The Virus of Dissolution:

Yugoslavia in Goran Marković's Variola Vera (1982)

Author

Miranda Jakiša

Abstract

Goran Marković's Variola Vera (1982, Yugoslavia) is a film about a historic smallpox outbreak, which occurred in Yugoslavia in 1972. More importantly, it is a film about Yugoslav fear: a fear of the other, especially the oriental or Muslim other and thus of the ‘alien’ within. Variola Vera is also a film about the fear of society’s disintegration; on several levels it suggests that in 1982 (the idea of) Yugoslavia was more of a mirage produced for the international gaze than a Yugoslav reality. These collective fears are translated by the film into an epidemics narrative that works with topoi of the horror, disaster and science fiction genres. Furthermore, the film offers several ways out of the (not only medical) crisis which the epidemic brought to the fore: on the one hand, the crisis is fashioned as at least partially (re)awakening a self-sacrificial, revolutionary, partisan spirit of solidarity. On the other hand, humanist medical expertise returns in the guise of the uncanny to haunt the biopolitical measures introduced by the Yugoslav state apparatus. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the aforementioned neuralgic points brought forward by the variola epidemic, while inquiring into how in Marković’s rendering the disease itself became a complex symptom of the Yugoslav society of 1982.

Keywords

Goran Marković; Yugoslavia; epidemics; smallpox; orientalism; horror; Variola Vera; public health policy

Introduction to Yugoslavia’s Disease

It does not come as a surprise that the film Variola Vera and other more or less forgotten films about epidemics, like Skeleton on Horseback (Hugo Haas, 1937, Czechoslovakia), adapted from Karel Čapek’s play Bílá nemoc / The White Disease were rediscovered in locked-down Europe during the Covid pandemic. Shot in 1982, Marković’s film suddenly seemed prophetic. It addressed several topics that the world was facing at the time: quarantine, isolation, social distancing and its psychological effects, the grievances of medical staff in hospitals, scarcity of vaccines, governmental measures, the role of scientific advisers and experts, yes, even complaints about economic losses in international tourism – all these issues had been raised by an almost forty-year old film from Yugoslavia.¹

Variola Vera tells the story of the last major outbreak of smallpox in Europe, which occurred in Yugoslavia in 1972. Variola Vera’s plot is thus backed by a real, historic event: the actual import of the smallpox virus to Yugoslavia by a pilgrim returning to Kosova after having visited Iraq. Until the 1972 outbreak Yugoslavia was considered smallpox-free: as the result of half a century of worldwide vaccinations, no cases had been recorded since 1930 (Trifunović 2017: 133). Still, in the 1970s sporadic outbreaks did happen all over the world, in South America, in Bangladesh, in Africa, in Sauerland/Germany and a few other European countries, mostly as a result of touristic travels. These outbreaks were always met by rigid isolation measures and mass vaccinations²; in this regard the Yugoslav 1972 outbreak was no exception. Finally, the smallpox virus could in all its variants – variola maior, variola vera, variola minor, variola haemorrhagica etc. – officially be declared extinct by the WHO in 1980, two years before the release of Marković’s film.

However, the film is evidently not reducible to the historic outbreak of the then extinct disease. As Marković informs us, it was inspired by his lasting wish to adapt Albert Camus’ La Peste / The Plague to the screen. Yet, “you do not need the plague any more, if you have variola”, Marković said in 2016 on a Serbian television show.³ The 1972 outbreak thus provided the backdrop and opportunity to realise a film not only on an infectious disease, but also on its consequences for the surrounding institutional, political and social order.

Marković is a highly acclaimed Yugoslav director, scriptwriter and playwright. Today, he might be best known internationally for his anti-Milošević documentaries and for his award-winning film Tito i ja / Tito and I (1992, Yugoslavia). Marković studied film at the FAMU film school in Prague, and soon became a well-known director in Yugoslavia. His feature films from the Yugoslav period largely focus on failing institutions and on a general critique of Yugoslavia’s self-management administration (Goulding 2002, Levi 2007). The film Specijalno vaspitanje / Special Education (1977), his first feature and a huge success, depicts the re-education of teenage delinquents, the popular comedy Nacionalna klasa / National Class Category Up to 785 Ccm (1979) dealt with Yugoslavia’s youth’s avoidance and disregard for the institution of military service and Majstori, majstori / All That Jack’s (1980) openly tackled the dysfunctionality of schools and the educational system. His last film addressing a Yugoslav institution’s failure, Variola Vera, depicts a Belgrade hospital, the lethal outcome of its inmates’ infection with smallpox and the government’s merciless sacrificing of patients, staff and visitors in order to tackle the epidemic.

In one of Variola Vera’s last scenes, an award letter by the WHO is being read out loud during a press conference, which congratulates the Belgrade authorities for their excellent management of the outbreak with the following words: “Selflessly you have stopped the spread of a lethal disease on the very outskirts of Europe and have thus prevented a catastrophe of immense dimensions”. While the task force and government representatives receive this praise, reporters are filming and photographing them.

