Features  |  Reviews

Balkan Rhapsodies: 78 Measures of War

A ruminative experimental mosaic
By GERALD PEARY  |  October 16, 2008
3.0 3.0 Stars

balkanINSIDE.jpg

Is there some poison in the air of the Balkans, as one individual asserts, that breeds eternal ethnic bloodletting? Is this a region of the damned? Or, as others argue, is it a place of innocents, where it’s criminal to drop bombs on the civilian populace, as the US-led NATO forces did on Belgrade in 1999? Complicated, complicated. Boston-based filmmaker Jeff Silva was there then in angry-at-the-US Serbia, and also in war-shredded Kosovo, two brave places to be an American with a camera. His film is a ruminative experimental mosaic: fragments of interviews with Serbs, street scenes, newsreel footage, black spaces, sound bites of chats with contrarian American thinkers (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky), and lots of visits with young Belgraders in their apartments. These last are armchair philosophers and American pop-culture experts one and all, amid smokes and Slivovitz. 55 minutes | Harvard Film Archive: October 13

Related:
  Topics: Reviews , Howard Zinn , Noam Chomsky , Jeff Silva ,  More more >
  • Share:
  • RSS feed Rss
  • Email this article to a friend Email
  • Print this article Print
Comments

election special
ARTICLES BY GERALD PEARY
Share this entry with Delicious

 See all articles by: GERALD PEARY

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 



Featured Articles in Talking Politics:
Monday, October 20, 2008  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2008 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group