Balkans’ Idolatry Delights Movie Fans and Pigeons

[Marcus Marulus]

Balkans’ Idolatry Delights Movie Fans and Pigeons

By DAN BILEFSKY

Published: November 11, 2007



ZITISTE, Serbia — In this sleepy farming village, residents talk of a new spirit of exaltation ever since a towering bronze and concrete statue of Rocky Balboa was erected in the village square, his boxing gloves raised in a heroic gesture of triumph.

But Rocky will soon have company in the region: Tarzan, Bruce Lee and a former Playboy model.

In a phenomenon that is either delighting or alarming cultural critics, monuments to icons of Hollywood and popular culture are sprouting across the Balkans, after almost a decade of bloodshed and vengeance that killed as many as 125,000 people in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
The noted Serbian visual artist Milica Tomic, for one, is concerned. She calls the statues “a dangerous joke in which history is being erased and replaced by Mickey Mouse.”

In Medja, a farming village about 12 miles from Zitiste near the Romanian border, city officials are frantically lobbying to raise money to erect a bronze statue of Tarzan. The statue will pay homage to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor and Olympic swimmer. Residents say he was born in Medja in 1904 and proudly show off his birth certificate at City Hall. When he was a baby his family emigrated to the United States. There, he went on to global stardom playing the loin-clothed ruler of the apes and booming out his distinctive ululating yell.

On a hill in the war-torn city of Mostar, Bosnia, divided by an Ottoman bridge separating Bosnian Croats on one side and Bosnian Muslims on the other, a bronze and gold-plated statue of the actor Bruce Lee was recently erected by a group of activists. They aim to bridge the ethnic divide by paying homage to a man who brought cultures together and embodied the fight for justice.

The statue is now in storage after its bronze weapons were vandalized. Both Croats and Muslims complained that the likeness of Mr. Lee, a martial arts icon, was a provocation because he was pointed at them in an aggressive martial pose. This prompted his creators to rotate the statue in a neutral direction.

And in Cacak, southwest of Belgrade, plans are under way to build a statue of a former topless model, Samantha Fox, a Briton who recorded the hit song “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)” and who captured local imaginations when performing in the town. Officials boasted that the statue would be larger than Rocky, but so far the only sign of Ms. Fox’s likeness is an empty pedestal in a local art gallery, with the word “rumors” written on it.

Here in Zitiste, the statue of any figure from the United States, no less such an iconic all-American film character as Rocky, would seem an incongruous presence. The United States, after all, led the NATO bombing campaign in 1999 after the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic defied international pressure and clashed with the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo.
But Bojan Marceta, a 28-year-old local cameraman who raised 5,000 euros (about $7,300) to commission the statue, said Rocky was a universal hero and far more deserving of respect than Serbia’s own recent leadership.

“Nobody from the wars of the 1990s or from the former Yugoslavia deserves a monument, because all our leaders did was to prevent us from progressing,” said Mr. Marceta, who celebrated the unveiling of the statue in August with fireworks at a public concert. “My generation can’t find role models so we have to look elsewhere. Hollywood can provide an answer.”

On a recent day, as a group of local children looked up at Rocky’s bronze six-pack abdomen and giggled, Mr. Marceta said the nearly 20-foot-tall statue — created by a Croatian artist and financed in part by a local chicken farmer — was a cry for attention from a place the world had forgotten.

That cry has been heeded, at least for now. Dozens of television crews from as far away as Japan have descended on the town. Even Sylvester Stallone sent the people of Zitiste a personal video message from the jungle set of the latest Rambo film, expressing joy that his character continued “to have an impact in the world.”

Not all of Zitiste’s citizens are convinced.

“I don’t like Rocky — it has nothing to do with this town, and the money could have been spent on something we need, like a new school,” said a retired farmer, Buka Sandor, 70, furrowing his brows. “We are just showing off.”

In Medja, Tarzan’s soon-to-be new home, Dragan Pusara, an assistant to the mayor, said he hoped that the brawny likeness of the town’s native son, Johnny Weissmuller, would bring luck and investment to Medja, after devastating floods.

He said Tarzan was a fitting icon for Serbs because Tarzan had been put in the jungle with nothing and, against all odds, managed to survive. Tarzan, he added, would transcend the ethnic divisions of Medja — home to Serbs, Hungarians and Serbs of German descent — because “he belongs to everyone.”

“After World War II, hundreds of displaced people arrived here with their families and one piece of luggage, and they needed to be strong to survive just like Tarzan,” he said.

Whatever the opinions of local residents about their new Hollywood talisman, some sociologists explain the glorification of nonpolitical Hollywood icons as the outgrowth of an identity crisis after the wars of the 1990s, when the lines between oppressors and victims were blurred.

When a Belgrade municipal authority recently appointed a jury of artists and intellectuals to commission a monument to the victims of the wars of the 1990s, the jurors could not agree on whom to honor. Mileta Prodanovic, a Serbian writer and painter who was on the jury, said the commission’s failure reflected the ideological vacuum left over from the time of Mr. Milosevic.

“These Hollywood monuments are a subversive response” to the governments of that time, which they are mocking, he said. “People realize that many of our soldiers in the wars of the 1990s were criminals who stole, robbed and killed. So people are searching for alternative role models and this is a healthy rejection of nationalism.”

But Ms. Tomic, who also served on the jury, said she feared that these new heroes imported from films and popular culture were just an excuse to avoid facing up to the bloody history of the Balkans.

“This turning to Rocky or Tarzan is unhealthy and dangerous,” she said. “We need to find a way of representing our grief, our responsibility and our despair. “Until we do that, Serbia cannot come to terms with the present and the future.”

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