Though the situation is being fashioned for the observing gaze of a global audience, for the film’s viewer in 1982, its irony shines through clearly: while the WHO might with good right celebrate its biggest vaccination success in history – the elimination of smallpox from Earth – the Yugoslav authorities in the film have no reason to be as proud. They sacrificed citizens, they had abandoned them and ruthlessly cut off from society. Clearly, the Yugoslav state, officially based in self-management, and its lack of internal solidarity is in this way exposed by Marković to the critical inspection of his film’s audience. Even more so, since in 1982, when the film was released, the shock-wave of the large 1981 protests in Kosovo, then an autonomous province of Yugoslavia, and which loomed in the film’s narrative’s background, could still be strongly felt in Yugoslav society.

The Film Variola Vera

The film’s fictional rendering of the 1972 outbreak runs as follows: a Yugoslav Muslim citizen, Halil Redžepi, travels to an unnamed country in the Middle East. As his hadj is mentioned we can assume he is returning from Mecca. In an oriental market this patient zero buys a flute from a smallpox-infected musician. Halil shows symptoms of an infection already when landing in Yugoslavia. But the symptoms are atypical and are not recognised for what they are, therefore he spreads the disease to a large number of contacts after his transfer to a Belgrade hospital.

Knowledge about smallpox hardly existed anymore at the time of the outbreak in 1972. When, finally, variola is diagnosed, those in charge still fail to immediately follow the medical experts’ advice. Later, they have to take drastic measures to get the infection under control. The authorities decide to completely isolate the hospital from the outside world and leave all people within it exposed to the virus in a full infection cycle. To help them survive these three weeks, the inmates get nothing but an insufficient amount of smallpox vaccine shots which the crisis committee, with some difficulty, obtained from Zagreb. Marković’s general ironic take on Yugoslavia can be recognised in many subtle, but at times also quite direct comments throughout the film: here for instance, general shortages are being addressed, plus the differences between republics, with Zagreb sending help to Belgrade.

Cut off from the outside world, those isolated in the hospital soon find themselves in a psychological state of emergency, each of them coping very differently with the situation. The locked-down hospital turns into a society within society in which the collective falls apart in front of the viewers’ eyes, and transforms into helpless and singled-out individuals. The director of the hospital, played by Marković’s father Rade Marković, barricades himself in his office and tries to keep the scarce vaccine to himself. While this head physician tries not to get infected in a drastically selfish and egoistic manner, other doctors refuse vaccination so that the precious vaccine can be used on patients. The painful separation from friends and family and the rigid border between the inside and the outside of the smallpox-infected hospital finds a melodramatic expression in a young man, the librarian Duško, who, in love with doctor Danka, steals into the locked-down hospital just to be with her. As a consequence, he will later die. The young son of one of the nurses spends night and day in front of the hospital, heartbreakingly calling for his mother: “Mama! Mama!”. His mother, nurse Zaga, will later hang herself in the hospital toilet, when her secret pill addiction and her theft of medication from the patients are discovered by Dr. Grujić. The gonorrhea infected patient Bora (nicknamed “Triperaš”, from Tripper, the German word for the disease) who will without fail assist even very sick patients throughout the film, only once loses his nerve: when the receptionist refuses him a telephone call to his relatives. This panorama of characters living through diverse ‘states of emergency’ allow Marković to criticise the Yugoslav context en passant with remarkable inventiveness.

Through the film, some variola vera infected patients die a horrible death, disfigured and helplessly exposed to the disease’s painful symptoms. As noted by several critics, these symptoms are represented in a radically visceral way, thus adding to the film’s horror dimension (Ognjanović 2007, Mandić 2019). The make-up artist Saveta Kovač was awarded the Golden Arena prize for makeup at the national Pula film festival for her work on Variola Vera.

Only one virologist and epidemiologist sent by the UN connects the isolated hospital with the outside world. This unrecognisable man, always dressed in a protective isolation suit covering his whole body and wearing a mask at all times, is their only support. It is only at the very end of the film that he will take off his mask for the first time, with this strong image sending the visual message that the danger is finally over. The smallpox scars on his face at that point reveal that this epidemiologist, the German actor Peter Carsten, dubbed into Serbo-Croat, had been immune all along.

As this brief description of the plot shows, the epidemic and quarantine allowed Marković to fashion the Belgrade hospital as a micro-society in crisis. Though rigorously cut off from Yugoslav society at large, it is not only produced by the political, disciplinary and economic interests of this society, but it also acquires the role of its symptom: the micro-society allows for a reflection on and diagnosis of the diseases troubling broader society. In the following, I will introduce three mutually intertwined interpretative approaches to Variola Vera which shed light on how Marković narrated his Yugoslav present.

Firstly, I will demonstrate how the film relies on a narrative based on nesting orientalism and Yugoslavia’s positioning as a late antemurale christianitatis (bulwark of Christendom) between East and West. Secondly, I will consider the modes of societal disintegration in Variola Vera as well as the film’s take on what is left of a communal spirit and of the will for self-sacrifice characteristic of Yugoslavia’s ‘third way’ narrative. Thirdly, the role of experts, knowledge and expertise in society as a return of the uncanny in the form of the epidemiologist will be scrutinised in detail.

All three topics relate to film genres applied in Variola Vera, featuring genre markers of a) an orientalist horror movie, b) a societal disaster film and c) a forecasting science fiction film.

