The Faces of War

The opening images of Tri (1965), by Aleksander Petrović, are forceful. Photographs, hard and unadorned, of Yugoslavian territory in the Second World War, accompanied by the sound of sirens and, after, powerful Serbian music. We believe we are going to watch a war film, a genre that Yugoslavian cinema produced much of, because the Tito regime’s power lay in part in the narrative of the partisans’ heroic resistance and their victory over the Nazis.

Yet, although war remains present as a background canvas, this is an anti-war film, which seeks to show how human liberty and dignity disappear or are destroyed in extreme contexts ruled by absurd and gratuitous violence.

This less obvious approach to the resistance and victory of the partisans, with different nuances, is typical of Yugoslavian cinema of the 1960s, as it gained greater international visibility due to the quality of films like Petrović’s. Many young directors had benefited from the state’s heavy investment in cinema, as well as from a certain liberalisation in Tito’s communist regime, which had escaped from Soviet orbit in 1948. Films emerged that were innovative in terms of aesthetic language and content, creating the Black Wave movement of which Tri is one of the leading examples. This movement was clearly influenced by Italian Neo-realism and the French New Wave and, as with the principal directors of those movements, Petrović too began to dedicate himself to the critique and cinematic experiments that prefigured a new Yugoslavian cinema.

Tri’s narrative structure is fragmented, taking the form of a triptych featuring three distinct moments from the unfolding of the war-like conflict.

In the first episode, the young protagonist, Milos, takes refuge in a village. He joins the locals in the station where they desperately wait for a train that will carry them away from the rapidly advancing German troops. The camera scans the frightened and angry faces. Collective panic takes hold and we are confronted with the inhumanity, even evil, that ensues. The Yugoslavian army insults the people and there is a need to find a scapegoat, someone who will exorcise the impending defeat. This happens when an innocent man is accused of being a spy and ends up being shot, without trial or evidence. Milos tries to protest but his voice is swallowed by the crowd as he witnesses this absurd murder. It is in this episode that Petrović uses mainly visual metaphors, avoiding redundant dialogue: the flock of sheep, the muzzled bear exhibited by the cigano for which there is no space on the train, and the woman who watches everything from the window, impassive and resigned.

The second episode takes place at the peak of the war. Milos is a partisan fleeing the implacable persecution of the Nazis through the mountains and swamps of the River Neretva delta, close to the Adriatic Sea. More than film the combat and gunfire, the camera concentrates on the body and face of Velimir “Bata” Živojinović, whose intimate, intense performance made him a star of Yugoslavian cinema. In an abandoned cemetery he finds another fugitive, injured and left behind by his unit, who admits to being afraid — and they feel a complicity. Then, suddenly, the other fugitive sacrifices himself to the Nazis so that Milos can escape, and so that the fugitive can look his executioners in the face — though in fact they prefer to burn him alive. Milos’s desperate cries act as the perfect subtitles to yet another cruel and absurd death he is unable to prevent.

The final scene takes place at the end of the war. Milos is an ex-official of the victorious Yugoslavian army and, once more, he encounters absurd death. He is faced with a group of prisoners accused of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and who are waiting to be executed. There is a moment of hesitation in which Milos’s gaze locks with one of the young female prisoners. But the evidence against her is irrefutable and Milos does not try to save her, even though he realises that, the war now over, these deaths too are just another absurdity.

It is the protagonist’s gaze that connects these stories, the gaze of a passive spectator who, in effect, is never able to intervene. The camera insists on fixing on the face of the principal actor, sometimes in close-up, who offers us an exhausted look often empty of histrionic emotion, since the war is a burden, free of heroism, marked only by inhumanity, waste and absurdity. That is why this film avoids sentimentalism and the many resources of cinema, opting instead for a tight economy of means. And worthy of note is the beautiful black-and-white cinematography of Tomislav Pinter, reminiscent of Italian Neo-realism. The camera wanders between the anonymous faces of the involuntary victims of a war, allowing us to notice the ethnic diversity of those lands. And amid those faced with the gratuitous violence of the conflict, it is a resigned expression that predominates, rather than the presence of any extended dialogue. The realist and poetic images and the beautiful soundtrack (especially the Serbian music) take priority over words.

This is a portrait of war as the territory of bestial actions, wastefulness and the absurd, but seen through the eyes of a protagonist who is never able to control his own destiny, ending up as a witness, a victim and, also, a passive aggressor. It is a work of art that, in the context of today’s new war in European territory, feels like a punch to the gut.