UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

photographs and footage from often unidentifiable locations: the photos show live footage of
bombing a city (probably Belgrade), casualties in the streets (quite possibly from Bosnia or
elsewhere), barricades in the streets and some footage from a US city (register plates on a car) etc.
On the one hand this may work well in creating a narrative, but the photo of the truck in the street
used to stop a Yugoslav army tank, for instance, does not really relate this reinterpretation to the
NATO bombings. Neither do the photos of dead people in the streets in Bosnia. Rather, it hints at
that the maker, and hence also the users tend to invest a song with their own interpretation(s); and
that in creating such video the maker is often left to use what is at hand. The second storyline
features the Russian singers enveloped in a plot that could also run independently of the war
footage. In this storyline the girls ‗act‘ in a love story video that involves assembling an explosive
device. The third, closely related to the second storyline is conveyed via subtitles, a poem that in a
way connects the first two, and in fact the entire video into a narrative (fictional) whole. Using this
three-layer visual storyline a very personal love story is intertwined with a more general, universal
one of loss and grief. This is further enhanced by the song, music and lyrics which, combined,
convey sadness and regret:
For the night in the rain of leads
For that I'm not by you
You, forgive me, my sister, Yugoslavia!
For the death in the spring rain
For that I wasn't helpful to you
You, forgive me, my sister, Yugoslavia! 260
This video is not a rendition of Yugoslav past as such, rather it is an artistic attempt—enabled by
digital editing and communications technologies—at creating a personal statement. In this case it
is a personal view of the music, the singers, and the country in flames. Amusingly, the readings of
this video, just as the interpretation presented by this video as already hinted at above, are not
uniform. In the comments section over the past five years there were some 500 comments posted.
Some of them are expressions of fascination with the making of the video, others yet, and these
are in majority, take this video as a point of departure to argue about the rights and wrongs, about
the winners and losers of this unfortunate war. Often the ‗discussions‘ boil down to calling names
and blaming members of any one nation involved in the wars for the collapse of the country.
One of the more interesting bits in this respect is a comment exchange where a visitor (apparently
a Croat), says:
260 n/a, ―Yugoslavia, composed by A. Voitinsky,‖ http://tatu.lovelove.jp/en/yugoen.html, accessed 5 September 2011;
the lyric transcript is in English, but the song is originally sang in Russian.
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