Nesting Orientalism: Attack from the East on the Body of the West

As mentioned before, in Variola Vera the outbreak is caused by a pilgrim returning to Kosova from his hadj to the Middle East. Over the entirety of the Second Yugoslavia’s existence the status of Kosovo has been controversially negotiated and discussed. Milovan Djilas’ memoirs reveal how Stalin, notorious for his undiplomatic problem-solving, told the Yugoslav delegation visiting Moscow in the 1940s to simply “swallow” the Albanians. In 1939, during his time as diplomat, Ivo Andrić wrote a “referat” (Draft on Albania), later often mentioned in his disfavour, about the “question of Kosovo” (Kosovsko pitanje), the term euphemistically expressing what bothered Yugoslavia at the time: ethnic (dis)proportions (Bjelajac 2007).

Starting in the 1960s and helped by an extensive modernisation project, Kosova’s Albanian population grew rapidly and by 1980 was a convincing majority of the Autonomous Province (Pichler, Grandits, Fotiadis 2021: 174). Also, the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 granted Kosovo a high level of autonomy, though the Autonomous Province was not fully equal in status to the federation’s republics. This ambiguous status triggered major protests in 1981, only one year before Variola was released, as protesters demanded the status of a constitutive people for Yugoslav Albanians, that Kosovo be made a republic, but also a substitution of socialism based on self-management with a more rigid Marxist-Leninist economic and political model (ibid.: 175). The protests were violently suppressed and a number of protesters lost their lives in clashes with the Yugoslav People’s Army. The protests of 1981, although successfully suppressed, thus opened unmendable cracks in the official Yugoslav ideology of “brotherhood and unity”, showing that national conflicts were not at all unimaginable or non-existent in Yugoslavia, while also contributing to the growth in strength of a largely pre-existent anti-Albanian sentiment in parts of the Federation.

The way in which Marković’s film presents the import of smallpox to Yugoslavia can clearly be read as an othering strategy and an expression of Yugoslav nesting orientalism (Bakić-Hayden 1995) directed against the Kosovo-Albanian population – and against Islam in Yugoslavia in general. Socialist Yugoslavia, suppressing religious activities and beliefs as such, perceived Islam as especially backward (Malcolm 1994: 195). This omnipresent disregard found its Islamophobic expression in the film, making Halil Redžepi, the Muslim, bring a deadly disease back home via his religious beliefs.

Also, in the opening sequences, Marković presents the oriental market where the disease was caught in the most orientalist (Said 1978) manner possible: the market is represented stereotypically as exotic, loud, colourful, sensual, chaotic, full of illegible sounds, of intrusive behaviour and constant haggle; men in oriental dresses surround Halil, and the continuous uncanny melody of the fatal flute anticipates the future terrible events. The exact geographic location of this market is not clear; rather, and once again in accordance with Said’s writings, the market is no situated place, it is a metonym for the “Orient” as such: sensual and seductive, but dangerous and unclean.

This exaggerated representation of the “Orient” is contrasted by the uniformed, organised and clean European administration, embodied by the Yugoslav customs officers met by the group of pilgrims of which Halil is part upon their arrival at Belgrade airport. The sound and image of their plane landing constitute an interlude, in which modern technology separates the two scenes: the backward Orient and the progressive Occident. In the arrival scene, the uniformed customs officers talk about the men from Kosovo as if they were not present – and in their common official language, Serbo-Croat: “Ko su ti? – Ne znam, neke hađije.” (Who are those? – I don’t know, some hadj-pilgrims). Clearly, there are Yugoslavs and then there are other Yugoslavs! While inspecting Halil’s red Yugoslav passport, they, the Slavic Europeans, are encountering ‘their other’ in the Muslims. The latter are wearing oriental hats (fezzes) and are, in the customs officers’ view, returning from an ‘inexplicable’ journey, mysterious to ‘real’ Yugoslavs.

Later, one of the positive characters in the film, the paediatrician Dr. Ćirić, who is militantly devoted to the well-being of her patients in the quarantined hospital, will be shown on her knees, fervently praying to the Virgin Mary asking her to spare the children and take her life instead. The film also discreetly suggests that Dr. Ćirić is an old resistance fighter and communist: in a dialogue preceding the prayer scene, the hospital’s chief physician mentions that he was incarcerated together with her in the Banjica concentration camp during the Second World War. Although Dr. Ćirić prays in secret, in a dark and empty corridor, the film thus makes Christianity – also within a socialist, even communist framework – the bright opposite of Islam’s ‘darkness’.

In contrast, after his horrific death (depicted in images reminiscent of splatter horror), Halil Redžepi’s Muslim relatives will, in their ‘backward’ religious manner, refuse the forensic examination of his body. As a consequence, the scientists managing the crisis have to exhume him to run the necessary tests and establish whether he really was infected with the variola virus. The opening of Halil’s grave in the middle of the night – vividly illustrating the lack of enlightenment Yugoslavs attributed to Islam – as well as the moment of his actual contagion on the oriental market are realised with acoustic and visual means typical of the horror film genre.

And the genre references do not end there. The process of physical decay which Halil suffers during his stay in the hospital turns him into a figure distinctly reminiscent of a zombie: the variola-caused blisters turn his face into a bloody mess, he cannot speak but mumbles incomprehensible groans, he vomits blood on those who try to help him and, most importantly, as a true zombie, he spreads his (oriental) contagion. Halil, the patient zero, is therefore the film’s first and central monster (as the epidemic spreads and Halil dies, others will take over this role, most impressively the hospital’s caretaker, but these are all ‘derivates’ of the original monster).

