....Usually when feature films are made, their producers try to knit together story and plot in order to create a mimetic whole that should enable the viewers to construct a vision of a dramatic event. When, for example, the director Steven Spielberg makes his highly popular historical films (cf. Schindler's List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan) he and his producers attempt to dramatise past events. Such movies can be said to write history with film, because they aim at realistically reconstructing the past in ways that resemble the writing of history that tries to represent the past in an accurate and undistorted version - "the past as it really was". ....Anybody seeing such a film, believing "this is what it was like" has accepted and confirmed the filmmakers' formula. Such filmmaking is rooted in a specific notion of historical writing, which would be grounded on the basic idea that outside and beyond our human perception past reality exists, and that the aim of historical writing is to enable human knowledge access to this past reality. In this respect, the presupposed aim of historical writing would be to transcend our faculty of knowledge from its position here-and-now in order to let it cover some assumed event, which would be placed there-and-then. When seeing a historical film, for example Saving Private Ryan, the belief that the film will enable us to know anything about past events emanates from this notion of historical writing.
....Seen from this perspective, the film Before the Rain proves to challenge not just the manner in which feature films in general and historical films in particular are conventionally made and understood, but precisely this notion of historical writing. In this article I will argue that a close examination of the complex narrative structure that is outlined in the film Before the Rain could function as a means to problematise our understanding of more conventional narrative strategies within moviemaking and the writing of history (1).
....In order to present this film in a more full-fledged manner, it should first be put into context. It was written and directed in the early 1990s by Milcho Manchevski, who was born in Yugoslavia and trained as a film director in the United States. As a moviemaker, Manchevski had previously been doing pop-videos and short films. Before the Rain was his debut as a feature film director.
....Manchevski's first impulse to make the film came as a result of his return in 1991 to his hometown Skopje (2). In the 80s he had spent most of his time in USA and he was not prepared to confront the magnitude of the changes that had occurred in Yugoslavia. The tension during the spring of 1991, shortly before the outbreak of the war, was strongly felt and Manchevski decided to make a film in order to work out this experience. In 1992 French and English film-producers decided to develop the script and the film was shot on location in Macedonia and London in 1993. Meanwhile, the Yugoslav State fell apart and its former republic Macedonia was declared an independent and sovereign state. In 1994 the film Before the Rain was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. It then became an instant international success, both by critics and by paying audiences. The film was awarded on several occasions in 1994-95; it was also Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film in 1995 (3). In this sense, Before the Rain is not an obscure and seldom shown film, but together with Hollywood made movies, such as for example Spielberg's films, it is recognised and seen world-wide.
....What makes this particular film interesting is, however, that its mode of narration differs fundamentally from a conventional mode of Hollywood filmmaking. To fully grasp how Before the Rain challenges conventional narrative structures, some of these conventions should be sketched.

