‘The Eclipse’ Review: A Rich, Timely Doc Probing a Serbian Family’s Darkened Memories of the Yugoslav Wars
12.04.2022 - 12:17
/ variety.com
Jessica Kiang The solar eclipses of 1961 and 1999, both observable in Serbia, bracket the events explored in the lyrical imagery of Nataša Urban’s debut feature-length documentary. But because life so rarely arranges itself neatly along a defined timeline, they do it imprecisely, blurring over a little at either edge, the way memories do.
As a metaphor, too, these astronomical events are evocatively imperfect: Our tiny little moon can occasionally blot out the sun the way an individual’s act of willful forgetfulness can all but obscure massive geopolitical upheaval. But an eclipse passes according to immutable laws of physics; memory and reckoning do not obey a similarly strict orbit.
People are far less predictable than planets. Still, our interpretation of celestial mechanics can be politicized, as the Serbian-born Urban outlines in the contrasting depictions of the two eclipses.
In 1961, lovely, scratchy archive footage shows excited Yugoslavs crowding the streets, at the express encouragement of the government, holding up pinhole papers and shards of blackened glass to safely observe the event. In 1999, by contrast, the Serbian population, made paranoid by prolonged conflict and state-sponsored messages about the dangers of solar radiation, drew down their blinds and hung blankets over their windows.
Urban’s brother, Igor, remembers being one of only a couple of people on the street after the air raid siren sounded to signal the beginning of the eclipse.In between the two dates, Urban traces the overlapping reminiscences of her family, who simply tried to maintain some semblance of normality despite the privations of war — a moral ambivalence Urban confronts but neither excuses nor judges. Interspersed with text
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