Contemporary theoreticians of the horror genre have largely insisted that its “monsters” are transgressive in the sense that the suppressed, internal collective fears of a culture are grafted onto them (Langford 2005; Ognjanović 2016; Wood 2002). The monster is a means of articulating and thus externalising collective fears “with the goal of distancing them, controlling and in the end overcoming them” (Vossen 2004: 20).⁴ It is not hard to see how the horror genre and the Yugoslav version of an orientalist narrative work in perfect accord in Variola Vera: the contagion creates disgusting zombie-like figures, fashions them as an intrusion of the unclean Orient into a Belgrade hospital, but also – through Halil being Kosovar – presents this oriental danger as an internal, not fully foreign one. As will be shown shortly, the containment of the variola “monster” will prove possible in the film, but it will neither fully erase the collective fear, nor will it put the mechanism of nestling orientalism which created it out of order.

Variola is thus presented as a virus attack of the East against the body of the West and Belgrade is staged as the location from where Europe defends its borders against an invasion from the Orient. This narrative strategy is quite in accordance with how the historic 1972 outbreak was framed. The Serbian anthropologist Sanja Lazarević Radak’s description of the fear-induced overreactions in Yugoslavia in 1972 perfectly match the well-known mental mapping and bulwark rhetoric of the Balkans as antemurale christianitatis.

During the historic 1972 outbreak, the Yugoslav authorities, Radak writes, erected a check-point on the Danube bridge to Pančevo between Serbia proper and Vojvodina – a spot symbolically separating Europe from the East (Lazarević Radak 2019: 76). Whoever crossed the bridge, be it on foot or in cars or buses, was vaccinated with a bifurcated needle. People crossing this provisional border several times were repeatedly vaccinated, a procedure which in some cases damaged their health. Fears inspired by orientalism, as Radak points out, fed on the notion that one was defending Europe’s outer borders with such overreactions.

This bulwark rhetoric, present in the Balkans since the late middle ages (Berezhnaya and Hein-Kircher 2019) and used intensively during the nation-building struggles against Ottoman rule (Kenneweg 2012), is expressed explicitly in the film in the above-mentioned WHO letter praising Belgrade for defending the rest of Europe. However, the letter also leaves little doubt on where Yugoslavia is to be situated in this operation of mental mapping: “on Europe’s very edge” (“na samoj ivici Evrope”). Thus, the mechanism of (nestling) orientalism works on several levels in Variola Vera: firstly, there is the “real Orient” (the non-situated market); secondly, parts of Yugoslavia are infected by this “Orient” (Kosovo and its Albanian minority); thirdly, this simultaneously foreign and internal Orient threatens and succeeds in infecting Belgrade; finally, for the WHO, this is all taking place on the outskirts of Europe, in a border-space which does not really pertain to the continent’s “core”. In other words, just like the “Eastern” threat is both internal and external to Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia is, following the logics of the “edge”, both internal and external to Europe: as the perspective moves “West” (from the market to the WHO) it incessantly carries its orientalising gaze with it.

Finally, the threat itself is not fully erased from Variola Vera’s ambiguous ending. In the last scene, the epidemic is over, and the team which was managing it is shown triumphant at the international press conference. However, in the last shot, the leader of the crisis team, still being photographed and waiting for questions, starts to play nervously with the very flute which had kicked off the epidemic. The flute has survived an attempt to burn it with the victims’ clothes in front of the hospital and has miraculously found its way (the film never explains how) into the centre of the image which proclaims the end of the crisis. Its appearance in the film’s last shot is accompanied by the same menacing musical leitmotif which had foreshadowed the epidemic in the opening market scene. Though the flute is probably no longer contagious, its last appearance discreetly suggests that the ‘Eastern’, oriental menace is far from over; even the experts fighting it do not always recognise all of its forms.

To summarise: as noted already by Sanja Lazarević Radak (2016: 282), the infection is given a culturally ‘foreign’ origin in a dark, remote country in the East. However, this origin then becomes the pretext for spelling out the fear of a Yugoslav ‘Orient within’, as articulated through the horror of the Kosovar ‘monster’, both foreign and own. Finally, through the insertion of an international gaze into the film, as represented by the WHO, the whole of Yugoslavia is fashioned as a border-space, dangerously close to the dangerous Other. A mechanism of symbolic dislocations, relying on a universalised strategy of othering, thus seems to incessantly permeate Marković’s film. The contagious nature of this mechanism might be worth taking account of in the present context, with the COVID-19 pandemics being termed the “Chinese plague”; thus contagion is once more being located as a problem haunting ‘us’ from the East.

