Emir Kusturica

Emir Kusturica is one of Eastern Europe's most celebrated and influential filmmakers. Over the course of a thirty-year career, Kusturica has navigated a series of geopolitical fault lines to produce subversive, playful, often satiric works. On the way he won acclaim and widespread popularity while showing a genius for adjusting his poetic pitch—shifting from romantic realist to controversial satirist to sentimental jester. This book divides Kusturica's career into three stages—dissention, disconnection, and dissonance—to reflect both the historic and cultural changes going on around him and the changes his cinema has undergone. The book uses Kusturica's Palme d'Or winning Underground (1995)—the famously inflammatory take on Yugoslav history after World War II—as the pivot between the tone of romantic, yet pungent critique of the director's early works and later journeys into Balkanist farce marked by slapstick and a self-conscious primitivism. Eschewing the one-sided polemics that Kusturica's work often provokes, the book employs balanced discussion and critical analysis to offer a fascinating and up-to-date consideration of a major figure in world cinema.