Abstract
‘Slučaj Harms’, directed and co-written by Slobodan Pešić (born in Belgrade in 1956), was the official Yugoslav entry at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Despite references in the Yugoslav press to the ‘Caméra d’Or’ prize, it was shown not in competition, but in the Festival’s non-competitive category ‘Un Certain Regard’ on 13 May 1988.1
That evening the dog saw terrible things. He saw the great man plunge his slippery, rubber-gloved hands into a jar to fish out a brain…
The Heart of a Dog, M. Bulgakov
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
One reviewer finds the epilogue comforting, rather than disturbing, for it is about art and the viewer and no longer about the relationship between the writer as an artist and as himself, or the work and the world in which it is rooted: Milan Cvijanović, ‘Slučaj Harms’, Ju Film Danas, 2–3, 1988, 104.
Kharms’s personal life and career were by now in a worse state than ever. His diary notes show the hopelessness of his mood. See Delo, (Belgrade) XXXV, 7, July 1988, 112–19.
It is interesting to note the extension of Kharms’s literary theory from the plane of objects to that of humans. According to Kharms, objects have contingent and necessary meanings. The former are relative, defined by ‘connectedness’ with other objects and humans; even if these connections are violated, objects retain their ‘quintessential’ meanings. Its continued existence when conventional links are denied affirms the object’s absolute nature, its true meaning. If this idea is transposed to the ‘sluchai’ (compiled a decade after Kharms gave expression to these theories) one might argue that the same principle operates at the human level: where ‘connectedness’ is destroyed, the absolute nature of the ‘objectified’ individual remains. Continuing existence in the absence of connectedness gives the individual a necessary, inalienable meaning. See Kharms, ‘Predmety i figury otkrytye Daniilom Ivanovichem Kharmsom’ (1927), Soviet Union/Union Soviétique, 5, 1978, 2, 299–300. W. Kasack points out that people in Kharms’s world are alienated not only from one another, but also from themselves: see Kasack, 1976, 77.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1991 Neil Cornwell
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Michalski, M. (1991). Slobodan Pešić’s film Slučaj Harms and Kharms’s Sluchai. In: Cornwell, N. (eds) Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11642-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11642-3_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-11644-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-11642-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)