Exit through the Cuckoo's Nest

There’s something peculiar about Nikola Ilić’s found footage memoir from times of war, specifically its sedated (im)personality, both in form and narrative, as the nth recent film about the collapse of Yugoslavia. In late adolescence at that time, the director talks about the failed attempt of serving in the army as a convinced pacifist, and eventually about his own private – but not uncommon – subterfuge: pretending to be mentally ill. Using what seems to both personal and found footage shot on VHS in the last years of the 90s, as well as institutional surveillance footage, Exit through the Cuckoo’s Nest seems distant, unremarkable, a fragmentary reminiscence of no intense feeling, particular detail or emotional tale. To some, these might be its faults. However, I found myself excited about Ilić’s approach, at a time when I’m rather unimpressed by discourses about history as epiphany or trauma. Sometimes, history is an untouchable spectacle, and the narrator? Nothing but an unreliable witness. Ilić’s way of remembering is sober, a resigned sadness free of fury or victimization, somehow similar to that popular wisdom of elders and to a “natural” way of addressing history. Complementary, the images seem nothing save a natural landscape of VHS imagery, by now unmistakably associated with political turmoil and Y2K leisure.

Nikola Ilic | CH 2024 | 19’ | Visions du Réel 2024, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024, Solothurner Filmtage 2025

Screenings at the Solothurner Filmtage 2025

Text: Călin Boto

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