....Story, Plot, Diegesis

....One common way of analysing film is to differ between story and plot (4). If the story of the film tells what it is about, then the plot of the film is the way this story is told. The story of Before the Rain can be summarised as follows: An awarded photojournalist, specialised on covering war-zones, decides to quit his job at a London based agency after a traumatic experience in Bosnia. He turns back to his native village in Macedonia with the intention of finding the love of his youth. Back in the village he finds that the community has been broken up and a line of demarcation between two groups has been drawn. Roughly, the groups are structured according to cultural and linguistic features so that the distinction between Albanians and Slavs has become over-emphasised. The photographer finds himself in the Slavic group, while his beloved is in the Albanian one. When attempting to save her Albanian speaking daughter from a Slavic mob, and at the same time de-escalate the conflict, the photographer is killed by his Slavic cousin. Also the daughter is killed, but by her Albanian brother.
....The plot in which this story is told can be broken up into four distinct parts: a prologue, and three individual, however inter-linked, episodes: "Words", Faces", "Pictures". In the prologue, a young orthodox monk, Kiril, who has sworn an oath of absolute silence, is picking tomatoes while listening to an elderly monk's reflections on the coming rain and about how children incarnate the hope for the future. However, the children shown are playing with fire.
....In the episode "Words", a Slavic speaking mob is searching the monastery where Kiril lives, in order to find an Albanian speaking girl. They do not find her, although she has hidden in Kiril's cell. When Kiril discovers her, he does not reveal his knowledge of her existence to the others.
.... Therefore, when the monks eventually find the girl, Kiril is dismissed from the monastery: he and the girl are shown leaving the cloister together. Later they are found by a group of Albanian speaking men and the girl is shot by her brother. Kiril is left helpless, sitting next to the dying girl.
....The episode "Faces" is set in London. A young woman, Anne, works in a photo agency. Aleks (Aleksander), who is a photojournalist, returns to the agency just in order to resign his work there. He has suffered a traumatic experience in Bosnia, which made him reconsider his whole life. Now he wants to return to his childhood village in Macedonia and start over. Although she is married to another man, Anne and Aleks are having an ongoing love affair. When Aleks wants her to follow him to Macedonia, she is in jeopardy. Aleks leaves London and the same evening Anne has an encounter with her husband in a restaurant. Suddenly a quarrel between two Serbo-Croatian speaking men in the same restaurant escalates to shooting, and Anne's husband is accidentally shot dead.
...."Pictures" shows Aleks' return to his native village. He wants to meet Hanna, an old classmate of his, but also the love of his youth. However, Aleks seems to have misconceived the profundity of the antagonism between the propagators of the different groups that has rapidly developed during his absence. When Aleks' cousin Bojan is mysteriously murdered, Hanna's daughter, Zamira, is accused for the killing. A Slavic mob, armed with machine guns, starts looking for the girl and Hanna comes to Aleks and begs for his help. Aleks tries to find Zamira and detects her being held prisoner by the mob. When he attempts to liberate the girl, another of his cousins kills him. However, Zamira manages to run away and hide in the monastery where Kiril (who is also a relative of Aleks') lives.
....The film ends where it begins, showing Kiril picking tomatoes while listening to the old monk speaking about the rain that will fall. ....The narrative structure of the film can therefore on one level be said to be circular - it ends where it begins - instead of linear, which would be the conventional narrative format of a feature film.
....Shortly before the opening of Before the Rain, Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction had become a box office success. Also in the latter film the narrative structure could in this sense be called circular instead of linear, and in the reviews written around the mid-90s Before the Rain was often compared with Pulp Fiction. The narrative structure of Before the Rain is, however, more intricate than the one of Pulp Fiction. In the former film, and unlike the latter one, the chronology of the story is not supported and confirmed by the plot. For example, in the agency in London Anne is shown looking at photographs depicting Kiril sitting by the dead Zamira. This would not be possible, according to the chronology of the story, because at that time Zamira would still be alive, and moreover, Bojan would not yet have been murdered and therefore no mob would be out looking for the girl in the first place. In the film there are other such details - telephone calls are made before they could have been made, people show up on places where they could not be, etc. - which make the plot undermine the chronological order of the story.
....Beside the distinction between story and plot, another conventional means to analyse film could here be introduced. When the plot outlines the story a narrative universe is created. Such universe is called the diegesis, and the elements in the narration that are used when composing this universe are called diegetic. Claudia Gorbman has defined the diegesis as the spatial-temporal world of actions and persons that is produced by the narration (5). According to the norms of realism, the diegesis should correspond and resemble the notion of the (extra-diegetic) "real universe" in order to make the narration realistic. Therefore, when Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan wanted to re-stage the D-Day in a realistic manner, he created a diegesis that should correspond the "real D-Day" in ways that should enable the audiences to resemble what they see on the screen with their previous notion of the "real D-Day". When audiences thus identify what they see on the screen with what they already possessed as common knowledge, a "reality-effect" is collectively perceived (6). Since the prevailing belief-structure of the audience is reinforced through this effect, the individual viewers collectively think that they have gained knowledge of the past by watching the film.
....Before the Rain distances itself from these norms of realism because its diegesis does not resemble the popular notion of the "real universe": the universe constructed in this film does not obey the rules of causality and chronology. Nevertheless, as will be demonstrated, outside Macedonia the film was widely received and interpreted as a realistic description of still present or recently past events. This condition raises the question how it was possible for audiences in the mid-90s to interpret the non-realistic diegesis of Before the Rain as a diegesis that followed the rules of conventional realism. However, before this question can be answered, one has to frame the actual reception of the film around 1994-95.

