From father's swimming lessons and the Yugoslav highway system, via privileges for officials and Tito's death to Western expansionism ("Drang nach Osten"), house searches and bridges bombed by NATO, Super 8 Stories offers a history of Yugoslavia not unlike Underground.
Of course, the differences are outstanding also. Super 8 says it. This is a private memoir. The memoir of a handful of people who make their living in a cultural spasm between Western and Eastern Europe. On the road in the West, at home in the East. When their bus travels by a pet cemetery with marble terriers and German shepards, each with a carefully engraved name, who wouldn't think of the mass graves of Srebrenica and the Kosovo? Who would? Perhaps, that's the difference between them and their audience.
They joke and they play. They are angry, upset and hurt. And they joke and play again. If the clownesque does not win out, it is at least there. As a survival strategy. As a commentary. As absurd as the pet cemetery and the bombed bridge. As absurd as the applause and the oversized gold jacket.
Unlike any other Kusturica movie, this one shows its materiality, the texture, the grain and the cut, as if to explore what stuff memory, history is made of.
It is a multi layered text and like any other of Kusturica's films, it is also a political statement. Wanting to go home, the accordion player crosses the river like Charon the Styx, because the bridge is destroyed like the Bridge on the Drina.
