The versatile contribution of the protagonist

In this film, the main protagonist is the head of the Union at that time, Željko, who seems to have a special contribution in the film. He is immensely involved in the narrative not only because he is directly affected by the main conflict – the suicide of his deputy and also the bankruptcy crisis of the company – but also because several times in the film, he expresses his intention to create the film itself.

At around 29:30, Željko calls on the cameraman to film the event in progress (the head of security hiding from him): “Film this too!” At 40:30, he tells others at an event about the fact that a film is being made about the company: “We are making a film about Gredelj” and later: “We have 90 minutes already, we’re close to the ending.”

Such a degree of knowledge about the details of filmmaking suggests that the relationship between the protagonist and the director is more flexible than in an observatory style documentary. Therefore, while watching the film, many times it feels like the shooting has been a collaboration between Željko and the filmmakers.

Based on solely this aspect, we could assume the film falls into the participatory documentary mode. However, this only applies to the first act of the film, mixed with observational mode. The second act consists of the screening of the documentary material itself for the workers ten years later. The workers watching the film evoked strong reactions from the people concerned and this method falls into the reflexive mode which is a method used by Jean Rouch in Chronicle of a Summer (1961) where reflexivity was translated into film language and became a cinematic device. It drives the protagonist to wonder about the possibility of including the filmmakers’ perspective as well as his own self-conception to reflect on how it would represent himself and his community through cinema. (De Groof, 2013)

The third act, which conveys a dance act performed by the workers of the company, would be of performative style. Dević said in the interview that the performative part of the documentary was the result of a joint idea between the filmmakers and the workers to make use of the production funding they received along the way. He mentions that it was actually the workers who came up with the “dance” choreography and Dević felt the need to capture and direct this into the film to show the importance of the emotional part of the story.

Condsidering all these applied methods, it can be concluded that the protagonists in the film were active participants in the creative part of the filmmaking process.

If we think about their contribution as a form of labor, their work is highly diversified. Even if their creative work is not taken into account, their work for the company (meetings, riots, negotiations, events etc.) is displayed on the screen but its separation from the work of the documentary is not evident.

Silke Panse suggests that documentary protagonists fall into a special category when it comes to acknowledging their exact contribution to the film being made about them. Workers in a documentary also provide the material for the work of the filmmaker yet the documentary is positioned as external to the work of its protagonists. Therefore, the working protagonist is materially immanent to the documentary image. Because the image of the documentary protagonist is presented as being unrehearsed and unchanged, there naturally cannot have been any immaterial labor or artistic process. The documentary protagonist is vital as the living material for the product that is their image but the product is immaterial: the worker cannot be the product. (Panse 2015) Rather, the contribution of the protagonist is often referred to as affective labor which is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people.

In my opinion, there is no doubt that the immense contribution of the company workers in the film – which even exceeds the general labor of the documentary protagonists – helps evoke emotions in the viewers, just as Goran Dević intended. The time that has elapsed since the start of his filming also embraces the emotional aspect of the film, especially when it comes to the self-reflection of the protagonist. It is heartbreaking to see how the characters are still so strongly affected by the conflict that forms the narrative of the film.

Sources:
*Panse, Silke: (2015, January 29). The Work of the Documentary Protagonist. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, 155–175. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118884584.ch7
*Devic, Goran on What's to Be Done? https://cineuropa.org/en/video/447830/
*Matthias De Groof (2013) Rouch's Reflexive Turn: Indigenous Film as the Outcome of Reflexivity in Ethnographic Film, Visual Anthropology: Published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology, 26:2, 109-131, DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2013.752698

Réka Pinczés
ELTE BTK Film Studies