....Different Collective Interpretations

....As has already been noted, in 1994-95 the film Before the Rain became an international success, also acknowledged by Hollywood (the Oscar-nomination), in spite of the fact that it was made contrary to the conventional Hollywood formula of filmmaking. How was this possible? What did audiences used to Hollywood-made film perceive when watching Before the Rain? To some extent these questions have been answered by the social-anthropologist Keith Brown. In an article he has compared the reception of the film outside and inside Macedonia (7). He points out that in the United States and Western Europe the film was seen as a depiction of the ethnic hatred that was collectively understood, outside Yugoslavia and the Balkan region, to characterise the downfall of Yugoslavian State. In this sense, the film was seen to illustrate the newsreels and the reports from the war in Bosnia, and thus as a description of still ongoing or recently past events. In the reviews that were written outside Macedonia two features were constantly refrained. The first was the "ethnic hatred" that was understood to characterise the Balkan region. The second was the beauty of the landscape. In general these reviewers "did not doubt the beauty or the authenticity of the images (…) they appear to wallow in the tragic paradox that was created; that such violence could exist in a landscape so beautiful". (Brown 1998: 166) The diegesis of the film was therefore collectively interpret according to the rules of realism, hence the reviewers (and the audiences as a whole) took for granted that the landscape that was shown in the film corresponded to a fixed location set in Macedonia, and they presupposed that the action of the film resembled action that had taken place in the country (8). In short, audiences in North-America and Western-Europe seem to have projected their understanding of the down-fall of Yugoslavia on this movie, hence interpreting the non-realistic film according to the notion of realism. Therewith they collectively perceived the film as a "reality-effect" which was producing something that they assumed to be documented knowledge of still present or recently past events.
....This manner of interpreting the film differs profoundly from the way it was received in Macedonia. Contrary to the other republics that constituted the former Yugoslav State, Macedonia has during the 1990s not experienced war directly on its territory. The kind of armed gangs and bands of warriors that emerged in Bosnia during the war were unseen in Macedonia when the film was first shown. Therefore, in Macedonia Before the Rain was seen as a warning for a possible near future, and not as a documentation of a recent past. This reception was also reinforced by the fact that the landscape shown in the film is not to be found on the ground. It is a composition of images from different localities in Macedonia that have been edited together to one picture. For example, the monastery in which Kiril lodges is a composite of footage from four different cloisters. Anybody being familiar with Macedonian surroundings would immediately see that the diegesis produced in Before the Rain does not correspond to an actual locality in Macedonia, but that it is constructed upon a mixture of footage taken from different places all over the young country (9). This virtual landscape was then collectively understood to underscore the interpretation that this was a film about a threatening future and not about an experienced past.
....What non-Macedonian audiences saw when viewing Before the Rain was therefore something else than what a Macedonian audience saw when watching the same film. Different viewers rooted in different contexts with different beliefs and pre-knowledge would project different understandings on the same film so that even when looking at the same thing they would see and perceive different things. This condition is, of course, not overly surprising, but it should nevertheless be explicitly emphasised, especially when North American and Western European audiences have regarded their own spontaneous understanding of the film as "realistic".

