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Memories of Yugoslavia: Iva Radivojević on When the Phone Rang
When the Phone Rang Iva Radivojević has established a reputation for crafting precise yet elliptical filmic enigmas that use voiceover and reconstruction to reduce narrative to its most essential components. Her latest feature, When the Phone Rang, which premiered at Locarno last year, reimagines the director’s own childhood during the breakup of Yugoslavia through the lens of Lana, a doppelganger living with her sister and parents in an unnamed but familiar town and country. The film’s title refers to a moment which serves as the basis for everything that follows, and to which we keep returning as the narrative progresses. Tight, vivid close-ups shot in 4:3 on 16mm create an atmosphere of tense uncertainty as they picture a world closing in on itself, now accessible only through the fragmentation of memory. Actors playing Lana, her sister and other young people they encounter silently emote and punctuate scenes with dialogue while an omniscient narrator guides us through their crumbling reality. The film makes its US premiere tonight at First Look.
Filmmaker: To me, this feels as much like a film about memory as it is a specific set of memories. I don’t know if you feel comfortable saying, but are these your memories?
Radivojević: Yeah, they are.
Filmmaker: I’m interested in how memories become concrete images. Where did you begin with this film?
Radivojević: Dubovka Ubershech is my recent inspiration. She talks about memories as ghosts who return to haunt the present. Some of these memories are like that. When I was asked about my childhood, somehow it would go to these same images or memories—always in the same apartment, always around this phone call. Then I was like, “Why am I only remembering these very specific things?” Of course, we know that memory is not really trustworthy, it changes over time, you only remember parts of it and so on. It wasn’t until I did this poetry workshop with Louis Walsh at Naropa, and he had us do this exercise that had to do with the repeating sentence, almost like a memory that keeps repeating—something clicked in that moment, and I just started writing. From there on, I knew that I wanted to give these memories a container because they kept reappearing. I also figured out that we don’t have any pictures from my house at that time, before we left. I wanted to give them life in a way, give them some kind of container so they wouldn’t be in my head anymore, but they would live in a different space.
Filmmaker: You’ve developed a very unique style in your work that is fictional in one sense: You have actors being directed, playing a part, and narration, filling in the details. But it also stems from a documentary impulse. So, in staging and containing these memories, how do you approach form and style? And why do you find it useful to have a different character with a different name, this element of remove, while directly dealing with your own memories?
Radivojević: I think the remove allows me some comfort in even telling the story. That’s as simplistic as I can get. It’s so vulnerable to say these things, and somehow in disguising myself I can have space. This also happens when we’re talking about voiceover; most of my films have voiceovers, and they keep changing. Languages change, the person changes gender or nationality and so on. So, it’s also some kind of a disguise. It’s usually telling a personal story or some kind of an experience, but using a disguise. The disguise also comes from the fact that as somebody who’s migrated from country to country, you are changing identity, reality, language all the time, so you are in a kind of disguise all the time, or shapeshifting.
Filmmaker: It’s not just the character’s name. You also call your setting the country of X, despite it being fairly obvious that it’s Yugoslavia. Is that for similar reasons?
Radivojević: That’s because I didn’t want to make the movie specifically about Yugoslavia, but to suggest that this could be any country, any place, any person. It’s happening over and over again everywhere. This could be—name a country today.
Filmmaker: One of the most prominent recurring images in the film is of this very interestingly designed clock that’s like a loaf of bread or piece of toast. And it’s always set at the same time; this is a film that seems to happen in one single moment. Can you talk a bit more about creating that very concrete image?
Radivojević: That’s a little bit of a lucky, intuitive filmmaking process. We filmed the clock because it happened to be in this apartment where we filmed; I didn’t know that that was going to be the image that repeats. We filmed the whole film in one apartment. We just kept re-arranging it. We used every inch. That clock just happened to be on that wall, and that wall had this very particular texture, almost like little mountains or something. I was going to use the clock, and we set it at that particular time, but I did not have it in mind as a repeating image or symbol. Then I was actually in conversation with Madeleine [Molyneaux], my producer, and she said, “There’s something about the clock. Why don’t we use that as a repeating device while we’re repeating these sentences?”
Filmmaker: Particularly because of the voiceover, performed by a separate narrator, your lead actor doesn’t have many lines, yet she’s doing a lot of emotive work. Can you talk about working through that process with her?
Radivojević: We found her in an acting workshop for kids. I was looking for some resonance with the people that I knew, these people who were being portrayed, and of course, for myself. There was something about her detached quietness, but then when she went on stage to perform, she was a real force. Something connected there. We didn’t have rehearsals at all, we didn’t have a casting process in which they come in and do a line or scene. Because of budgetary issues, there was no time to rehearse. I don’t even think I’m interested in doing heavy dialogue scenes. It was something about relaying an essence, and we got really, really lucky that she was incredibly emotive and incredibly present all the time. I’ve never worked with kids before, and I knew that reducing the lines would make it easier, perhaps, to get the performance or feeling that I needed.
Filmmaker: You show her face, her sister’s face and the face of others, but some people are only seen from the neck down. Why that limitation?
Radivojević: I think the idea was to make the world really small, the world of children. All the children’s faces are shown to be in their universe. There’s a whole war going on outside, but their life goes on, and this is like a murmur that happens. That was the idea. Also, again, sometimes constraints are really creative, and the constraint was that there was a budgetary limit in which we couldn’t hire more actors. So the idea was that the parents [were] these Tom & Jerry figures, where the owner of the cat only shows up with their feet or hands. They’re in the background. You never see them.
Filmmaker: That’s what I thought of, but it felt like a silly comparison.
Radivojević: No, but it is.
Filmmaker: I love that idea of everything outside of their world existing as murmurs. We’re not seeing the most horrific aspects of this war. They’re being hinted at in very chilling ways.
