Out of the past: Memories and nostalgia in (post-)yugoslav cinema

Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 117-142

  Daković, Nevena ^a  

^a University in Belgrade   (Serbia)

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EID: 84918907551     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (55)

1. Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 11.
2. The term “interventions” broadly refers to the presence and work of documentary material in the fictional structure and is close to the notions of insertion, combination, amalgam, intrusion or even contamination and the resulting effects.
3. Greene, Landscapes of Loss, 5.
4. Andrew Dudley uses the term optique, which “suggests the ocular and ideological mechanisms of perspective.” Andrew Dudley, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 19. The mode of fiction/docu intertwining might be seen as the optique/mechanism of perspective for memories and the past in general.
5. Dušan Bjelić, Obrad Savić (eds.), Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalisation and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002);
6. Ivo Banac, Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992);
7. David Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth:Questions of Identity and Modernity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
8. The hybridity of documentary fiction is partially expressed by the term faction as the text intermingling facts and fiction, in which fictional material takes on the function of, and is treated as, documentary or archival footage.
9. The sequel, entitled A Throatful of Strawberries (Jagode u grlu, 1984), will be barely mentioned since it does not contain any documentary footage.
10. However if the beginning of the disintegration is set right after Tito’s death in 1980 then even these films belong to the post-Yugoslav era.
11. Vladimir Jankelevitch and Frederick Jameson. Vladimir Jankelevitch, L’Irreversible et la Nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1973);
12. Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
13. Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, vols. 1-3. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992).
14. Linda Hutcheon, “Telling Stories: Fiction and History” in Peter Brooker (ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism (Harlow: Longman, 1992), 239.
15. Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Encyclopedia of European Cinema (London: Cassell-BFI, 1999), 457.
16. Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945-2001 (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 124.
17. Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945-2001 (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 124.
18. Greene, Landscapes of Loss, 19.
19. Hutcheon, “Telling Stories,” 233.
20. Robert Stam, Sandy Flitterman Lewis, Robert Burgoyn, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (London: Routledge, 1992), 167.
21. The archive documentary material is taken from the well-known state-produced newsreels called Filmske novosti-the same ones as Dragojević paraphrases at the beginning of Pretty Village Pretty Flame (Lepa sela, lepo gore, 1996)-a Serbian version of the March of Time.
22. Greene, Landscapes of Loss, 3.
23. Nevena Daković, “Remembrance of the Things Past” in Guido Rings, Morgan Rikki (eds.), European Cinema: Inside-Out. Images of the Self and the Other in Postcolonial European Film (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2003), 243-59.
24. Tony Rayns, “Underground,” Sight and Sound 6 (1996): 54;
25. Misha Glenny, “If You Are Not For Us,” Sight and Sound 6 (1996): 13.
26. An atypical and amusing revolutionary image equally evolves from filmic prototypes such as General della Rovere (Il Generale della Rovere, 1959) or Balkan Express (1982), with brigands and hoodlums as accidental war heroes.
27. In this sense, Natalija (Mirjana Joković), who belongs to one man above ground and to another underground, could be regarded as a contemporary Persephone.
28. Lili Marleen provides the connection with real history since the song was broadcast for the first time by Radio Belgrade on April 11, 1941. Rainer Werner Fassbinder replays this event in his film Lili Marleen (1981), while Hark Bohm, who plays the song’s composer in Fassbinder’s work, appears at the end of Underground as a hospital doctor.
29. “nostalgia for a national identity which is simultaneously exposed as skillfully manipulated illusion.” Rayns, “Underground,” 53.
30. Greene, Landscapes of Loss, 240.
31. The documentary fiction also includes quotations from other forms of art and culture. There are allusions to the Bible (the cellar as Noah’s ark of salvation), painting (Gericault’s or Breughel’s compositions), comics and literature.
32. The segment is both film as history and history made as film-within-a-film, supported by the combination of extradiegetically/intradiegetically framed narrations.
33. Dina Iordanova book Cinema of Flames (London: BFI, 2001), 111-36.
34. Even Stojan Cerović labels them as Serb and Montenegrin (Iordanova, Cinema of Flames, 116).
35. Dudley, Mists of Regret, 294.
36. Mette Hjort, “Themes of Nation” in Mette Hjort, Scott MacKenzie (eds.), Cinema and Nation (London-New York: Routledge, 2000), 106.
37. Post-revisionist westerns (Dance with Wolves, 1990, Silverado and The Ballad of Little Joe, 1993)
38. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2000), 142.
39. The wider claim about Serbian history as a chain of deaths and assassinations is supported by the totality of the oeuvre of Dušan Kovačević. Every film chapter of the spontaneous chronicle of Serbian and Yugoslav history in his oeuvre ends with death, assassination and devastation.
40. Stam, Flitterman Lewis, Burgoyn, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, 16.
41. Stam, Flitterman Lewis, Burgoyn, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, 16.
42. Jameson, Postmodernism, 168-70.
43. Jameson, Postmodernism, 170.
44. Jameson, Postmodernism, 170.
45. Jameson describes the case of Body Heat (1981) where “nostalgia works as a narrative set in some indefinable nostalgic past, as eternal 1930s, say, beyond history.” In ex-Yugoslav cinema a great example is Hey Babu Riba (Bal na vodi, 1986).
46. Jameson, Postmodernism, 166-7.
47. Jacqueline Simon, La fêlure dans le cinéma romanesque américain des années 40 et 50 (Paris: Masson, 1989).
48. Nevena Daković, Melodrama nije žanr [Melodrama is not a Genre] (Belgrade and Novi Sad: Prometej, 1995).
49. Jameson, Postmodernism, 173.
50. Simon, La “fêlure,” 21-2.
51. The documentary/authentic elements of background and setting, the still existing city topography and recollections of the real popular figures of the 1960s who appear as themselves make it a successful example of constructed urban mythology.
52. David Albahari, “Paket aranžman” [Package arrangement], Vreme 537 (3 May 2001), 27.
53. The rock album contained music of three bands: Idoli, Šarlo akrobata and Električni orgazam.
54. Three Palms for Two Punks and a Babe (Tri palme ta dve bitange i ribicu, 1998), Thunderbirds (Munje, 2001) and When I grow up I will be a Kangoroo (Kad porastem biću kengur, 2004).
55. Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (London: Arnold, 2002), 248.