....The Collective Construction of National Identity

....What did then a Macedonian audience see when watching Before the Rain around 1994-95? Following Brown's study of contemporary Macedonian reviews, they saw Macedonia (10). The bringing together of different well known places and buildings through the composition of a virtual landscape made possible a collective erection of a visual monument over the new Republic of Macedonia. As Brown has accurately put it, Manchevski did not recreate Macedonia on film: he created an image of the new State of Macedonia. (Brown 1998: 168) And when the people of this new State not just accepted and approved this image, but actively identified themselves with it, a new national identity was in the making. The international recognition of the film also helped reinforcing this collective construction of a national monument. Instead of collectively falling prey to ethnic conflict, the film helped the young republic to disarm ethnic-oriented troublemakers. It also helped the Macedonian republic to be internationally recognised and to profile itself in the face of the more or less hostile scepticism raised in its neighbouring countries. Ironically, when audiences outside Macedonia identified the diegesis of the film with their vision of Bosnia, the same diegesis was used within the new republic to create a difference between Macedonia and Bosnia. Nevertheless, the international recognition of the film helped forming a Macedonian national identity, although this international recognition was based on blurred notions of Macedonia and the rest of the Balkan region.
....However, when looking at this Balkan region as a whole, the tragic dimension of this ironical twist becomes unavoidable. Not just in Western Europe but also among different countries within the Balkans Before the Rain was seen as a film about the war in Bosnia. The Ljubljana based film- and literature scholar Slavoj Zizek saw the film in connection with "the trauma 'Bosnia' (ethnic cleansing etc.)". He also draw a parallel between it and Emir Kusturica's film Underground, which was released in 1995, and which was received more or less at the same time as was Before the Rain. Zizek meant that these two films were generally viewed from the same perspective and that they both were understood to confirm a Western notion of the wild, uncivilised, and above all incomprehensible Balkans, a notion that he called "Balkanism" (in parity with Edward Said's concept "Orientalism") (11). In his article, Zizek focused primarily on the film Underground and referred only once to Before the Rain. This reference is however a problematic one, because from reading his article one gets the picture that Before the Rain would to a high degree resemble Underground and that both films would be depictions of the Bosnian war.
....By now Slavoj Zizek has become so internationally recognised as a theoretician of popular culture that a presentation of him would be superfluous (12). Apparently, in and around the institute in Slovenia where he works, there has been an ongoing discussion about how to interpret movies dealing with the down-fall of old Yugoslavia. In the debate the two films Underground and Before the Rain have been equalised in the same manner as in Zizek's above referred argument (13). It seems that most of the Slovenian critics view both these films as naive and simplifying, describing the conflict through ethnically and historically tinted stereotypes. However, when they were working out a Slovenian and/or Central European discourse around these two films, also a Slovenian intellectual and/or national identity could be said to have been in the making.
....It might be that from a Slovenian point of view, the films Underground and Before the Rain could be compared in an equalising manner - both of them dealing with the aftermath of the collapsed Yugoslav State, but non of them referring to Slovenia, which therefore could construct some sort of a "Central European Yugoslav Sonderweg" that would differ this new country from the others that emerged out of old Yugoslavia. Seen from a Macedonian horizon, however, these two movies are regarded as most different. ....When Underground - a film made in Serbia/Yugoslavia - focus the war in Bosnia as some sort of prolonging consequence of Tito's Yugoslav project, then Before the Rain - in this respect a Macedonian film - could be said to outline the conflict as a fundamental break with Tito's project, not as its inherited consequence. Moreover, in the diegesis of Before the Rain the war in Bosnia is turned into a somewhat peripheral event, while it is central in the diegesis of Underground (14).
....The actor playing the role of Aleks, Rade Sherbedzija, was one of the post popular actors in old Yugoslavia. The presence of Sherbedzija in the film alongside with other references to old Yugoslavia, including the image of Tito (a framed old photo on the wall, an old newspaper cover) has reportedly triggered a kind of "Yugo-nostalgia" around Before the Rain in Macedonia. (Brown 1998: 170) That kind of interpretation of Yugoslav history lies far away from how this history has been portrayed in Underground. In the latter movie the Yugoslav people (foremost the Serb people) are depicted as having been collectively deceived by the communist party under Tito.
....In his survey over the reception of Before the Rain, in which he does not even once mention the film Underground, Brown concludes that the film could be "argued to occupy an active role in the transition of the Republic, from a part of Yugoslavia to a sovereign state". (Brown 1998: 171) The overall reception of this film inside Macedonia can therefore be said to have functioned as an active element in the collective construction of a Macedonian national identity. This conclusion can be expanded: movies like Before the Rain, Underground, Welcome to Sarajevo, etc. could all be said to have been actively used in the collective construction of different national identities in the different newly founded countries in the Balkan region. But it should also be recognised that one and the same film plays different roles in the making of different national identities. Moreover, it should be emphasised that the making of a national identity does not necessarily overlap the making of an ethnic identity. For example, the film Before the Rain has been actively used in order to construct, at one and the same time, a Macedonian national identity and to counter-act the constructions of Slavic and Albanian ethnic identities inside the new Macedonian State.
....The tragic moment in these processes of constructing collective identities is that there seem not to be any possibilities of determining the processes on an entirely intellectual level based solely on pure reason, but instead, all judgements and interpretations are being done in confrontation with other such judgements and interpretations. The tragedy would then be that although this kind of identity-construction processes are unavoidable, they will always be carried out through acts of more or less openly violent confrontations. This would be the case no matter what arrangements are to be used in order to replace the confrontation with a purely rational decision-making process.