Radivojević: Yeah. As a kid, especially before the internet, you don’t really know. You sense something—urgency, danger and so on—but you don’t really know what’s happening. Also, I was not interested in making a film about war. It’s more about the heartache of dislocation. What does it feel like to be torn away suddenly from your homeland, your friends, your family, your language?
Filmmaker: The music feels really significant. We have the opera Carmen at the beginning, which the protagonist is watching on TV before the phone rings. There’s Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 1,” which she plays on the piano, the punk music that we hear first on the soundtrack and then that she’s listening to with Vlad as they sing along and dance. And then two more really evocative circumstances. One, when she’s cleaning the plant with milk, she’s humming something. And then, of course, her friend Mariana singing the song “Please, Mr. Jailer” from Cry-Baby. Can you talk about incorporating the music?
Radivojević: These are all little remnants of those childhood years, what people listened to. When we told the actors that they have to learn this or that song, they’d never heard it, but their parents were very excited because it’s the music of their childhood. We used very year-specific music. Everybody on set who is a similar age would get so animated when we listened to the songs. “Mr. Jailer,” Cry-Baby. Opera was on TV all the time in the morning. There were three channels available, so you’d just watch opera. In terms of her playing the piano, she actually plays the violin. She doesn’t play the piano. Luckily, she knew this one piece. And obviously, I used to play the piano when I was a child, so we needed her to perform something. That was a bit of surprise. It was lucky, it’s beautiful and it fit.
Filmmaker: Can you also talk about the ways in which you let the present-day spill in, which may have been a budgetary thing, but also could relate to, as you said, the universality you intended for this film? An example is seeing “ACAB” spray-painted on a wall in the background?
Radivojević: We had this discussion last night. I’m like, “ACAB dates. It’s not a new thing”.
Filmmaker: Ah, okay. ACAB was a thing back then.
Radivojević: I think so. But also, to your point, of course it’s a budgetary issue. Somebody mentioned air conditioners. There were new cars that we couldn’t control. But at the same time, it’s a little bit similar to how I direct actors or what I want from them. I have a very particular thing I want to talk about in a very specific way, and I’m not so concerned about perfection or things that spill in. If you choose to pay attention to that or if that bothers you, that’s okay, because I think the overarching thing is there. Even if we had the money, would I go to people and say, “Take your air conditioners down”? I don’t think so. I don’t want to bother people.
Filmmaker: There’s a game that Lana and her friend Jova play of following people. What exactly are they doing?
Radivojević: There was no internet, no phones, nothing, so you invented your own games. This was a sort of pastime where we’d follow people. We’d want to know where they live, what their name is, who they are, and also [did this] as a way of knowing the neighborhood a little bit better. I actually still follow people.
Filmmaker: Really?
Radivojević: Yeah. Sometimes I’ll just follow people to see where they go—obviously not to their houses or in their elevators, but I see where they take me. Especially if I’m in a new city and searching around, I’ll find an interesting person and just let them lead me.
Filmmaker: Have you ever been caught in the act?
Radivojević: I don’t think so.
Filmmaker: I wanted to ask also about this line that I feel was really evocative: “When she put the phone down, she felt betrayed.” Can you speak more to that?
Radivojević: That’s very particular to the relationship with my father. That scene is so small. I don’t even know if it’s registered as it should be. Obviously, he was bringing women home. So, there is a betrayal of your own little personal space. and Maybe this is why this room keeps coming up as a memory: Your little universe that is your home has been intruded on, somehow it doesn’t feel safe anymore. That was one aspect, but it’s more about what it means to to detach from everything you love, and perhaps one of those things is also your father.
Filmmaker: Another interesting instance of detachment is when the phones are disconnected. The narrator tells us that the phone lines in the country are no longer working. Recalling the fact that we’re seeing her return again and again to this phone call, it’s like, what’s worse? Being able to get these calls, or now not being able to get these calls?
Radivojević: We had family in Croatia, in Macedonia, in Bosnia, all over. There’s something about not being able to communicate. I guess that that translates also to one of the last lines in the film: “She was so far away, using words she doesn’t understand.” You’re going to a country where you can’t communicate. You don’t know how to say things, how to connect with people. I think that that’s an echo of the inability to communicate.
Filmmaker: Why does the film end where it does? How did you know that was the point at which you wanted to stop telling the story, which obviously has a strong dramatic continuation?
Radivojević: Because the story after that is something entirely new. Maybe it’s part two. In this film, we’re exploring all the things you’re leaving behind or being torn away from. What happens after can also illustrate that, but this woman is in a new place. Those memories coming back were only from Yugoslavia; no memories of Cyprus circle back to me so much. So, I wanted to stop with the sea, because sea is a passage of migration and so on. We moved to an island detached from the world. Also, it’s echoing [my] crying. I don’t remember any of it. It was told to me by my grandmother who the film is dedicated to.
Filmmaker: That’s the last line of the movie: “I don’t remember any of it.”
Radivojević: Yeah. My grandma died in May. She asked me if I was sad when she would come visit us in Cyprus. I had told her that I cried a lot and was sad all the time, but didn’t tell anybody. And I don’t remember saying that to her. I don’t remember crying either. So, clearly, there’s some kind of burial that happens as a survival mechanism.
Filmmaker: How does it feel to have concretized these memories and be sharing them with people?
Radivojević: It’s my third feature, and the first film that I’ve made where I feel really strong. I don’t know why that is. I can’t elaborate more on what that means yet. Even yesterday at the premiere, there were some people who were also from Yugoslavia. The interviewer who was here before [you] has an Algerian background, and there’s a relatability that happens [about] this tearing that happens when you have to leave that. I feel like it’s useful.
