Style as Political Substance, or The Bosnian Master: The Case for Danis Tanović
Danis Tanović might be the most personal, visually compelling, and thematically thoughtful political auteur working in European cinema. And regrettably, his name will largely go unrecognized by even the most globetrotting and well-watched of cinephiles. With very few exceptions, Western film lovers have failed to properly appreciate Tanović’s best work, a sin that needs rectifying. With an indefatigable eye for style as political substance, Tanović’s rivals the best in the craft. His films are masterclasses in political subversion, human-first art, layered artificiality, and sensuality. Worth in salt on the line, this critic is comfortable declaring the filmography of Danis Tanović is a filmography worth the investment.
Tanović has directed (and released) nine feature films, a handful of documentary shorts, and two limited series, with several other projects coming soon. But only three of these efforts are widely available in North America as of this writing: No Man’s Land (2001), Cirkus Columbia (2010), and The Postcard Killings (2020). If there is one film the average Western moviegoer may have encountered while scrolling through the bowels of Letterboxd lists or Eastern European cinema, it would be No Man’s Land, his Academy Award-winner (for Best Foreign Language Film), which follows three soldiers on two different sides of the Bosnian War, trapped in a shared trench. It’s certainly a quality film, and it comes as no surprise it’s his most available title, but it’s also his first feature, and, like most first-time filmmakers, Tanović has matured as an artist in the two decades since his debut.
The Postcard Killings is one of the director’s two English-language films and stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a New York City detective chasing a demented killer (or killers) across Europe to bring his daughter to justice; it’s a movie that reflects a market and star capable of propelling Tanović closer to the mainstream. There are still many characteristic features of his artistry that leave their mark on the film, including a general skepticism toward policing, the frequent use of diegetic or in-world cameras as vantage points, and even taboo love. But although The Postcard Killings grows on this viewer with each watch, it’s also, unfortunately, his most insignificant feature to date.
Cirkus Columbia, the third of the director’s widely available films, is a masterpiece, without qualification. According to Letterboxd, however, fewer than 600 users have logged the title (compare that to No Man’s Land‘s 16,000+). If a reader is to take just one thing from this essay, let it be this: Cirkus Columbia is available for $3.99 on both Amazon Prime and Apple TV Plus. Set on the brink of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1991, the expatriate Divko Buntić (Miki Manoklović) returns home to his small idyllic town in Herzegovina (specifically, the southern part of the country) and disrupts the lives of those around him in the process in a deeply sensual summer film where the political violently collides into the mundane. The effects of Yugoslavia’s breakup and subsequent onset of war are distilled in the complicated relations of one family, complete with a parable-esque and borderline incestuous relationship. Not unlike the great novels of Gabriel García Márquez, Halldór Laxness, or Günter Grass, watching a Tanović film demands relating the local to the national, the fictional landscapes to actual geography, and the personal to the political.
Moving beyond Tanović’s most immediately accessible works, it took three years for this writer to find a watchable version of Death in Sarajevo (2016), likely the director’s second-best film as a stylist, even if its rather blunt political analogizing will inevitably turn off some viewers. As of today, any potential screening requires a VPN to find the film, which is set in Hotel Europa on the centenary of Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as the past-prestige hotel prepares to host a delegation of European Union diplomatic VIPs. Then there’s Triage (2009), which stars Colin Farrell as a devastated war-time photojournalist in Kurdistan, and which also requires some effort to find and can only be bought on Blu-ray; in a post-rental store world, no one can “accidentally” stumble across Triage on popular streaming services. Similarly, Tigers (2014), a dramatization of a real-life Pakistani salesperson’s struggle against the corporate iniquities of fictional baby formula companies (à la Nestlé), is exclusive to Zee5, a small Indian cinema streaming service that is available in the United States.
Meanwhile, L’enfer (2005), An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (2013), Not So Friendly Neighborhood Affair (2021), and the director’s two TV series (Kotlina, 2022; Uspjeh, 2019), are virtually impossible to watch in North America — at least legally and easily. In fact, in order to watch these titles for this piece, Tanović himself had to send screener links. All of this is not to emphasize the esoterica of his filmography, but to state in no uncertain terms that, apart from Cirkus Columbia, the small sampling of Tanović’s filmography widely available in North America does not reflect the sum of the director’s great artistry.
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