans of social justice, universal equality and brotherhood (“Macedonian Film”). Read in a slightly looser key, and in the previous lines you will really recognize the “hippies of the 11th century”… Film critic and film historian Georgi Vasilevski in “Film Encyclopedia” (Culture, Skopje, 2010) assesses that “… the ambitious spectacle JAD, which is among the most expensive financial projects of Vardar Film, did not fully meet the expectations and hopes of the admirers of his talent”. Contrary to the dominant negative criticism of JAD, Čepinčić, on the other hand, assessed that the film, both as a project and as a realization, retains a special position within the framework and possibilities of the then Macedonian feature production. “The mainly discursive criteria by which this film was welcomed and assessed at the time of its release seem to have been left without any real argumentation in terms of the aesthetic potentials that the film contains, and in places realizes them with the force of a classically experienced work” (“The Macedonian Feature Film – Book Two”).
Is it a coincidence that Cenevski’s next project is titled LEAD BRIGADE (1980)? It is not a coincidence at all, because anyone who has been even a little bit friends with Cenevski knows well that this author has always been curious about the global aesthetic, but also political-ideological turmoil in the world. The eighties of the last century are often marked as the climax of the “lead times”, especially in Europe, then divided into blocs and torn between communism that did not deliver the promised results and the flywheel of neoliberalism. And Cenevski, that widely educated and noble interlocutor on all possible topics at the cafe tables – the then alternative variants of parliamentarism in our country – rarely came to those squares without a scroll of relevant political newspapers and magazines under his arm. In the worst case, at least with the world’s leading weekly, the New York “Time”. LEAD BRIGADE, unlike the framework of more distant or more recent history in the previous two films, the next one, KNOT, is also with a (then) current theme of the conflict situations of the miners and the conditions in which they live. Most critics wondered why one of the most talented Macedonian directors of his time took up a “production film” that belonged to the hard phase of socialist realism of the fifties or, why at least in the film he did not make a dramaturgical “twist” of the socialist ideology, which would put LEAD BRIGADE in the same category as Andrzej Wajda’s MAN OF MARBLE (1977) (assessment by Chernenko in “Macedonian Film”). “Workers’ self-management, inexplicable in itself, Cenevski still wants to subject it to a dramaturgical analysis… he wants to clarify a fiction, incomprehensible in itself, so that in that attempt he finds himself as if in the role of Sisyphus. “Similar to his hero Lazar, who, invoking such workers’ self-management, wants to revitalize the neglected mine, removing bad workers, criticizing the management of the plant and supporting the weak and disappointed by that slightly pessimistic atmosphere” – Čepinčić has more understanding of Cenevski’s intentions (“The Macedonian Feature Film”).
It seems that the shadow of the success of BLACK SEED never freed Cenevski from the creative cramp and the constantly high expectations of critics and audiences. KNOT (1985) is a film with a psychological story from World War II, more precisely the fascist occupation of Macedonia and the deportation of Jews to the death camps, in which the fates of the victims and the executioners are intertwined. Critics saw in KNOT too complicated dramaturgical lines, enough for several films. Perhaps Chernenko is right when he points out that somewhere in the subconscious of the authors in small cinematographies, poor in finances, each subsequent film seems to them as “the last for an indefinite period”, so they imprint all the ideas they have on them. The optimistic, cheerful and fruitful principle of carpe diem versus the melancholic, even defeatist now and who knows when. You guess which principle won in the case of Cenevski…
If Cenevski came to Macedonian cinema from “nowhere”, the end of his career also somehow ended – “nowhere”. In other words, although that career never officially ended, Cenevski disappeared from Macedonian cinema more than three decades ago. On the other hand, the author who was welcomed as an anfan terrible of Macedonian cinema and instantly glorified almost as the much-desired messiah of the new age, ended his directorial career at the age of 42. That is the same or similar age at which other authors filmed their debut works; and in both cases it is the same, or similar, injustice. “In the current situation, it is as if I have no ground to lead the dialogue about art, about the future, everything is politicized. The system of credentials has been completely displaced, and with it the system of values…”, said Cenevski in the last interview he gave to the media, for the magazine “Forum” in 2002 (reprinted in the book “Faceria” by Vlatko Galevski, “Forum”, Skopje, 2004). The first synonym I wanted to use to describe Kiril Cenevski was Steppenwolf, in the spirit of the novel of the same name by Hermann Hesse. But perhaps a more accurate word would be Bogomil, a Christian believer without a church. The faith of the film author is indisputable, the system – economic, political, social, cultural – in which he should present his kinesthetic works is disputable. Something similar to the “Bogomil of ex-US rock and roll” Branimir Joni Štulić, the leader and soul of the Zagreb band “Azra”. It is no coincidence that Cenevski, like Štulić, was surrounded by his self-exile with superior silence as a kind of shield. And so for more than 30 years. Why? “The answer, my friend, is rustling in the wind…”, Dylan sang.
If anyone has a better answer, please say so!