....The Limits of Photographic Realism

....Above, the question how audiences in the mid-90s could interpret the non-realistic diegesis of Before the Rain as a diegesis that followed the rules of conventional realism has been raised. When trying to give an answer to this question, one should bear in mind that different audiences perceived this film in fundamentally different manners. Roughly speaking, when people outside the territory of former Yugoslavia saw Before the Rain, they resembled it with TV newsreels and thought that they saw a depiction of recent past. At the same time, when people in the new republic of Macedonia watched the film, they saw a possible near future. However, taking their vantage-point in footage from contemporary London or images of UN vehicles in Skopje, other people saw the actual present (15). But, as has already been noted, since the plot undermines the chronology of the story, the film can also be seen as being set outside of the temporal realm of past-present-future. Accordingly, the film has been interpreted following these four different modes of temporality: the near past, the near future, the actual presence, and beyond temporal reality. It should, moreover, also be underlined that most viewers of the film have understood Before the Rain according to only one of these four temporal modes, without taking the other three into active consideration. Why is that?
....Two tentative answers can be given to this question. The first one is that since most people that went to see the film around the mid-90s expected to see something about the conditions in Balkan after the down-fall of Yugoslavia, they did not, however, expect to have their notions of realism, history, and temporality challenged. Therefore, when making sense out of its complex diegesis, most people simplified the narrative structure of the film and projected their own presuppositions upon it. Since different viewers had different presuppositions they also saw different things. Furthermore, they had their previous beliefs confirmed and therefore they were able to leave the cinema with a positive opinion about the film. The other way of answering this question is to point out how consciously and cautiously Manchevski has edited this film. It can be made subject to a vast number of possible interpretations without having its diegesis severely distorted or forced into a presupposed analytical framework.
....Nevertheless, the rest of this essay I will devote to one single understanding of Before the Rain, namely my own. Through this particular interpretation I will argue that following its narrative structure through a close examination, one is enabled to understand how this film challenges inherited notions of moviemaking and history-writing. To facilitate the reading of my interpretation, the results should initially be anticipated. I will argue that in this film, Manchevski has put forward the argument that no correspondence between the faculty of knowledge and the "real world" beyond this human faculty can be construed. Therefore, the notion of realism, according to which an artwork can be compared with the "real" motive it is set out to represent, cannot be upheld. Neither "reality as it really is" can be documented, nor can there be any direct connection between the past beyond human knowledge and the history written by human beings, because since we have no access to that kind of past we cannot claim that history could represent it. This epistemological break between the "real world" on the one side and human knowledge on the other is in the film illustrated by the photojournalist who suddenly rejects his earlier belief that he could objectively document reality by photographing it. Instead of his previous understanding of his work - from a neutral position he would transmit knowledge from one end of the world to another through his photographs - he suddenly realises that there is no such neutral position and that he is always taking active part in any situation in which he may find himself.
....In the film, a key line marks out this shift in his understanding of the means of photography and of the notion of photographic realism. Aleks says: "I killed. I took sides. My camera killed a man", thus indicating that his notion of a neutral ground from which he used to take his photographs cannot be uphold anymore. As has already been noted, Aleks has decided to quit his job as a photojournalist after a traumatic experience in Bosnia sometime in 1992-93. According to the story told in the film, Aleks got friendly with a militiaman and complained to him that nothing interesting happened. The militiaman then randomly picked one of the prisoners he was set out to guard and shot him on the spot. Meanwhile, Aleks photographed the event. Thereafter Aleks drew the conclusion that it was actually he who had killed a man with his camera and he blamed his earlier naivety for having caused the entire incident. On the bases of this conclusion he decided to stop working as a photographer. Apparently, he has at the same time given up his belief that reality can be documented through the means of photographic realism. This shift in Aleks' world-view signifies, furthermore, that the whole notion of realism should be reconsidered.
....This latter conclusion could also be directly ascribed to the writer/director Manchevski, because in Before the Rain he is actually playing a small but significant role: the prisoner being shot in front of the camera (16). When in this manner writing himself into the script, Manchevski has more than just made an ironic remark to the theory of "the death of the author". To the film he has added a self-reflective remark - he is writing the script and shooting the film within a concrete context and he, no lesser than his imagined character Aleks, can find a neutral position from which he could objectively describe the situation. Instead, Manchevski has visually stated the moral of the film: that there is no neutral spot outside the temporal stream of events from which reality could be documented, hence the groundwork for both the notions of photographic realism and of conventional historical writing (the attempt to represent the unmodified past in the present) has collapsed. From this condition as the point of departure, new conventions for the understanding past and present realities have to be constructed.
....This general conclusion is underlined by the composition of the film's diegesis. As has been pointed out, the story of Before the Rain is not told according to a conventional linear plot. However, when scrutinised closely, the plot-line is not even circular. ....Although the scenes in the beginning and in the end of the film to a high degree resemble one another, they are far from being identical. It is not just that the camera-angles have been modified, but the monologue held by the elderly monk has also been substantially changed.
....The film begins with the scene in which Kiril is shown picking tomatoes. Suddenly he kills an insect that had bitten his neck. Then the elderly monk says: "It will be rain. The gadflies bite." Thereafter he looks to the horizon and continues: "Over there, it is already raining." When returning to the monastery together, a distant sound that could be either thunder or canon blasts can be heard. The elderly monk says: "There is a smell of rain. The thunder always makes me twitch. I fear that they will start shooting also here." Some playing children are shown, and the monk says: "Children… Time never dies. The circle is not round." The children, however, have built a circle of pegs and weed, and they set this circle on fire.
....The film ends with a similar scene, however shot from another camera-angle. This time the monk looks at the horizon and says: "It will be rain. The gadflies bite. Over there, it is already raining." Then he turns to Kiril and continues: "Come on! Time does not wait… because the circle is not round". In the background, the viewer can see the girl, Zamira, running towards the camera. The film ends with a shoot at the dead Aleks and the first drops of rain falling upon him (17).
....The difference between these two scenes may be considered subtle, but it is however distinct. Especially the difference between the two lines "Time never dies. The circle is not round.", and "Time does not wait… because the circle is not round" clearly indicates that Manchevski did not intend to create a circular narration. Rather, these lines point out that he wanted to problematise the notion of time and temporality within the diegesis of the film. That Manchevski consciously has used the film to problematise time and narration is refrained once more in the film's middle sequence. In a scene from the London episode the viewer is exposed to the following graffiti: "Time never dies/the circle/is not round".
....So, when examined closely, the plot proves to be neither linear nor round. Instead, the film produces a diegesis in which the presence of time is always underlined precisely because the chronology of the story is constantly undermined by the plot, and in turn causality is short-circuited throughout the diegesis. Therefore, I argue, this film is made in an attempt to consciously challenge the tendency in conventional moviemaking to let the plot coincide with the story in order to help the audience experience the "reality-effect" that would confirm the conventional notion of realism. Furthermore, I argue that this film is composed in a deliberate attempt to challenge the idea that historical writing could be a sort of documentation of the past "as it really was" produced from some presupposed neutral position beyond temporality.

