By Michael A. Pardy
The filmmaker Saidin Salkic does not mess around. Nor does he take the easy way out. His edgy films don’t coddle viewers with digestible narratives or with bittersweet evocations. Instead, he prefers to grab us by the throat and rattle us to the bone with a cacophonous onslaught of sounds and images; his films leave our nervous systems reeling.
Boy Among the Ruins is no exception. You want to look away but can’t. It demands your constant attention. Like his previous film, Silence’s Crescendo (and to some extent, The Last Days of Loneliness), Salkic is baring his soul here and forcing himself and the viewer to confront a haunting past and a harrowing future. To my mind, one cannot separate the essence of his filmmaking – the exploration of the chasm between the quick and the dead and all the horrors in between – from his personal history: at age twelve he survived the Serbian massacre of Muslim boys and men in Bosnia, as did his mother and his sister; his father did not. To state the obvious, along with the loss of his father, he lost his boyhood, his security, his home, his homeland: he was and remains the “boy among the ruins.”
Filmed primarily in graphic black and white, the film makes palpable the endless loop of apprehension, fear and expectation that accompanies the living-hell of war (Ukraine looms large here too), and the horrible loop of unrelenting nightmares that ensue in its wake. Salkic claims his personal stake as a casualty by inserting himself into the film under many guises: a hand awkwardly holding a long knife; a man cowering under a blanket; a head embodying Munch’s “The Scream”; a silent and omniscient moon-faced man witnessing all – the endless collage of missiles launching, shells exploding, buildings burning, and citizens venturing furtively through debris-littered streets.
As if to break the spell of war he has cast, there is a juncture almost midway into the film with the introduction of lofty arias accompanying sinister aerial footage (think of the Wagner-blaring helicopters in Apocalypse Now and the final scene of Dr. Strangelove), followed by repetitive film clips from My Darling Clementine and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. These elements are puzzling but no less interesting. Salkic is, I think, making a stylistic turn in order to challenge us to find the meaning and purpose in these linked but disparate halves. Just as he has had to find purpose in reconciling his past Bosnian boyhood with his present Australian adulthood.
Salkic has said that his film is “sharp, like a spear thrown from the childhood, by a boy among the ruins at the devastated, ruined contemporary consciousness in an attempt to humanise it.”
In that light, the film is a warning to a benumbed audience of the existential threat of soul-killing alienation. Yet, the film does present seeds of hope. The horrors presented in the body of the film are bookended by scenes of bucolic mountain streams and soft voice-overs. At the beginning, a muffled voice speaks of boyhood innocence and its “magical time of freedom”; at the end, the same voice calls for recognition and protection of that innocence. Like a balm, the final shot is gentle and soothing. For all the talk of boyhood, a young girl appears, Salkic’s daughter, standing by the stream. With open arms, she tosses handfuls of pebbles into it, then turns to us with an enigmatic and expectant and open face. That face is the final conundrum in a film filled with them.
The work of Saidin Salkic, including Boy Among the Ruins, will screen on Sunday, September 18 2022 at Castlemaine’s The Coolroom
