The other is our open eye nightmare. Especially when it appears at first irreconcilable, distant, not reducible to us.
It frightens us because as we look at it we are forced to come to terms with our deepest being. And the more monstrous it appears to us, the more it leads us to that beast with which we have learned to cohabit so well that we almost forgot that it is sleeping on the dog mat beside our bed.
It is not by chance that we can fine stories of children raised by wolves or apes both in the Baroque and the 1700’s leterature. In the former they are an anesthetic of the full cultural shock of the New World discovery, which acquainted us with authentic “savages” who did not even know the wheel.
In the latter it relativized every cultural idea when it came to postulate the new myth of a good savage, who may be better than us since he was so much closely related a the state of Nature that knows no wars or persecutions.
In both cases the story begins with a shock: when we really try to communicate with someone who is different from us we are forced to confront the picture that this someone is at the same time creating of us. Such a picture is never pretty. On the contrary, often it is a monster who is pretending it forgot it was raised by wolves, but still bites and dismembers when the time is right.
When, in Ničije dete, a child is brought to the Belgrade orphanage after being found in the Bosnian forests, abandoned as an infant and seemingly raised by wolves, the first response is that of rejection. The boy, who won’t accept to wear clothes and shoes, who empties the bowl on the ground before eating because it is easier to reach with his mouth, is irrecoverable. He will never learn to talk, let alone write, read, do math or begin to feel the need to form a family or go to work. Pućke, as they call him, is the “other” in no uncertain terms. He has two arms and two legs just like us, but he grew up away from us following models we cannot even define “cultural”: he learned the logic of the pack, and he is for all intents and purposes a little wolf.
This child though, while living in contact with other outcasts of our social living, with the children of an orphanage who are themselves another pack immersed in the emotional desert of our indifference, begins to react to certain stimuli.
He plays with a marble, turns on the electric light, learns how to sit at the table, and eventually begins to talk and write. He even completes grade school.
His is not however a story of integration. While he accepts the logic of the social world, he never shrugs off the logic of the pack. He changed species, maybe – here’s the twist – but not his behavioral model. Indeed the world around him remains an unsolvable unknown, a dilemma without a solution. It’s where he is living now, his habitat, and the things of life flow over him without him being really able to understand or grasp them.
The director of Ničije dete, (No One’s Child) Vuk Ršumovic, does a very good job of keeping the right distances to make us feel the irreconcilability between our world and this child wolf. We can see him write, but we never see what he writes. We put him in a classroom, and we feel him daydreaming about the woods of a childhood that is much closer to him than our incomprehensible present day. The closer the child comes to our world, the more the camera stops being in his eyes and becomes objective, to better witness his existential distress which is also our distress because we do not know what to do with him.
No mother ever taught him to love and he remains for ever a puppy, and a dangerous one at that (Žjka, his first friend, treats him like a pet, yells that he belongs to him when they want to take him away, and abandons him with not much regret when the father comes to pick him up even if just to put him to work).
Precisely for this position as an outsider Pućke is the ideal figure to go back to talking about the Balkan conflict. The child is surrounded by scattered signs of a war that is about to start and he can never understand, not even when they put a uniform on him and a rifle in his hands. From the top of his otherness he manages to be something more than a child who suffers the horrors of the war. His story is not just the tale of a childhood denied by the war, but the shrill call of a state of Nature that is and stays bestial for sure, but is not for this reason monstrous, as we alone know way too often how to be.
(Translated from italian original by Maurizio Izzi)
From: Close-up