Ivana Miloš, Three Reeds (2022), monotype, gouache, collage, and nature print with reeds on paper.
The line of dancing children on the shore was life exploding from the drought. Among thin reeds and branches the human plant grew in pure air.
—“Cuttlefish Bones,” Eugenio Montale
Sometimes, in order to understand the meaning of a plant in a film, it is necessary to look for the same plant in another film. The majestic reed beds that appear towards the tragic finale of a breathless chase sequence between Nazi soldiers and two partisans in the middle part of Aleksandar Petrović’s devastating anti-war parable Three (1965) seemed strangely familiar when I first saw the film. I also saw them in a beautiful document of a disappearing way of life, Obrad Gluščević’s Ljudi s Neretve (1966). Both films were shot around the same time, in the middle of the 1960s, in one of Yugoslavia’s most fertile regions, the Neretva delta located in what is today the very south of Croatia. While Petrović presents the plant as seen through the eyes of partisans in an extreme situation, Gluščević highlights its meaning for those living their daily life next to it.
Ljudi s Neretve, a breathtakingly shot short documentary focusing on a group of people ignored by Tito’s state ideology shows people living close to and from the Neretva river. He documents their customs, songs, and work, as well as the threatening industrialization and land reclamation that lead to a drying out of most of the distributaries and, ultimately, the end of the very culture he was portraying. In a couple of scenes we see the people working with and transporting the reeds growing next to the river, in the marshland between rocks and the sea. They use them to build their homes, wattle fences, or weave baskets. It’s peaceful work in accordance with nature and it’s also the kind of work that has been largely forgotten.
It is easy to understand why Christianity or the Zulu religion find inspiration for their origin stories among the reeds. In Christianity it is Moses who is found in the reeds, a lost orphan caught between desert and water, confinement and freedom, death and life. In Zulu mythology the first man, Unkulunkulu, emerged from the uthlanga, a bed of reeds. These plants with their thin stems, so easily broken and deformed, constantly rustling and whispering with their feet in the mud, remind me of the small margin between what’s sanguine and what’s headed towards despair. In the wetlands, the cycle of rotting and exploding into life is knit closely together.
In-between life and death is also where Three and Ljudi s Neretve meet. But even if the sound recordists capture the same birds chirping in both films, coots and warblers resting among those aquatic plants, the landscape takes on another meaning during World War II when partisan Miloš (Velimir Bata Živojinović) reaches the delta in Three. For him and his comrade, both on the run, the often four-meter high plants provide a much-needed hideout. Not only are the two fighters being pursued by soldiers, but there is also a helicopter with a machine gun hunting them down. Cinematographer Tomislav Pinter employs the point of view of the sadistic pursuers in breathtaking bird’s-eye-view shots. Through their eyes, we understand the importance of nature in the act of hiding. As in many other cases in film history, the eye of the camera merges with the barrel of the gun. When the camera can’t see its target, neither can the soldiers. Even when filmed at eye level, the partisans hide behind the spikelets and the long growing hair of the reeds, stressing their dependence on their last remaining ally: nature. It’s an ally that can turn into an enemy any second. Nature doesn’t take sides.
The whole sequence is a frantic journey through an incredible landscape. Between rocks, hummocks, rivers, snowy mountain tops, creeks, lakes, and a field of grassing sheep, Miloš runs for his own invisibility. The partisan hides behind branches, in scrubs, under sheep, but his camouflage only works perfectly among the reeds.
A great deal has been written about the relation between landscape and warfare. In the ancient Chinese military treatise The Art of War, Sun Tzu remarked that “The five outstanding kinds of vegetation are thickets, brambles, hedges, reeds, and sedges,“ and he further commented that “When an army is traveling, if there is hilly territory with many streams and ponds or depressions overgrown with reeds, or wild forests with a luxuriant growth of plants and trees, it is imperative to search them carefully and thoroughly. For these afford stations for bushwackers and spoilers.“
However, Miloš and his fleeing comrade are not trying to reach the reeds. Instead, they are running in the direction of the Adriatic Sea where they expect to find other partisans. Not only do the reeds embody a dividing line between visibility and invisibility, they also mark and protect the border between land and sea. I remember hours searching around lakes or seas, trying to find a shore from which to enter the water but finding nothing but reeds surrounding the water’s edge like a protective ring. The swamps of the delta are endless, almost inescapable. Shots of the partisans struggling through fields of cracking, earth-colored reeds almost become a metaphor for an escape becoming a trap, a movement like something out of a nightmare where every step becomes more difficult while the impervious indifference of nature slowly turns against those trying to survive.
Ultimately, Miloš’s comrade is captured. The protagonist has to observe an execution from his hideout among the reeds. The Nazis hesitate before shooting the man when they see his face. Again, Petrović stresses the importance of visibility and invisibility when it comes to life and death. Finally, they put him in a cabin which they set on fire while shooting at it. Is Miloš powerless or is he a coward for remaining invisible and safely hidden among the plants? It’s a moral question.
There are no easy answers, but having his protagonist despair among the Phragmites australis, the plant inhabiting the place between life and death, the filmmaker once more emphasizes how little things decide everything. Miloš is Unkulunkulu, he is Moses come again. His fate shows that in war (as in other extremes) a man can be born anew any second. But he can also vanish. This plant, as common and plain as it may appear, decides who can reach water and who will die of thirst. Its protection can turn into a prison, its concealment can lead to isolation, its resilient beauty can lead to invasive growth. As Ljudi s Neretveshows, it’s best to live in harmony with reeds. Learn from them, work with them, talk to them, observe them, and don’t forget that, just like those lean bodies shaken by the wind, humans were once also born in the mud.
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.