....Rain and War

....Basically, I argue that Before the Rain is not set out to be a realistic film, but a tragedy. The experience he has made in Bosnia has taught Aleks, as it has taught most people in the 1990s, that there are no clear-cut and easy solutions to this kind of conflicts. Above all, there exists no neutral position outside the conflict from which one could objectively document and rationally solve it. ...."You have to take sides against war", Anne tells Aleks in London. But to make war against war itself is, however, a paradoxical undertaking. The traumatised Aleks responds that "War is normality and peace the exception". Therefore, Aleks conclusion is that one has to take sides within war, but still the same he refuses to line up behind either one of the conflicting parties. Like Sophocles' or Shakespeare's tragic heroes, Aleks seems doomed to disaster.
....As has been noted in the beginning of this essay, Manchevski made Before the Rain in order to work out the tense atmosphere he had experienced in Skopje in 1991. In the face of the wars between first Slovenia and Yugoslavia and thereafter Croatia and Yugoslavia, also Macedonia seemed to be endangered. In a situation of repressed hostility, when a majority of people expect and calculate with war in a foreseeable near future, can such an escalation of violence be stopped and de-escalated? Can a war be fought against the notion of war, so that the outbreak of expected violence and bloodshed could be inhibited? Most possibly, Manchevski conceived and made his film with the direct aim of counter-acting tendencies that could unleash armed conflicts and war in Macedonia, however such a conscious purpose is difficult to state.
....Nevertheless, Manchevski has confirmed that he made active use of Shakespearean tragedies when conceiving the script: themes from Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet have been woven into the manuscript (18). The point to be underlined is that the film is made as a classic tragedy and not as a modern realistic drama. That being the case, after having seen the film, the viewers would then not be supposed to intellectually recognise their own everyday reality, but to have an experience of catharsis: a feeling of purification and relief after having confronted an existential dilemma and having had this dilemma conceptualised. In an interview from early 1995, Manchevski has said that some people in Macedonia complained after having seen the film: "Some people said, 'We don't all live in run-down villages, we also drive Mercedes cares. Why didn't you show that?' But most of them read the film just as I wanted them to, which is as a warning (19)." But a warning against what?
....When making sense out of this film, it is tempting to see the notion of rain as a metaphor for war. The title of the film would then be read "Before the War", and film would warn that war could soon strike down on Macedonia, like it had already hit other parts of former Yugoslavia. For example, the lines uttered by the elderly monk in the beginning of the film points clearly in that direction: "Over there, it is already raining. (…) There is a smell of rain. The thunder always makes me twitch. I fear that they will start shooting also here." Nevertheless, the metaphoric does not run as smoothly as that. When Kiril dreams that Zamira is smilingly standing by his bed, it is raining.
....But when Zamira actually stands by his bed, she is not smiling but hunted and frightened, and it is not raining. Later in the film, Aleks dreams that Hanna enter his room and start, smilingly, to undress. At the same time, the falling rain can be seen through the window. But then again, when Hanna really enters his room she is frightened and worried about her disappeared daughter. At that time, no rain can be seen through the window. Here, "rain" appears to be not just a metaphor for war, but also for sexual fantasies, especially male ones.
....Furthermore, the complexity and the ambiguity around the usage of the notion of "rain" in the film is also singled out through the strophe by Mesa Selimonovic, with which the film opens: "With a shriek birds flee across the black sky, / people are silent, my blood aces from waiting." With what would this frustrating waiting end? Would the relief come with ending of passivity and the outbreak of the awaited war?
....After having seen the film Before the Rain, one would be disposed to answer this last question with a clear "No!". Even if an outbreak of action would disperse the tense atmosphere of frustrating passivity and therefore initially be perceived as a relief, it would rapidly prove itself to something more hideous than the earlier condition.
....Therefore, when the film was made within a discourse of escalating violence, and when its purpose was to de-escalate this tendency from within the discourse, then its means would not be to simply reflect present condition but to present a substitution for the awaited eruption. In this case, I argue, the means of conventional modern realism would not be sufficient and therefore Manchevski choose to make a classical tragedy. And whatever effect this particular film has had on the people in Macedonia during the 1990s, it can at least be stated that Macedonia is the only country that emerged out of the break up of former Yugoslavia that has not experienced war or ethnically coloured clashes between conflicting groups.
....Instead of trying to knit together story and plot in order to create a mimetic whole that would enable its viewers to construct a vision of a dramatic event, the filmmaker behind Before the Rain has let the plot short-circuit the story so that the audience would be enabled to experience an existential dilemma. In this manner, the way Before the Rain has been composed differ on a profound level from the way conventional realistic films, such as for example Saving Private Ryan, are been made. When placing the former film alongside the latter one, it is possible, I have here argued, not just to compare different approaches to filmmaking, but furthermore different notions of present and past reality.


....(1) Before the Rain (1994), written and directed by Milcho Manchevski, produced by AIM Productions NOE Productions Vardar Film, with the participation of British Screen and The European Co-Production Fund (UK). Presented by PolyGram and The Ministry of Culture for the Republic of Macedonia.

....(2) At a workshop dedicated to the film Before the Rain the writer/director Milcho Manchevski participated and the following information is drawn from his presentation. The workshop - which was organised by Robert Rosenstone, Bo Strath, and Erik Tangerstad within the framework of the research project "the Collective Construction of Community" - was held in April 1999 at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, under the heading "One Film - Many Histories: An Inquiry into the Film 'Before the Rain'". Other participants were, Keith Brown, Robert Burgoyne, Ian Christie, Thomas Elsaesser, Victor Friedman, Bengt Holmen, Dina Iordanova, Anton Kaes, Reinhard Koselleck, Hayden White, as well as members and researchers at the European University Institute.

....(3) For a full coverage of Manchevski's work until 1999, including the list of awards for Before the Rain, cf. Manchevski, Milcho (1999) Street, Skopje:Playtime.

....(4) Cf. Thompson, Kristin (1988) 'Neoformalist Film Analysis: One Approach, Many Methods' in Kristin Thompson Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis Princeton, New Jersey: Priceton University Press. Here I have however relyed on the Sweidish translation: Thompson, Kristin (1995) 'Neoformalistisk filmanalys: ett perspektiv, flera metoder' in L.G. Andersson and Erik Hedling (eds.) Modern Filmteori 1 Lund: Studentlitteratur. In this article, Thompson refers this methodological approach back to the Russian formalists of the 1920s. They spoke, however, of sujet and fable - not of story and plot - and because the concepts "story" and "plot" have a wider range of meaning than "sujet" and "fable", Thompson make use of the latter terms in order to gain precission. Nevertheless, in this case I have decided to stick to the terms "story" and "plot" which both seem to be precis enough for this discussion, but not strange enough to cause unwanted confusion.