Societal Disintegration: Partizan (in) Spirit

While “the other within” certainly was one issue of the time, the looming disintegration of Yugoslav society clearly was another. Marković’s international contemporaries recognised the mocking critique of Yugoslavia and its self-management organisation in Variola Vera right from the start. The French film critic Lorenzo Codelli, for instance, headlined his report on the 1982 Pula Film Festival with a metaphor pointing out the contagiousness of critique within Yugoslav film: “L’épidémie du cinéma yougoslave”. In the magazine Positif he elaborated especially in regard to Marković’s Variola Vera: “Markovic’s mockeries are directed against a state apparatus that is, from now on, reduced to managing (or seeming to manage) a society struck by permanent epidemics.” (Codelli 1982: 49).⁵ Pavle Levi later referred to the same ailing state of Yugoslavia in his already mentioned study on Yugoslav film Disintegration in Frames, identifying Marković as a key director of Yugoslav institutional failure:

Goran Marković, for instance – to take one talented director among many – built his oeuvre (and reputation) by placing under close scrutiny, dissecting, and, ultimately, satirizing, one institution of the socialist Yugoslavia after another. […] Each one of these specific institutions acquires, in Marković’s hands, the status of a micro-structure allegorically referring to, and critically reflecting upon, the Yugoslav self-managed society as a whole. (Levi 2007: 58)

To this very justified accent on Marković’s critique of Yugoslavia’s self-management, I will add two other important aspects which should lead to an in-depth understanding of the epidemic in Variola Vera. Firstly, the disease not only sheds light on the decay of Yugoslavia, it also discreetly suggests a remedy in the guise of “partisan spirit”. Secondly, Variola Vera not only thematises neuralgic aspects of Yugoslav society, it also enquires into how they are being suppressed in favour of an image conforming to Yugoslavia’s renowned “third way” self-fashioning: in Variola Vera, Yugoslavia turns out to be rotting inside while keeping up its clean international image of successful and warm-hearted socialism.

Let me now return to the micro-society presented by the film. Even before the epidemic’s start, the Belgrade hospital is represented as dysfunctional: its heating system is old and leaking, leaving patients to freeze in their rooms. With the epidemic’s start, things will only get worse. After patient zero has infected others in the hospital, the government ruthlessly isolates the building, delivers too few vaccine shots for those quarantined and then leaves the locked-in patients and medical staff to the lethal fate of the smallpox infection cycle, with many suffering a terrible and painful death. The lengthy scene of the isolation procedure juxtaposes the Aesculapian spirit of healing (represented by a statue in front of the hospital) with the lack of solidarity with the hospital inmates (even their windows get boarded up).

This society within society breaks down quickly in the film. Several function holders fail to fulfil their tasks and the community, represented by those isolated in the hospital, disintegrates into pure chaos and immorality. Nurses turn out to be drug addicts stealing patients’ medication, doctors start drinking and raping junior hospital staff in their charge, anonymous copulations take place in public hospital rooms in front of the eyes of other people (who have stopped caring), the director and chief physician abuses his privileged position, locks himself in his office and consumes all the antiglobulin meant for the child-patients, while the party functionary Uskoković uses his insight into the strategic disease-control operation to attempt to release a personal relative from the otherwise strictly quarantined hospital. The boy Kalimero, the caretaker Mile, the pilgrim Halil, the young and dedicated nurse Slavica, all die a painful, particularised deaths, shown in explicit detail. They moan, scream, bleed, beg, cry, lose control and consciousness while becoming increasingly disfigured. At the end of this disintegration, they stop being part of society, they partly even stop looking human any more.

While, on one hand, it violently rips people out of the community, on the other the virus infects without exception: innocent and guilty, the powerful and the powerless, young and old, Muslim and Christian. So, Yugoslavia allegorically dissolves in Variola Vera: it does not seem to have the moral and ideational cohesion for real communality (any more). The infection “from the East” merely brings the insufficient immunological state of the idea of Yugoslavia to the surface, it does not cause it.

But while the variola virus reveals the dire health of Yugoslav society, the film still sets the stage for a possible restart: by producing a catastrophe, the disease also creates a possible revolutionary situation. The fact that the virus infects all members of Yugoslav society does not function as an equalising strategy, evening out differences: instead, it strongly suggests that the good in Yugoslavia can only be rescued by a complete and total cleansing process of the whole political body. This restart is represented by the three-week smallpox infection cycle. Everybody, according to Marković’s film, has to live through the horrible purifying disease until in the end some will be left whose spirit is still alive or at least re-awakened.⁶ In a certain respect, what we find in Variola Vera resembles catharsis through endurance or the anthroposophic idea of reinforcement by living through diseases. I argue that behind this alluring idea of a possible restart lies the Yugoslav ideology of self-infection with partisan spirit, on which the supranational state was built.

After the founding of AVNOJ (Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) in 1942, the country employed a fervent narrative of Partisan self-sacrifice. Only those embracing the partisan spirit of the founding days were to be counted as 'real' Yugoslavs. This idea can also be seen in Yugoslavia’s partisan film production (Jakiša 2012). Yugoslavia’s ideological self-understanding – not only in the light of Variola Vera – can be described as that of an “infection” community, in which ideational contagion was morally required and explicitly demanded. Its transgenerational dimension can be historically reconstructed from the rituals of youth organisations (Duda 2015, Spaskovska 2017) and songs in popular culture, such as Đorđe Balašević’s Računajte na nas / Count on us, in which the 1970s rock’n’roll generation commits itself to the partisan spirit of their parents and grandparents.

