Pawel Pawlikowski
LimonovPawel Pawlikowski, a Polish-born British filmmaker, enters the narrative as both a witness to Eduard Limonov’s wartime self-presentation and the director of the documentary that fixed it on screen. In 1992, disturbed by rhetoric in London and Paris that cast the Serbs as heirs to the Nazis, he went to see what people on the other side of the conflict thought. His work did not simply record the war’s public arguments: by bringing Limonov into the frame, it made visible the strange proximity between a celebrated Russian writer, a besieged city, and the armed men surrounding him.
Filmmaker and Witness
Pawlikowski had met the book’s narrator several times while the book was being written, and they shared many interests. He had also made a moving documentary about the final months of Venichka Erofeev, author of Moscow to the End of the Line and a figure of the Brezhnev-era underground. Erofeev appears in Pawlikowski’s film as an impoverished, alcoholic man ravaged by cancer; the narrator recalls being deeply moved by his condition, while imagining that Limonov would have judged him without pity. That earlier film establishes Pawlikowski’s interest in lives at the edge of ruin, but his journey to Bosnia brought him into a different kind of encounter: not with a dying writer, but with people acting out a war’s myths in the midst of the war itself.
The political climate shaped his decision to go. Pawlikowski knew journalists, writers, and filmmakers who had established themselves in besieged Sarajevo, but he wanted to hear from the other camp rather than rely on the prevailing account of the Serbs. His film gathers details that connect battlefield politics to everyday culture: musicians play the hurdy-gurdy outside soldiers’ tents, old chants celebrate earthly defeat and heavenly victory, and songs about burning Turkish houses echo through weddings and children’s ditties. Children sing while carrying Kalashnikovs. Names of heroic ancestors are replaced by contemporary leaders, including Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.
Meeting Limonov at Pale
At the officers’ mess in Pale, Pawlikowski noticed an unusual man with large glasses and a crew cut. He wore a Yugoslav People’s Army overcoat over a leather jacket and carried a 7.65 pistol that Pawlikowski thought looked more like part of a costume than a natural accessory. The man was on friendly terms with a group of Chetniks, though he did not appear to be one of them. The detail mattered: Limonov’s military appearance seemed at once purposeful and theatrical, an impression that would become central to Pawlikowski’s film.
When Limonov heard the French being spoken by a crew from Antenne 2, he introduced himself as a writer interested in the planet’s hot spots and listed his presence at Vukovar and Transnistria. He compared himself, jokingly, to Bernard-Henri Lévy, but not on the same side. The television crew reacted with perplexity and disgust to the pistol. Limonov answered that he was not a journalist but a soldier, declared his support for the Serbs, and rejected the crew’s neutrality as cowardice. He then returned to the Chetniks’ table. Pawlikowski’s soundman recognized Limonov from a book about his hand-to-mouth years in New York, prompting Pawlikowski to laugh at the contrast between that literary reputation and Limonov’s Serbian companions.
Making Serbian Epics
Pawlikowski turned this encounter into an opportunity to film Karadžić with Limonov. Foreign writers were plentiful on the other side of the conflict and rarer among the Serbs, so Limonov could serve as an interlocutor who was already inside the scene. The choice also suited Pawlikowski’s documentary method: he disliked offscreen questions and visible microphones, which he considered marks of lazy filmmaking. In Serbian Epics, a BBC production later screened widely and won numerous prizes, Limonov appears speaking directly with Karadžić, identified as a psychiatrist, poet, and leader of the Bosnian Serbs.
The conversation takes place on heights from which Serb artillery bombards Sarajevo, a city set in a basin below. Soldiers stand around the two men as Karadžić explains that his people are not aggressors but are seeking to reclaim territory they regard as historically theirs. Limonov respectfully nods and answers with admiration for the Serbs’ resistance to fifteen countries allied against them. Their discussion turns to poetry: Karadžić recites an ode he wrote two decades earlier, imagining Sarajevo engulfed in flames. The ominous setting and the men’s measured exchange make political claims and poetic performance occupy the same frame.
When Karadžić is called away to speak with his wife, Limonov is left beside soldiers. One is greasing a machine gun; seeing Limonov’s fascination, he offers him a turn. Limonov takes his position behind the weapon, follows the soldier’s instructions, and, encouraged by the adults’ laughter and pats on the back, fires a magazine toward the besieged city. The sequence shifts abruptly from a conversation about territory and poetry to a physical act of participation. Pawlikowski’s camera makes the transformation legible without resolving exactly what Limonov intends.
Images, Rumor, and Reputation
After the film appeared on French television, a rumor spread that it showed Limonov shooting people in Sarajevo’s streets. Asked about the episode fifteen years later, Limonov said he had fired toward the city but not aimed at anyone; he said he had aimed at nothing in particular, or at the sky. A close examination of the film supports part of his account: its opening wide shot places the men high above the city, at a distance from the streets where snipers shot at people. Yet a subsequent, closer view of Sarajevo is presented as though it were a reverse angle of the machine-gun scene. That change in perspective creates a misleading visual continuity, making the firing appear more directly aimed at the city’s streets than the earlier shot establishes.
Pawlikowski’s film therefore became evidence and an occasion for uncertainty at once. It does not prove that Limonov shot people, and the book leaves open whether he would have been troubled by doing so or whether he had done it elsewhere. But the images and the stories built around them had a definite social consequence: people who had thought of Limonov in Paris as a charming adventurer began to regard him as something close to a war criminal. The film also unsettled its later viewer, the book’s narrator, who obtained a DVD from Pawlikowski and stopped working on the book for more than a year. The narrator’s shock came not because the footage established a crime, but because it made Limonov look ridiculous: a little boy playing tough at an amusement park, the sort of war-seeker Jean Hatzfeld calls a “mickey.” Pawlikowski’s achievement, as the narrative presents it, lies partly in this double exposure: the camera records a serious and dangerous setting, while revealing the gap between Limonov’s self-image as a soldier and the childishness of his performance.