....(5) Cf. Gorbman, Claudia (1987)'Narratological Perspectives on Film Music' in Claudia Gorbman Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music London and Bloomington: BFI Publishing/Indiana University Press. In this case I have relyed on the Sweidish translation: Gorbman, Claudia (1995) 'Narratologiska aspekter av filmmusik' in L.G. Andersson and Erik Hedling (eds.) Modern Filmteori 1 Lund: Studentlitteratur. Because I have re-transalted Gorbman's definition back to English its exact formulation may differ from her original. But I only sketch the theory around the diegesis concept, such treatment of the definition may be forgiven.

....(6) About the concept "the reality effect", cf. Ankersmit, F.R. (1994) 'The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics of Historiographical Topology' in F.R. Ankersmit History and Tropology. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor Berkeley - Los Angels - London: University of California Press, pp. 125-161. The concept was origianly coined by Roland Barthes, who used it in order to describe an effect that could be perceived when confronting different interlinked texts. When reading and experiencing the tension in and between texts, one can perceive a sense of reality, and this sense is "the reality effect".

....(7) Brown, Keith (1998)'Macedonian culture and its audiences. An analysis of Before the Rain', in Felicia Hughes-Freeland (ed.) Ritual, Performance, Media, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 160-176.

....(8) Or in Brown's words: "The actuality of the landscape thus confers actualite on events". He also recalls how a colleague of his, Jonathan Schwartz, when confronting a group of Dutch university students had to convince these students that the film was "not an actual documentary but a dystopian nightmare". Brown 1998: 166f. The point to be underlined in these quotes is the inabillity of a Western audience to differ between the diegesis of the film and the extra-diagetic condition beyond the frame of the film. In other words, a confusion between the "reality-effect" and "reality" can here be sensed, a confusion that creates the ground work of realism.

....(9) In the above mentioned workshop, the Balkanist Victor Friedman said that the first time he saw the film he was initally confused because he could not make sense of the film's settings. But as soon has he understood that the film was "not realstic" he could make sense out of it.

....(10) Brown has pointed out that the international recognition of the film as Macedonian, made it possible to identify the film as Macedonian also within the new Macedonian republic: "The identification of the film as Macedonian (…) was connected to the legitimacy of the country with the same name". Brown 1998: 171.

....(11) Zizek, Slavoj (1997) 'Undergrund oder: Die poesie der etnischen Sauberung' Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaften 4/1994, 587-593.

....(12) Cf. Eduardo Gruner's recent introduction in an Argentine edited volume: Gruner, Eduardo (1998) 'Introduccion. El retorno de la teoria critica de la cultura: una introduccion alegorica a Jameson y Zizek' in Fredric Jameson & Slavoj Zizek Estudios Culturales. Reflexiones sobre el multiculturalismo Buenos Aires - Barcelona - Mexico: Paidos, pp. 11-64.

....(13) Cf. Slosar, Irina (1997) '"Du lugst! Du lugst! Ah, wie schon du lugst!"' Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaften 4/1994, 594-598. In this article Slosar both reflects arguments made in this debate and gives a contribution to it. Form her references in the article, which is written in German, one can conclude that most of this discussion has been conducted in Slovenian.

....(14) For a recapitulation of the debate around Underground cf. Andersson, Ulf B (1998) 'Bosnien, kriget och filmerna' Filmhaftet 101 (1/1998) 68-72. In this article on how the war in Bosnia has been refelcted in feature films Underground (1995) is compared to Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). However, Before the Rain is not mentioned once, which in a sense is logical since the latter film does not realy deal with the war in Bosnia.

....(15) Irina Slosar, for example, taking her point of reference in the scene with the shooting in a posh London restaurant, saw the film as a metaphor for how the present wars in Balkan threatened Western Europe. (Slosar 1997: 596) In the above mentioned workshop, Bengt Holmen, who was based as a UN-officer in Skopje at the time of the shooting of the film, attached his own personal experiences to some of the scenes of the film. The Balkanist Victor Friedman noted that the graffiti "Burek, da!" (that was to be seen in the film) corresponed to the graffiti "Burek, nein danke!" that was at the same time documented in Lubljana. Since "Burek" is a dish that was considered typically Yugoslav, and since "da" means "yes" in Slavic languages, while "nein danke" is "now thanks" in German, Friedman reporrted that he used this scene as historical document over the mental break up of Yugoslavia during the first half of the 1990s.

....(16) On a direct question during the workshop, Manchevski admitted that it was he who played the prisoner.

....(17) The transaltion is my own, and it is based on the Swedish subtitles of a video-pirint of the film.

....(18) Manchevski made this confirmation during the discussion at the above mentioned workshop.

....(19) Quoted after Brown, 1998, p. 169. The orignal interview was published in Village Voice, 21 February 1995.