Seen from this angle, several individuals in Variola Vera show a partisan self-sacrificing spirit. Dr. Grujić and nurse Slavica hold the dying Redžepi, well aware of the consequences. The librarian Duško catches the disfigured and caretaker Mile in his dying hour, and Dr. Marković, who has a vaccination-contraindicating heart condition, still takes a shot to be able to care for the patients for as long as possible. When she suffers the expected heart attack, the young medical student Dr. Danka (whom her uncle, the functionary Uskoković wanted to free from quarantine) sends Dr. Marković on the escape route instead, so that she can get adequate treatment. And last but not least, Dr. Kenigsmark, portrayed by Erland Josephson – famous at that time from his work with Ingmar Bergman and later with Andrei Tarkovsky and Peter Greenaway – represents the Good in the dissolving society.⁷ He patiently cares for everyone, standing at the boy Kalimero’s bed in his dying hour, he keeps communicating even with the hospital director in spite of his highly dysfunctional leadership and, most importantly, he supports the UN epidemiologist and expert, who finds a reasonable and helpful ally in Dr. Kenigsmark. At one point, Kenigsmark confesses that the faith and beliefs which had been holding him up to work so fervently for others have been temporarily shaken by Dr. Grujić’s infection, but his spirits recover to their full strength quite quickly.

Self-infection thus features as a way of resetting Yugoslav society back to a time when people were eagerly collaborative. Furthermore, this past is explicitly connoted by some of the film’s images and scenes. An overt parallel between the present situation in the hospital and that of World War II is established when Dr. Kenigsmark finally manages to enter the locked office of the cowardly chief physician, who starts ranting about how Dr. Ćirić (the heroic, praying paediatrician) has hated and persecuted him ever since their time together in the Banjica concentration camp during World War II. The first thing she did after they broke free, he recounts to Dr. Kenigsmark, was to report him to a partisan committee for “bad demeanour” (lose držanje) inside the camp. However, the chief physician informs Dr. Kenigsmark and the viewer, Dr. Ćirić could not prove her claim in front of the committee. Now, his cowardly and selfish demeanour inside the locked-down hospital irrefutably proves that Dr. Ćirić was telling the truth. By the same token, a parallel is being established between the World War II concentration camp and the quarantined hospital: the chief physician’s demeanour is once again bad because the two situations mirror each other.

Further still, Dr. Kenigsmark reproaches his colleague that he is the “head of this house” (glava ove kuće), and has to fulfil his role and take charge of the hospital in crisis. The chief physician immediately refuses. This complete break-down and betrayal is once again reminiscent of the Yugoslav World War II context. A dominant ideological narrative on the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia (often to be found in early partisan films, for example, Živjeće ovaj narod / The Unconquered People from 1947), goes as follows: the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s government abandoned its people without really putting up a fight, thus this people had to organise itself and lead its partisan struggle. The head physician, the hospital’s “chief of government” thus reacts to the crisis (already associated with a World War II concentration camp) in a way distinctly reminiscent of the pre-socialist government’s cowardly betrayal of its people.

Then the partisan fight with the disease begins. Once again, there are striking parallels between this fight and the one represented in partisan films. The hospital’s inmates are shown twice in the guise of refugees: each time the disease reaches one of the hospital’s three floors, this floor has to be evacuated. In these scenes lines of people carry their things (blankets, pillows etc.) to a safe floor, with those who are too sick to walk on improvised stretchers, mattresses etc. The evacuation scenes are thus distinctly reminiscent of partisans marching burdened with their wounded, whom they are not going to abandon, while the disease develops in two “enemy offensives”, first taking the second then the first floor, but never reaching the final point of resistance: the ground floor. In other words, the fight with the disease is, at least to a certain extent, fashioned through overt parallels with the partisan struggle. As the disease progresses from the top of the hospital down, it echoes the progressive collapse of society's values through its various strata of power but the partisans (the people) withdraw to the ground floor and never succumb.

Finally, the situation of crisis opens a revolutionary space. When the cynical but self-sacrificing Dr. Grujić finally manages to get the chief physician out into the open, the hospital’s head tries to escape, but is caught by Bora Triperaš, a distinctly proletarian figure who mockingly addresses him as “diša”, a colloquial and in this case derogatory term for “principal”. This is then followed by a general uproar of the hospital (patients and staff included) against their “head”. Differences in class and status thus at least partially dissolve within the space of quarantine, with the proletariat (Bora) overtly challenging and mocking the “principal” (if not the red bourgeoise, of which he is part).

Marković’s film thus works with markers of disaster movies, a genre that was at its peak at the time, with an apocalyptic-restorative idea of resurrection in its centre. Variola Vera is to a certain extent partisan in spirit, it revisits Yugoslavia’s partisan past not only on the affective level, but also on the level of imagery and through the forms of its protagonists’ struggle. If the disease is disastrous, it also brings to the fore the buried partisan strength which is needed to tackle this monster. However, this new revolutionary zeal is itself quarantined in the movie: it never leaves the space of the hospital, not even in the form of an image or of news.

