25696 - A Film Journey Through Former Yugoslavia and its Demise

Learning outcomes

The student is expected to achieve a solid knowledge of culture and politics of diversity, exclusion (linked to state rules on citizenship and other), migration, human rights violation, and various nationalisms in relation to the Yugoslav demise. In particular, given the weakness of social science methods in contesting nationalist explanations of the victory of ethnonationalism in the Balkans, the student will learn from new sources as films - both documentary and fiction , how to use them, simultaneously, as a document/ text and a visual ethnographic tool. As a result, the student will improve his/her own cultural studies approach and the anthropological methodology.

Course contents

The course addresses diverse cultural aspects of the political conflicts and societal crisis in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states, as opposed to the interpretations of Yugoslavia's demise that treat it as an ‘ethnic' war (which became dominant in the media and a bulk of academic texts since the 1990s).

Numerous accounts of the Communist-era struggle for democracy and against the one-party state come to a sticky end when offering answers to the following questions: How did the one-time undivided focus of Eastern European pro-democracy activists – on human rights and pluralism of political views – disintegrate so quickly in the aftermath of 1989? Why did it give way, so easily, it seems, to the dominance of exclusivist, mainly ethnonationalist political programs in many postsocialist states, amid the still fresh memories of the Communist era sacrifices for plurality of opinions and solidarity with the powerless? How did the notion of civic camaraderie as the basis of political action (against an oppressive state) get replaced by the celebration of consumerist and nationalist values in defining one's lifestyle and human worth?


Filmography in the former Yugoslavia since the 1960s offers a particularly rich insight into the trajectory of political and social crises that prepared the collapse of socialism and the subsequent violent state disintegration. We will watch and discuss films made by the authors who had been critical toward, both, the League of Communists' and the post-1990 nationalist interpretations of the problems of socialism and the ways out. Along the way, we would explore the questions of artistic autonomy (and the lack of it) and censorship, and the role of film industry and film market in socialism and post-socialist states.


Moving forward to the cinema in post-Yugoslav states, we shall discuss the works of the new, yet already critically acclaimed authors, especially those in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, who explore the uneasy processes of coming to terms with the war violence, war crimes and genocide, and the failures of both local and Western elites to move away from nationalist politics and pressures to identify citizens along ethnonationalist markers. We will seek to find continuities (and reason behind them) between the post-1995 antinationalist stance of young filmmakers and their predecessors in the Yugoslav new film (‘Black Wave') cinema. Finally, we would discuss the emergence of a pan-post-Yugoslav film (and cultural) sphere and trans-border audiences.

Readings/Bibliography

COURSE SYLLABUS/ READINGS SCHEDULE

Popular and Academic Imagining of the Conflicts and War in Yugoslavia:

What is Orientalism and Balkanism: Methodological Critiques of Essentialism (including Occidentalism)

Maria Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review 53(2): 453-482, 1997.

Milica Bakic-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54: 1995, 917-931.

Dunja Rihtman Auguštin, “A Croatian Controversy: Mediterranean - Danube – Balkans,” Narodna umjetnost, 36/1, 1999, pp. 103-119.

(An example of Orientalism/Balkanism/ Essentialism: Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts. 1994. New York: Vintage Books. Prologue: Saints, Terrorists, Blood and Holy Water, and Yugoslavia: Historical Overtures, pp. 3-77).

Recommended: Katherine Verdery, What was Socialism, and Why Did It Fall (Chapter 1 in What was Socialism and What Comes Next? N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Politics, Economy, and the 'Crisis and Reform' Period in Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia's Stability and Disintegration: Political and Social Lines of Conflict; ‘Ethnic’ and Social Causes of the War

Carl-Ulrik Schierup, "Memorandum for Modernity? Socialist Modernisers, Re-Traditionalisation, and the Rise of Ethnic Nationalism" in Schierup, C.-U., (ed.) Scramble for the Balkans: Nationalism, Globalism, and the Political Economy of Reconstruction, Macmillan, London, 1997, pp. 47-80.

(Alternatively: C-U. Schierup, “Quasi-proletarians and a Patriarchal. Bureaucracy: Aspects of Yugoslavia's. Re-peripheralisation,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 1 (1992): 79-99.)

Ana Devic. 1998. 'Ethnonationalism, Politics, and the Intellectuals: The Case of Yugoslavia'. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 11, No. 3.

Olivera Milosavljevic, “Yugoslavia as a Mistake” (pp. 50-80) and “The Abuse of the Authority of Science” (pp.274-302), in Popov Nebojsa and Drinka Gojkovic, eds. 2000. The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis in Historical Memory. Budapest: Central European University Press.

Valere Chip Gagnon, The Myth Of Ethnic War: Serbia And Croatia in the 1990s (Cornell University Press, 2004): Introduction, chapters 2, 3, & 4.

Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Chapters: Introduction; Destruction of Political Alternatives, Destruction of Sociability.

Film in Late Socialist Yugoslavia: Between Ideology and Aesthetics; Worlds Currents, Cultural Politics, and Everyday Life

 Precursors: 1945-1960s and the ‘Partisan Films’

Nebojsa Jovanovic, Gender and Sexuality in the Classical Yugoslav Cinema, 1947–1962 (Doctoral thesis, CEU Budapest, 2014 (chapters 1 and 3).

Daniel Goulding, 2003 (1985). Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945-2001 Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chapters: New Film and Republican Ascendancy, 1961–1972; Confrontation with the Revolutionary Past; Contemporary Reality: Critical Visions; Accommodation and Resurgence: The New Yugoslav Cinema, 1973–1990.

Nebojsa Jovanovic, “Breaking the wave: A commentary on ‘Black Wave polemics: Rhetoric as aesthetic' by Greg DeCuir, Jr,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema, vol. 2, no. 2 (October 2011).

Pavle Levi. 2007. Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chapters and sub-chapters: The Black Wave and Marxist Revisionism; New Yugoslav Film; Sex and the Socialist Revolution; Montage: Praxis; Tito and Jesus; Yugoslavism Without Limit; New Primitivism; Sarajevo Surrealists.

Post-Yugoslav Cinema and the Post-War Popular Culture: Breaking (Out of) the National Metaphors into a New Realism

War Crimes and Memory: How to Move (Back) to a Cooperative Future

Nikolai Jeffs. 2005. “Some People in This Town Don’t Want to Die Like a Hero: Multiculturalism and the Alternative Music Scene in Sarajevo,” in Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins, eds. Rock’n’Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 1-19. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/60308

Martin Pogačar, 2015. “Music and Memory: Yugoslav Rock in Social Media,” Southeastern Europe 39 (2015) 215-236. https://transyuformator.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/seeu_039_02_poga-ar.pdf

Nebojsa Jovanovic, “Futur antérieur of Yugoslav cinema, or, Why Emir Kusturica's legacy is worth fighting for,” in Daniel Šuber and Slobodan Karamanić (eds), Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia. Brill, 2012.

Ana Devic, “Fringe Antinationalisms: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Cinema, in Paul Stubbs and Christophe Solioz, eds. Towards Open Regionalism in South East Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012, pp. 191-209).

Nebojsa Jovanovic, Bosnian Cinema in the Socialist Yugoslavia and the Anti-Yugoslav Backlash, KinoKultura, Special Issue 14: Bosnian Cinema, edited by Nataša Milas, Cynthia Simmons, and Trevor L. Jockims, August 2012.

http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/14/jovanovic.shtml

Eric Gordy, 2013. Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial. The Past at Stake in

Post-Milošević Serbia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Magdalena Rekść, 2016. Post-Yugoslav Collective Memory. Between National and Transnational Myths. Polish Political Science Yearbook, Vol. 45, pp. 73–84.

V. Beronja & S. Vervaet (Eds.). 2016. Post-Yugoslav Constellations:

Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Literature and Culture. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.

Dijana Jelača, 2016. Dislocated Screen Memory. Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan.

Fiction and Anti-Fiction Literature/ Role of Literature in a Critique of Nationalist Readings of the Past

Dubravka Ugresic, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (Phoenix House, 1998).

Dubravka Ugresic, Europe in Sepia. University of Rochester: Open Letter Books 2014.

Aleksandar Hemon. 2008. The Lazarus Project. Picador.

Aleksandar Hemon. 2013. The Book of My Lives, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Post-Yugoslav Societies: Lost (and Angry) in ‘Transition’

Azra Hromadzic. 2015. Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (The Ethnography of Political Violence Series). http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15365.html

Srecko Horvat and Igor Stiks. 2015. Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics After Yugoslavia, Verso.

Tanja Petrović, ed. 2014. Mirroring Europe. Ideas of Europe and Europeanization in Balkan Societies. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

 

Films:

'Black wave' (Crni val/ talas)

· Zaseda (The Ambush), Zivojin Pavlovic, 1969.

· Rani radovi (Early Works), Zelimir Zilnik, 1969.

· Skupljaci perja (I Even Met Happy Gypsies), Aleksandar Petrovic, 1967.

·Misterija organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism), Dusan Makavejev, 1971.

Uloga moje porodice u svjetskoj revoluciji (The Role of My Family in the World Revolution), Bahrudin Bato Cengic, 1971.

On web in two parts: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4a7hgs

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2kfjey

Breza (Birch), Ante Babaja, 1967. A poignant look into the microcosm of rural life between the two world wars, also from a striking gender perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQmLDMQaNbkce

Lisice (Handcuffs), Krsto Papic, 1969.

Ples v dežju (Dance in the Rain), Boštjan Hladnik, 1961.

Tri (Three), Aleksandar Petrovic, 1965.

Moj stan (My Apartment), Zvonimir Berković. This film was awarded first prize for short feature at the Cannes Festival in 1963.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2e6wp8

'The Prague School' (Praska skola)/ New Critical Cinema

· Okupacija u 26 slika (Occupation in 26 Tableaux), Lordan Zafranovic, 1978.

· Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota (Stefica Cvek in the Jaws of Life), Rajko Grlic, 1984.

· Tako se kalio celik (Thus Steel Was Tempered), Zelimir Zilnik, 1988.

· Kuduz, Ademir Kenovic, 1986.

Post-Yugoslav Cinema

Tito po drugi put medju Srbima (Tito's Second Time among the Serbs), Zelimir Zilnik, FR Yugoslavia (Serbia-Montenegro), 1994.

· Savrseni krug (The Perfect Circle), Ademir Kenovic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1996.

· Marsal (Marshall Tito's Spirit), Vinko Bresan, Croatia, 1999.

· Outsider. Andrej Kosak, Slovenia, 1997.

· Underground, Emir Kusturica, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, France, Germany, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, 1995.

Bogorodica (Madonna), Neven Hitrec, Croatia, 1999.

· Cetverored (Four by Four), Jakov Sedlar, Croatia, 1999.

· Noz (Knife), Miroslav Lekic, Serbia-Montenegro, 1999.

· Nicija zemlja (No Man's Land), Danis Tanovic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Slovenia, Italy, UK, Belgium, 2001.

· Ljeto u zlatnoj dolini (Summer in the Golden Valley), Srdjan Vuletic, Bosnia-Herzegovina/ France/ UK/Slovenia, 2003.

· Svjedoci (Witnesses), Vinko Bresan, Croatia,2003.

· Gori Vatra (Fuse), Pjer Zalica,. Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2003.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCcwQMSWA8M

Remake, Dino Mustafic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2003.

· Grbavica (Esma's Secret), Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Austria, Germany, 2005.

· Vukovar, posljednji rez (Vukovar, the Final Cut), Janko Baljak and Drago Hedl, Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, 2005.

· Awakening from the Dead (Budjenje iz mrtvih), Milos Misa Radivojevic, Serbia, 2005.

· Karaula (The Border Post), Rajko Grlic, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Austria, UK, 2006.

· The Tour (Turneja), Goran Markovic, Serbia, 2008.

Kenedi se vraca kuci (Kenedi Goes Back Home), Zelimir Zilnik, Serbia-Montenegro, 2002.

· Zene u crnom (Women in Black), Zoran Zolomun & Helge Reidmeister, Germany, 1998.

· Crnci (The Blacks), Goran Devic and Zvonimir Juric, Croatia, 2009.

· Na putu (On the Path), Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Austria, Germany, Croatia, 2011.

Krugovi (Circles), Srdjan Golubovic, Serbia, Germany, France, Slovenia, Croatia, 2013.

Muskarci ne placu (Men Don't Cry), Alen Drljevic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2017.

Zaba (Frog), Elmir Jukic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2017.

Ne gledaj mi u pijat (Quit Staring in my Plate), Hana Jusic, Croatia, Denmark, 2017.

Takva su pravila (These are the rules), Ognjen Svilicic, Croatia, 2014.

Dobra Zena (A Good Wife), Mirjana Karanovic, Serbia, 2016.

Tilva Roš, Nikola Ležaić, Serbia, 2010.

Tri Dritare dhe një Varje (Three windows and a hanging), Isa Qosja, Kosovo, 2014. https://vimeo.com/97315174

Password: cmbcmbcmb

Buick Riviera, Goran Rusinovic, Croatia, 2008.

https://vimeo.com/99717147

Teret (The Load), Ognjen Glavonic, Serbia | France | Croatia | Iran | Qatar, 2018.

Dubina 2 (Depth Two), Ognjen Glavonic, Serbia, 2016.

Ničije dete (No One's Child), Vuk Rsumovic, Serbia, 2014.

Čefurji raus! (Chefurs Raus!), Goran Vojnovic, Slovenia | Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2014.

Fine mrtve djevojke (Fine Dead Girls), Dalibor Matanić, Croatia, 2002.

Zvizdan (The High Sun), Dalibor Matanic, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, 2015.

Quo vadis, Aida? Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany , France, Austria, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Norway, 2020.

Useful film review sites

Cinema projects with documentary films online

http://www.kinoeye.org/03/10/celluloidtinderbox.php

http://www.arhitel.com/

See “Akademici” on the role of the Serbian Academy of sciences, and documenting all its endeavors until today in a short film).

http://factum.com.hr/hr (see esp. film “Goli”/ Barren Island)

Teaching methods

Given the weaknesses of social science methods in contesting the hegemonic nationalist explanations of the violent and enduring ethnonationalism in the Balkans, the students will learn about the conflicts to a great extent from visual sources - Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav films - both documentary and fiction – starting from the late 1960s. The aim is to understand films as, simultaneously, a document/ text corresponding with other texts, a visual and ethnographic study, and a potential instrument of political agendas. As a result, the students shall improve their knowledge of the methods of cultural studies, sociology, gender studies, and anthropology.

Methods: Seminars and lectures, students’ group presentations, discussions of films and literature, weekly diary and final essay writing.

Assessment methods

Students must attend all classes and film screenings. According to the MIREES rules, attendance will be taken at every class meeting, and you may not be able to finish the course if you are absent more than what is permitted.

The lecturer will open each class with a presentation of the main questions for each set of topics, likely in addition to summarizing the previous session, which will lead to the discussion moderated by students.

Students must fulfill the following requirements:

1) Group presentations lasting approx. 20 minutes. Presentations must establish critical links between reading materials and a selection of films. Presentations’ summaries must be distributed one day in advance.

1a) Alternatively (instead of group presentations), students can write two (weekly) diaries (three pages each).

2) Short Outline of the Final Essay (1-2 pages)

3) Final Essay (10-14 pages, double-spaced, 2500-3500 words) incorporating material from course readings and a comparative analysis of several films.

The outcome of the module will be averaged to that of the other module composing the integrated course in order to determine the final grade.

Teaching tools

Books (chapters), academic journal articles, media texts, films (documentary and fiction), black (white) board.

Office hours

See the website of Ana Devic