M y Miloš didn’t like to talk about the time he spent at that camp in Aus- tria. It was only at the opening of the exhibition Mauthausen 106621 that I rst came face-to-face with his fate. It was then that I wanted to shoot my rst lm, the sto- ry of my father’s life...” This is how director Darko Bajić begins the touching story of his father Miloš,Yugoslavia’s rst abstract artist, who survived the horrors of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, and whose life is depicted in the documentary lm Lifeline, which opens this year’s edition of the BelDocs In- ternational Documentary Film Festival. What did returning to that terrible place look like for your father? - I didn’t have time to think about my fa- ther. I was young and had just discovered the world of lm. I crawled into the crematorium’s furnace, entered the gas chambers, shot while listening to my father’s stories and tried to re- construct everything that had happened there. Confronting that crime left me with trauma that I still live with today. Were you haunted by those images from that camp? - That was a case of coming face-to-face with my father’s fate. An encounter with death. Such things move us deeply. I believe that everything I then experienced looking through my camera lens determined my fate as a lm director. It was actually there that you rst found out that your grandfather had also been imprisoned and tortured in the same place? - My grandfather, Miloš’s father Trifun, was mobilised during World War I by the Austro-Hun- garian Army and sent to the Russian front. My granddad didn’t want to kill Russian ghters, so an Austrian Major shot him in the back. Wound- ed, he was transported – together with captured Russians - to the small Austrian town of Mau- thausen. So, both my grandfather and my father – along with a large number of other Serbs – suf- fered the same fate. What happened to your grandfather; did he survive the camp? - Yes, but he died very soon after the war as a consequence of his wounds. My father moved to live with his uncle Spasoja in Belgrade and enrolled in ne art studies with Professor Beta Vukanović. Sometime in late 1943, Miloš joined Valjevo’s Partisan Division. The Germans captured him, but he managed to escape. He hid in a hos- pital where he was treated for tuberculosis. When a drive for enrolments in the Academy of Fine Arts was announced, he couldn’t resist signing up. He was accepted, but it was in that way that they found and arrested him. He was sent rst to Banjica, then to Mauthausen. Did he ever tell you how a man can handle such a tragedy; how he can survive and return to normal life after everything? - In the concentration camps they milled ma-
LINIJA ŽIVOTA Linija života je film o velikom umetniku i profesoru Mi- lošu Bajiću, o surovosti rata u kojem je ljudski život vre- deo onoliko koliko je čovek bio sposoban da radi u mon- struoznoj mašineriji koncentracionih logora, o 11 miliona onih koji nisu dočekali šansu da nakon tog rata žive, ra- de, stvaraju i oforme porodice i o tome kako je glavni ju- nak svojom maštom i umetnošću pobedio smrt i postao prvi apstraktni slikar u bivšoj Jugoslaviji. LIFELINE Lifeline is a lm about great artist and professor Miloš Bajić, about the cruelty of a war in which a human life was worth as much as a man was capable of working in the monstrous machinery of a concentration camp, about the 11 million people who didn’t get a chance to live, create and form families after that war, and about how the lead character managed, with his imagination and art, to defeat death and become the former Yugosla- via’s rst abstract artist.
Darko sa ocem Milošem
Darko
with his father Miloš
smo na šipci ispred zgrade u ulici Ta- deuša Košćuška i pričali. Ako je ne- ko gledao novi film, morao je da ga prepriča celom društvu. Ali je morao da se potrudi. Stvarali smo i maštali život oko sebe dopunjujući ono što nismo imali. A tada smo imali duha, danas imamo kompjutere. Sećaš li se prvog filma koji si ispričao? – Da. Hičkokove Ptice . Pričao sam im kako je posle projekcije svaki go- lub plašio moju devojku. Bili smo slo- bodni da tragamo za onim što želi- mo. A to je bila ideja mog oca, da ostanem slobodan u traženju sebe. Učio te je i da imaš poseban od- nos prema umetnosti?
– Dok su boje još bile sveže i ši- rio se miris terpentina, sedeli bismo pred njegovom tek nastalom slikom. Upozoravao me je da ne žurim sa za- ključcima, da maštam zajedno sa sli- kom, ali i sa svakom knjigom koju pročitam ili filmom koji odgledam. Da nikada ne osuđujem i ne presuđu- jem. To danas pokušavam da kao pro- fesor prenesem svojim studentima. Ostavićeš svetu uspomenu na Miloša Bajića... – Bio je sjajan tip, imao sam sreću da mi bude otac. Želeo sam da snimim film, da ispričam priču, a da kao sin ne budem previše ličan. Filmom sam pokušao da dam odgovor na pitanje – da li je zlo nestalo sa ove planete?
| 39
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator