1 I would like to express my gratitude to the wo anonymous reviewers for their inspiring and thorough comments, to Mark D. Steinberg for his expertise and goodwill, and to Jane T. Hedges for her superb editing of this article. Before the Rainis described as a “hugely successful movie” in Petér Krasztev's article “Who Will Take the Blame? How to Make an Audience Grateful for a Family Massacre,” in Andrew James Horton, ed., The Celluloid Tinderbox: Yugoslav Screen Reflections of a Turbulent Decade(Shropshire, Eng., 2000), 27, at www.kinoeye.org/03/10/celluloidtinderbox.pdf (last accessed 3 December 2010). Regarding this film's role in the visibility of Macedonian cinema, Dina Iordanova wrote: “Macedonia, a country whose entire film production consists of about 50 feature tides, came onto the spotlight with the celebrated film by Milco Mancevski Pred dozdot (Before the Rain,1994).” Dina Iordanova, “Introduction,” Horton, ed., The Celluloid Tinderbox, 12.

2 Before the Rainis available in The Criterion Collection edition (2008). For a more detailed summary, see Erik Tängerstad, “Before the Rain—After the War?” Rethinking History 4,no. 2 (July 2000): 175'81.

3 While some of the critics perceive the film as, in Slavoj Žižek's phrasing, offering “to the Western liberal gaze … precisely what this gaze wants to see in the Balkan war—the spectacle of timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions, in contrast to decadent and anemic Western life,” Victor A. Friedman gives a welcome corrective, commenting on the viewers “seeing grim outcomes where no fatalism was meant,” as Dina Iordanova sums up Friedman's interpretation, who himself asserts that this seeing of grim outcomes was “not a failure of the film but of the [viewer's] gaze.” Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review225 (September-October 1995): 38; Victor A. Friedman, “Fable as History: The Macedonian Context,” Rethinking History4, no. 2 (July 2000): 143, cited in Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media(London, 2001), 84. Conceptually centered around the tropes of seeing, watching, being watched, and the demands of the eye or gaze, and often related to some aspects of postcolonial criticism, much of the criticism of the film is connected with issues of the western discourses on the Balkans. However, while one can read a film set in a specific space and time as creating a specific representation of that space and time, and thus participating in the creation of a discourse about them, to do so is a result of a chosen interpretive approach and not of the film itself, or of cinema in general. Such a critical approach often negates or diminishes a film's essential nonliteral or aesthetic dimension that functions outside the sphere of immediate and recognizable political and cultural concerns. For more on this, see “Introduction” in Gordana P. Crnkovic´, Imagined Dialogues: Eastern European Literature in Conversation with American and English Literature(Evanston, 2000). Also see Russell A. Berman, Fiction Sets YouFree: Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture(Iowa City, 2007). Milcho Manchevski addresses this issue in some of his interviews; see, for instance, Keith Brown, “An Interview with Milcho Manchevski,” World Literature Today82, no. 1 (January-February 2008): 12–15.

4 Heidegger, Martin, Early Greek Thinking trans. Farrell Krell, David and Capuzzi, Frank A (New York, 1975), 65.Google Scholar

5 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method trans. , W, Cumming, John, and Barden, Garrett (London, 1979), 324 Google Scholar, quoted in Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening,trans. Charles Lambert (London, 1990), 8.

6 Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language,1. Corradi Fiumara here refers to Heidegger's discussion of proper hearing in his Early Greek Thinking.

7 Bruns, Gerald L, Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven, 1989), 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 “In order to reinforce the fact that this is not a documentary about contemporary Macedonia, I treated the film—to a point—like a fable, stylistically. The country was made to look like a fairy-tale land in the way it was photographed. Blues and visuals suggestive of Byzantine art dominated the first third … we wanted to create even more heightened reality composed solely of wonderful landscapes, a place obviously unreal, closer to a mythical land than to current-day Macedonia.” Milcho Manchevski, “Rainmaking and Personal Truth,” Rethinking History4, no. 2 (July 2000): 131.

9 Schmidt, J. H. H, Handbuch der lateinischen und griechischen Synonymik(Amsterdam, 1968), 73 Google Scholar, quoted in Montiglio, Silvia, Silence in the Land of Logos(Princeton, 2000), 11'12.Google Scholar

10 Hempton, Gordon and Grossman, John, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World(New York, 2009), 1.Google Scholar

11 Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language, 98.

12 Irena Makarushka's “Religion, Ethnicity and Violence in Before the Rain”sees this issue differently and reads the film's take on the monastery's seclusion and separation as mainly negative. See www.manchevski.com/@page=press_essey&sub=therain&sub2=essays&body.htm (last accessed 3 December 2010). My own sense is that the film as a whole perceives the monks and their space in a positive light: Kiril proves heroic in his hiding of Zamira, the monastery itself provides shelter to Bosnian Muslim refugees, and all the monks help Zamira and Kiril escape from the Macedonian men pursuing her.

13 As Victor A. Friedman clarifies, Zamira's wearing pants should not be interpreted as her being clad in men's clothing, because “piljane or (intijane, a kind of loose pantaloon … are characteristic everyday household wear of [rural] Muslim women in Macedonia and elsewhere in the Balkans.” Friedman, “Fable as History,” 136.

14 Friedman's article provides the historical background for this situation in which younger people of different ethnicities do not know each other's language, as opposed to their older family members who do: Zamira's mother and grandmother, Hana and Zekir, know Macedonian, and Aleksandar knows some Albanian. Ibid., 136'37.

15 Being silent in this way, Kiril becomes part of a vast and ancient community of those whose silence is “the expression of knowledge, willpower, or even heroism,” as André Neher puts it. André Neher, The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz,trans. David Maisel (Philadelphia, 1981), 13.

16 The film complements its endorsement of silence by repeatedly showing the violent or even lethal potential of words when handled improperly in their making or their reception. The several instances of different, life-affirming uses of words, most notably in a conversation between Aleksandar and Hana (the woman Aleksandar loves and Zamira's mother), a conversation that leads to Aleksandar's rescuing of Zamira, are characterized by the presence of deep listening by the interlocutors, listening that hears not only the actually spoken words, but also the whole realms of another person's existence and one's own related ethical decisions. But the film repeatedly features “non-listening words” and failed communications; Venko Andonovski talks about the empty words and “damaged communication.“ Venko Andonovski, “Semiološkata fobija od tugoto: Semiotikata na sličnostite i semiotikata na razlikite vo filmot Pred dož dotna Milčo Mančevski,” Kinopis12, no. 7 (1995): 21'27. Words are also associatively connected with or lead directly to death: Anne has an utterly nonfunctional verbal communication with her husband, punctuated by verbal outbursts and marked by what seems to be his total inability to hear her, which precedes the violence that erupts in the London restaurant and claims his life. The restaurant shooting itself appears to be caused by a conversation gone bad: the two men, speaking a variant of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, seem to be having a not unfriendly conversation that quickly veers into a quarrel, physical fight, and shooting. And it is not so much a concrete event, the murder of the Macedonian man Bojan, that, however horrible it may be, results in further acts of violence, but instead a specific set of wordsattached to it, alongside a very specific interpretation of these words, as will be discussed later in this article.

17 Manchevski, “Rainmaking and Personal Truth,” 131.

18 Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language, 24.

19 A prime example of such an erasure of the living body by strident words happens with the group of armed Macedonian men, who by labeling Zamira an “Albanian whore,“ become unable to grasp that she is in a way still just a child.

20 “We can retrieve and restore the life-enhancing role of listening. To the extent that we approach in an accepting manner, or let ourselves be accosted, we allow the existence and further articulation of whatever faces us.” Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language, 16.

21 To repeat: “Among the possible meanings of the verb legein(besides the prevalent ones related to saying) there are meanings of a different nature, such as to ‘shelter,' 'gather,’ ‘keep,’ ‘receive,’ which would surely be more conducive to a cognitive attitude based on ‘proper hearing.'” Ibid., 1.

22 Saying that proper hearing is a precondition of seeing may sound counterintuitive: after all, we see what we see and that's that. But things are not that simple: one sees what one thinks one is seeing, and the presence or absence of hearing what one is looking at is a crucial component in the creation of what one thinks one sees. For more on this topic, see a discussion of Chinatownin Gordana P. Crnkovic, “From the Eye to the Hand: The Victim's Double Vision in the Cinema of Roman Polanski,” Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film4, no. 5 (29 November 2004), at www.kinoeye.org/04/05/crnkovic05.php (last accessed 3 December 2010).

23 Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking,60.

24 Ibid., 62.

25 Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language, 15.

26 The association between Zamira and a cat is also clearly present in Manchevski's vision of her character, as evidenced in, among others, the published fifth revision of the screenplay for Before the Rain.In a description of one scene that did not end up in the final version of the film, Zamira, while running, gets hit by a branch and licks blood off her hand, “like a cat.” Milcho Manchevski, Before the Rain/Pred doidot(Skopje, 2002), 189. Manchevski also mentions the “feline quality” of the actress Labina Mitevska in his director's commentary on the Criterion DVD edition of Before the Rain.

27 Milcho Manchevski, in a director's commentary on the Criterion DVD edition of Before the Rain.

28 The rendering of nature in Before the Rain,and this link between the two main characters and plants and animals in particular, could be a topic of another whole work focusing on the issues of ecocriticism, whose insights deeply concern listening and silence. Identifying Maurice Merleau-Ponty as one of ecocriticism's main predecessors, for instance, Louise Westling writes that “Merleau-Ponty called for a reawakening to the world around us, that requires listening to the other voices that we have forgotten to hear, voices that arise in what we may have formerly assumed to be silences.” Louise Westling, “Literature, the Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman,” in Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, eds., Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam, 2006), 39.

29 Milcho Manchevski, in a director's commentary on the Criterion DVD edition of Before the Rain.

30 We see a boy taking a photograph of the double funeral of Bojan and Aleksandar and then turning around and seeing Kiril running down the hill, which would seem suspicious and could lead to the discovery of Zamira's being in the monastery; the two boys observe Aleksandar's visit to Zekir and Hana, and the few boys emerge from behind the rocks when Zekir hits his granddaughter Zamira, which indicates that it was perhaps again the children who watched her and informed on her movements.

31 As Corradi Fiumara puts it, our noise-laden environment may cause a person's numbness or the complete “inhibition of our listening potential,” which happens simply in order for one to survive or “protect one's inner self.” Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language, 82. Or, this environment brings about the subconscious metabolization of the vast quantum of messages, which can again mightily distract one from his or her own proper hearing and being in the world; or one can deal with this dense and overwhelming noise critically, but then dealing with it may make one spend so much of oneself and one's time in this sphere that there is much less chance for the development of the proper listening to the voices that become audible only when noise is silenced.

32 Weil, Simone, “The Power of Words,” a nonreferenced quote from Weil in Sian Miles's preface to this essay, in Miles, ed., Simone Weil: An Anthology(London, 1986), 239.Google Scholar

33 Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language,127'31 (emphasis in the original).

34 Paul Friedlaender, Plato. I. An Introduction,trans, by H. Meyerhoff (London, 1958), 33. As quoted in Corradi Fiumara, Other Side of Language,130.