Marković’s critique of the Yugoslav failure to be (or stay) a morally upright and good society is accompanied by a critique of Yugoslavia’s position on the world-stage. The decision-makers in the film are interested in the tourist season that could be ruined by the epidemic, or in the fact that the Italian and Spanish media report critically on Yugoslavia’s epidemic management. Their concerns are capitalist in nature or centre on threats to Yugoslavia’s image and public relations. The irony is more than palpable when the WHO letter awarding the “golden branch for the successful fight against an infectious disease” describes the “selfless actions” of the authorities. What is exposed here is Yugoslavia’s blindness towards the totalitarian defence of its international image. Neutrality and third way socialism – Tanja Zimmermann coined the term “ideology of thirdness” (Ideologie der Drittheit, Zimmermann 2014) – turn out to be devoid of content, reduced to mere appearances in the Yugoslavia of Marković’s time. This is one of the central messages in Variola Vera: the former partisans now are mere Uskokovićs(!)⁸ Also, the seemingly democratic self-governance is, if seen in the right, epidemic light, nothing but totalitarian autocracy. The only lesson to be learned from variola and the only positive prospect for Yugoslavia lies within the hospital: its survivors and its dead appear as a basis upon which a radically new world can be built.

The Role of Experts: Predictability as the Uncanny

The relationship between disease and power opens one last aspect of Variola Vera which deserves discussion: the role of experts and science. It was foremost Michel Foucault who, first in Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975) and then in Security, Territory, Population (Sécurité, territoire, population, 2004) elaborated a complex relationship between disease, knowledge and power. Conveniently enough, Foucault used two exemplary diseases in order to develop his analysis: first the plague, then petite vérole, smallpox, the variola virus. Contrary to Antonin Artaud’s famous take on the plague, which fashioned the disease as a glorious meltdown of all forms of social and cultural inhibitions (Artaud 2010), Foucault claimed that plague epidemics were an important pretext for the introduction of disciplinary dispositifs into society: a city infected by the plague was broken down into a grid, surveilled through a close monitoring of its inhabitants’ movements, each citizen had to report daily to the authorities etc. (Foucault 1985) The plague thus offered a playground for experiments with a new, disciplinary form of power. Variola, in its turn, was an important factor for the development of governmentality: rather than trying to eradicate the disease through physically surveilling the inhabitants of a city, early inoculation strategies were based on statistics and risk assessment with regards to different groups within a country’s “population” (Foucault 2004). Strategies of inoculation thus played a major role in the inventing of the category of population, a collective entity which is to be conceived of and governed (in part) on the basis of its biological existence.

The approach to both diseases shows, in Foucault’s view, that medical expertise, power, knowledge and disease interact time and again. An epidemic can lead to a crisis; at the same time, however, it can bring forth and consolidate new forms of power.

Already from the earlier sketched-out analysis, it is quite evident that Variola Vera does thematise the interplay between power, visibility and disease: ambitious achievers like the functionaries Uskoković and Jovanović are challenged by the variola outbreak, they mercilessly apply disciplinary measures, and put major efforts into managing the media and Yugoslavia’s international image and these efforts pay off: in the end they manage to produce an image of success for the international press. In the last analysis, the epidemic helped them consolidate another condensed representation of the “third way’s” validity; in other words, it was used to support a display of state power.

However, a figure more challenging with regards to the relationship between epidemics and power is the film’s epidemiologist and scientific expert sent by the UN to offer support with the Belgrade outbreak. He is the only outside person entering the hospital, the only one who can cross the border between the quarantined micro-society and the outside world. On his first entry he says in an uncanny, grave and earnest voice: “The action committee sent me. I am going to help you ”.⁹ This scientist, although intimidating, is not a henchman of power, but an ally showing solidarity with the hospital’s inmates. Yugoslavia’s merciless leadership has no leverage on him, he personifies the outside of the Third Way impasse.

More than that, the figure of the epidemiologist stands outside all ruling orders; to a degree he defies classification. Firstly, he is almost fully dehumanised in his appearance: he wears a mask, gloves, hat, a protective overall and goggles, almost resembling an alien creature invading the world of the familiar. Secondly, his outside, unclassifiable position is articulated by the choice of actor and manipulation of voice: played by the German actor Peter Carsten, the epidemiologist had to be dubbed into Serbo-Croat by another actor and is additionally alienated by means of a vocoder.¹⁰ In the majority of his scenes his voice is thus fashioned as not only an acousmatic one (its source, the mouth, is fully covered by the protective mask) but almost as inhuman, robotic. His unique, incomprehensible, alienated appearance and his way of speaking distinguish him from everybody else; he appears supernatural, outlandish and yet, in a seemingly contradictory manner, in solidarity with those in need.

Carsten’s whole appearance in the film functions as a rift in reality; with the character of the UN-epidemiologist, the fantastic (Todorov 1973) breaks into the otherwise realistically narrated world of Variola Vera. Up until its very end, the film keeps the viewer in doubt as to the nature of its main helper-figure, which could be a human as well as a superhuman appearance. Only in the final demasking scene does this fantastic figure resolve into the strange in Todorov’s sense of the term.

The epidemiologist could thus be viewed as Marković’s flirt with science-fiction. Further still, it can be regarded as an incarnation of the Freudian uncanny (Freud 1963). The scientist functions as the return of the familiar we lost sight of, forgot, that now, upon reencountering it, haunts and frightens us. On the level of the film’s narrative, this is made quite explicit. In Variola Vera, the epidemiologist is the bearer and the personification of knowledge long lost to Europe; having studied smallpox in Africa, he is the only character in the film with any real knowledge of the disease. Both even translate into his physique: when he finally takes off the mask at the end of the film, his pockmarked face reveals that the epidemiologist lived through and survived smallpox in the “Third World” himself.

