After the highly publicized Bruce Lee monument was erected in Mostar, a city and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005, a series of similar ventures were initiated in rural Serbia. Some sociologists describe the glorification of nonpolitical celebrity figures as the result of an identity crisis caused by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a period when a once functioning multi-ethnic unity collapsed.
—
Turbo Sculpture is an essay by Aleksandra Domanović about sculptures of pop culture heroes, e.g. Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa and Bob Marley, which have been placed or proposed in the nation-states that once comprised Yugoslavia. You can also watch a
photo-illustrated reading of the essay voiced by a dead-pan British man.
[via We Find Wildness]
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 18, 2012 -
5 comments
A hapless painter is endowed with the ability to understand the speech of forest creatures. Little does he know that the evil King Cactus is planning to destroy the forest using his monstrous grinding machine and an army of magically animated polearms, or that he will play an instrumental role in thwarting the scheming xerophyte. Released in 1986,
Čudesna šuma ("The Magical Forest") is Yugoslavia's first feature-length animated film. Created in collaboration with a US production company, it's available in English as (hold on to your hats, folks) "
The Elm-Chanted Forest."
[more inside]
posted by Nomyte
on Mar 7, 2011 -
7 comments
ESPN screened this great
documentary about the rise of the Yugoslavian basketball team in the late 80s, and the breakdown of relationships within the team, in particular Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, as the country disintegrated in the 90s.
posted by jedro
on Oct 17, 2010 -
15 comments
Fairy-tale author
Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (1874-1938) has been called the "Croatian Anderson", or more recently the "Croatian Tolkien", and twice nominated for a Nobel, in the 1930s, before she committed suicide. Her most famous fairy-tale collection,
Croatian Tales of Long Ago (1916), was recently adapted as a flash animation, some of which can be
viewed online (flash, pop-ups) in an award-winning site. The
original book in English translation (1923) at Internet Archive includes
some cool artwork.
posted by stbalbach
on Sep 25, 2009 -
9 comments
On December 5th, a Croatian man named Nico awoke to find a map his girlfriend had left him featuring a specific path she wanted him to take to work; along the way he saw stencils, paint, aerosol, collage wheat pastes & other art she had laid out in the pre-dawn hours letting him know how much she loved him.
The sights Nico saw, in order, are collected here.
posted by jonson
on Dec 10, 2006 -
80 comments
Hello to the Krilcic family. Ten years after we last saw you we are alive and well. And I hope you are. We would like to hear from you and see you. Goodbye.
In each episode of
Videoletters, two former neighbors, friends or colleagues separated by the Bosnian war exchange video messages. Since 1999,
two filmmakers have been helping people from across the former Yugoslavia find and reconnect with one another in this way, often with heart-breaking results. Watch a
sample episode here about two young men, Vlada (a Serb) and Ivica (a Croat), whose families were close friends when the war began. [Bit more inside]
posted by Ljubljana
on Apr 29, 2005 -
3 comments
WarPhotoLTD.com is a Croatian photography showcase intended to "educate the public in the field of war photography, to expose the myth of war and the intoxication of war, to let people see war as it is, raw, venal, frightening, by focusing on how war inflicts injustices on innocents and combatants alike." Search by Photographer, War, Award or Collection, though the site is obviously new-ish and has a small database. Here's a particularly
stunning one from their
current collection ("A Decade of War").
posted by dhoyt
on Oct 16, 2003 -
3 comments
