GOODBYE, HOW ARE YOU?

The film heralded in its opening credits as a “satirical documentary fairytale” is a phenomenon perhaps best described by adapting the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: whenever you try to concentrate on a certain point in the film, you can no longer appreciate the masterfully edited linkage of images and words. If, however, you simply drift along with the narrative, you are likely to miss one ironically-clever aphorism after the next. GOODBYE, HOW ARE YOU? plays with this irreconcilability, with the cognitive dissonance produced by the falling-apart of text, images and music. Boris Mitić delivers not a classical documentary but a collage of archive footage, video recordings and stills relating to Serbia from the early 1990s up to the present day. He underlays the images with lyrical words from a first-person narrator, combining the latter’s stream of aphorisms with soft piano music that in turn contrasts sharply with the footage of war and violence. Viewed superficially, all this makes the film function much like an abstract film poem – but one ironically fractured by camerawork that repeatedly takes up individual formulations and plays with their literal meaning, follows associations that stray far from the course. On a number of levels – immediately obvious but between the lines, too – the film’s strength is that it renders sensitive yet unsparing account of a post-war Serbian society that has lost sight of its ideals. “ Because we were unable to choose between Western and Eastern civilization,” the narrator laconically asserts, “we decided simply to be uncivilized.”