However, by pushing the interpretation a little further, it could be claimed that the epidemiologist’s 'uncanny' aspect stretches beyond his being a bearer of lost, frightening knowledge: only through appearing as an inhuman, uncanny figure can he in fact perform his role of a helper. As was noted previously, unlike the Yugoslav organs of power, who were ready to let everyone die, this bearer of medical knowledge and expertise came to actively help. He is truly concerned with the protection and well-being of individuals in the locked-down hospital. Although it will not be in this expert’s power to change the situation medically – after all, the virus has an alien logic of its own, which the collective body will have to suffer through – throughout Variola Vera he still remains the voice, consciousness and spirit of scientific enlightenment in the service of the people. The epidemiologist shares his knowledge of smallpox patiently and thus makes the events more predictable and bearable for the infected and for the locked-in in the hospital.

Ironically, this figure of medical enlightenment can perform this role only as long as it remains uncanny. Upon removing his mask, the epidemiologist is asked by Dr. Kenigsmark why he was wearing the protective suit when he was in fact immune all along. To this, he replies that the suit was worn “for psychological reasons”, to stay convincing for and independent of both sides: the locked-up patients inside the hospital, but most of all the Yugoslav officials outside. Only if it bears the disguise of the uncanny, if it remains fully unclassifiable, Variola Vera would suggest, can the principle of compassionate medical enlightenment remain independent of the disease-power network. The humanist principle, which should be well-known, thus has to wear the protective suit of the uncanny in order to remain active.

In several aspects Marković’s epidemiologist might remind contemporary viewers of scientific experts in the COVID-19 pandemic and their role as problem solvers in the face of political calculation; he could also, although slightly cynically, point towards some of the motives for the resistance and disbelief with regards to these decisions: in order to remain independent, Marković would suggest, the medical expert has to put on the guise of the uncanny; the very humanist healing principle thus returns into the power-ridden society as an unfamiliar, haunting one in order to escape the disease-power nexus.

Conclusion

In 2020, the first Covid year, the German film scholar Denis Newiak published a book on pandemics in film entitled: Alles schon mal dagewesen. Was wir aus den Pandemie-Filmen für die Corona-Krise lernen können (We Heard it All Before. What We Can Learn From Pandemic Films for the Corona Crisis). In this book, Newiak emphatically stresses that film can be understood as an early warning system for societal grievances and future challenges, overlooked by governments, but noticed by filmmakers, and that film even sketches out possible solutions in advance. Newiak’s idea of cinema as prognosis and instruction manual stems from Niklas Luhmann’s description of self-observation of societal systems in media. Goran Marković stated in several interviews in spring 2020 – when Variola Vera was rediscovered overnight – that he had anticipated many events with his film: lock-downs, quarantines, isolation, lack of medical supplies and a shift of attention towards medical and scientific advisers. But Marković was even more prescient about the loss of moral integrity and social cohesion within Yugoslavia, followed by its dissolution, and the transformations the post-Yugoslav world would go through soon after the film’s appearance. Seen in this light, the UN epidemiologist acquires a final uncanny aspect: exactly reflecting the UN staff who, during the 1990s Yugoslav wars, were often the only connection between populations stuck within the conflicts and the outside world. Furthermore, the epidemiologist, not really able to substantially change the course of events (the disease had to take its course), foreshadows the very limited impact of this benevolent UN presence.

In conclusion, Variola Vera is not only a film about a historic variola vera outbreak, it is a film about Yugoslav fear: a fear of the other, especially the oriental or Muslim other and thus of the “alien” within. Variola Vera is also a film about the fear of society’s disintegration; on several levels it suggests that in 1982 (the idea of) Yugoslavia existed only on the surface and was more of a mirage produced for the international gaze than a reality. These collective fears are translated by the film into an epidemic narrative that works with topoi of the horror, disaster and science fiction genres.¹¹ Furthermore, the film offers several ways out of the (not only medical) crisis which the epidemic brought to the fore: on the one hand, the crisis is fashioned as at least partially (re)awakening a communal, self-sacrificial, revolutionary, partisan spirit. On the other hand, humanist medical expertise returns in the guise of the uncanny to haunt the biopolitical measures introduced by Yugoslavia’s state-apparatus. Finally, Variola Vera demonstrates quite brilliantly that an epidemic can never be conceived of in isolation of the various mechanisms and significations which necessarily get grafted upon it: the epidemic is for Marković a complex hermeneutics of social, political, historic and representational symptoms.

Miranda Jakiša
University of Vienna
miranda.jakisa@univie.ac.at

Acknowledgement

Open access funding provided by University of Vienna.

Biography

Miranda Jakiša is a Full Professor of South Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Vienna, Austria. From 2009 to 2019 she was a Professor of South and East Slavic Literatures at Humboldt University Berlin. Miranda Jakiša received her PhD at the University of Tuebingen with a dissertation on Bosnian literature. Her main fields of research are South Slavic literatures of the 19^th to 21^st century, Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav film, transnational literatures, and contemporary theatre in South East Europe. Currently Miranda Jakiša is researching literatures and cultures of ‘gastarbajt’ in the German speaking countries.

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Suggested Citation

Jakiša, Miranda. 2022. “The Virus of Dissolution: Yugoslavia in Goran Marković's Variola vera (1982)”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 15. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2022.00015.323

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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