Postsocrealistički arhitektonski onirizam na primerima filmova i stripova Enkija Bilala / (Post)socrealistic Architectural Onirism in Examples of Bilal’s Films and Comic Strips

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze and explore the way the media have transformed film and comic strips by applying an interdisciplinary approach to three dystopian, phantasmagorical science-fiction movies by Enki Bilal: Bunker Palace Hotel (1989), Tykho Moon (1996) and Immortal Ad Vitam (2004) using them as case studies. All three films are a cinematic view of postapocalyptic cities – Belgrade, Paris and New York in which Bilal’s narrative dramatizes specific problems associated with postmodernism – linking ancient mythologies with the dictatorships of Eastern European authoritative political systems and creating a strong aesthetics of a specific dreamlike degenerative world of humans and androids in which existentialism is examined. The art of socio-realistic hyperrealism is presented as a paradigm. The architecture used in the films is a hybrid of ultra modern skyscrapers of industrial structure, full of eclectic post-modern forms, while the city is a deformed, polluted, post-nuclear wasteland used as an allegory of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s. The deformed architectural portraits of these towns are pictorially dependent on German Expressionism as seen in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) and show the influence of Futurism and the Bauhaus. The combined influence of Hieronymus Bosch and Joseph Stalin as well as that of Egyptian mythology creates Bilal’s profoundly individual universe. The distorted and postmodern architectural expression is seen as a dystopian vision of the future.