{"title":"An Insider Snapshot of the Recent (Trans-)National Developments in Balkan Cinema","authors":"Maya Nedyalkova","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2022.2028998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2022.2028998","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"6 1","pages":"230 - 233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85586192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘In a partisan way’: Želimir Žilnik’s Uprising in Jazak and the reconstruction of antifascist memory from below","authors":"Gal Kirn","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2021.2018868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.2018868","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This text works at the intersection of film, memory and politics taking the case of Želimir Žilnik’s short film »Uprising in Jazak« (1973) as its object of study. Most notably, the text will present visual and alternative memory strategies. The text argues that Žilnik’s film is one of the most prolific examples of making a partisan film in a partisan way from the epoch of socialist Yugoslavia. The film’s raw image and cutting is a conscious politico-aesthetical intervention into the dominant genre of that time in socialist Yugoslavia – huge war partisan spectacles also called »Red Westerns«. Žilnik’s method consists of a delicate bottom up ethnographic reconstruction of partisan and antifascist memory of the poor villagers in Vojvodina (village Jazak) who − 30 years after the war – collectively tell and renegotiate the stories of the antifascist resistance from the war. The visual language and method of Žilnik stays immensely actual today in post-socialist times of historical revisionism, also in terms of political message. Žilnik succeeds In complementing an Arendtian trope that analysed fascist collaboration from below in terms of »banality of evil« with something I name the everyday deeds and practices of resistances that constituted the partisan community.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"46 1","pages":"272 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80573327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Das ist Walter”: The Evolving Figure of the Archetypal Hero Embodied by Velimir Bata Živojinović in the Yugoslav War Film","authors":"M. Radović","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2021.2008200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.2008200","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Velimir Bata Živojinović boasts a body of work which traverses 350 motion pictures from Classical Yugoslav Cinema over The New Film to Contemporary Serbian Cinema, historical epic to film noir, family comedy to radical avant-garde. A legendary actor and one of the most significant personalities of Yugoslav cinema, he is best remembered as the archetypal hero of the Partisan film. This research examines the ways in which Živojinović’s popular figure was constructed through the genre of the war film and the brand of Partisan film distinct to Yugoslavia. By situating Živojinović’s star image in the context of his oeuvre, defining Partisan aesthetics and closely analysing three different periods in the actor’s career, with respect to the films which are central in developing his image as the archetypal hero, namely Kozara (Veljko Bulajić 1962), Valter brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo (Hajrudin Krvavac 1972), and Lepa sela lepo gore/Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Srđan Dragojević 1996), I demonstrate how the indestructible partisan figure embodied by Velimir Bata Živojinović was established in on-screen cinematic space, and how this figure continued to develop, transform, and evolve across films, and, finally, through off-screen public space.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"91 1","pages":"162 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73136389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Balkan Film at the 2021 Thessaloniki International Film Festival","authors":"A. Grgić, Lydia Papadimitriou, C. Parvulescu","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2021.2015679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2021.2015679","url":null,"abstract":"The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF), which took place between November 4 and 14, this year, is a resourceful hub for cinephiles and film professionals around the world to learn about recent output from the film industries of the Balkans, as well as about its cinematic traditions. To provide a panorama of Balkan cinema, TIFF has several tools at its disposal. The Balkan Survey showcases ten relevant recent feature films from the region and a selection of shorts. In addition, it features a special tribute for a director from the region, this year for Binka Zhelyazkova. Greek films are presented in a dedicated national section, while the Meet the Neighbours competition selects from an area that includes the Balkans, the Mediterranean region, and Eastern Europe. TIFF is a well-established event, with several competitive sections, the most important ones offering Golden Alexanders. This year, the Golden Alexander for the main competition went to Softies (Samuel Teis, France, 2021), while the Golden Alexander for Meet the Neighbours to Small Body (Laura Samani, Italy-France-Slovenia, 2021). The films from the Balkans that gained prestigious awards this year were Magnetic Fields (Yorgos Goussis, Greece, 2021), which won several awards including Film Forward for ‘young and daring directors who question our ties with reality.’ Vera Dreams of the Sea (Kaltrina Krasniqi, Kosovo-North Macedonia-Albania, 2021) was awarded the Silver Alexander of Meet the Neighbours, and Celts (Milica Tomović, Serbia, 2021) won the Mermaid Award for the best LGBTQI+-themed movie. The Balkan Survey is not competitive; however, in the words of its curator Dimitris Kerkinos, it is ‘one of the salient features of TIFF’s international identity, offering a strong motive to Greek audiences, but also to foreign film professionals to catch up on the latest cinematic developments in the Balkans’. The Survey was inaugurated in 1994, shortly after TIFF became an international festival. The Survey was aimed to build bridges of dialogue between national film cultures in the Balkans and stimulate coproductions. From its launch, it assertively used the term ‘Balkan’ to mark its pool of selection and did not shy away from introducing itself as promoting not only the talent but also the traditions of the area. This year’s line-up included titles from Bulgaria, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. Kerkinos describes it as showcasing ‘films with a great stylistic and thematic diversity that bring to light major regional concerns, such as issues of women’s liberation, the refugee crisis, immigration, religion, the family, and social dynamics’.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"12 1","pages":"240 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79755894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘They Are Not like […] Pamela Hódi […] Constantly Showing Off’—How Hungarian Tweens Negotiate Fame through Disney Princesses","authors":"Anna Zsubori","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2021.2008132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.2008132","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ever since Disney Princesses were established as a marketing brand in 2000, they have become a famous ‘phenomenon’ that has been commercially successful, popular, and adored, but one that has also received much criticism from scholars and consumers alike. Although audience research has gained increasing recognition in recent years, this field’s attention has focused mainly on the ‘West’, neglecting Eastern European—including child—audiences. Moreover, while there are several scholarly examinations of Disney Princess films, these studies mainly employ textual analysis (Escalada-Cordova 2018; Whelan 2014; Wilde 2014) rather than conducting empirical research. Instead of reading for the audiences and making assumptions about how they interpret fame from a media text, in this case Disney Princesses, it is therefore crucial to ask audience members themselves, as Sonia Livingstone observes, ‘it is established that audiences are plural in their decodings, that their cultural context matters, and that they often disagree with textual analyses’ (2008, p. 4). By drawing upon diverse scholarly works within the field of celebrity studies as well as undertaking an audience study with Eastern European—specifically Hungarian—tweens, the objective of this article is twofold. On the one hand, this paper argues that animated characters are indeed entitled to have a fame status. It does so by deploying theorisations that distinguish between heroes and celebrities (North, Bland, and Ellis 2005), celebrities and stars (G. Turner, Bonner, and Marshall 2000), and differentiate among animated characters considered as ‘celeactors’ (Rojek 2001), or as stars (Ellis 2007; McGowan 2018; 2019). On the other hand, through the analysis of audiences’ diverse perceptions of fame, illustrated by Hungarian tweens’ understanding of Disney Princesses—an enormous global media phenomenon—this article provides a key case study for the aforementioned argument while highlighting the features of celebrity culture that are specific to Hungary. Taking into account Hungarian tweens’ approaches towards Disney Princesses, while considering that Disney is claimed to have ‘immense power over childhood culture’ (Garofalo 2013) and that ‘[t]he celebrity is simultaneously a construction of the dominant culture and a construction of the subordinate audiences of the culture’ (Marshall 2014, p. 48), this paper starts revealing the diverse ways in which different cultures conceptualise celebrity notions.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"2 1","pages":"211 - 229"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89771153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing a Version of Themselves: A Comparative Analysis of Želimir Žilnik’s Work with Nonprofessional Actors","authors":"Zdenko Mandušić","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2021.2009651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.2009651","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Želimir Žilnik’s films are marked by the director’s work with nonprofessional actors who come from the social periphery or marginalized communities and offer unconventional perspectives about social conditions and history. As the title of Žilnik’s recent retrospective exhibition ‘Shadow citizens’ indicates, his films present individuals who embody alternatives to their time’s ruling ideology. These characters include homeless men in communist-era Novi Sad, guest workers in Germany, drag queens in nationalist-dominated Belgrade, immigrants trying to enter Europe and laid-off industrial workers in post-Yugoslav Serbia. Following the long legacy of filming amateur actors, Žilnik cuts a distinct path in using nonprofessionals. This essay comparatively analyzes his Kenedi trilogy and The Old School of Capitalism (2009) with other recent films of social concern from Eastern European directors to place in relief how Žilnik’s films define the socially marginalized and historically determined position of their subjects. This article argues that Žilnik’s films present a critical development in the cinematic practice of reenactment and the use of nonprofessional actors since the director makes it possible for his amateurs to simulate and critically revise their reality on the film screen.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"32 1","pages":"137 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80292509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dissensus and the Politics of Transnationalism in the Cinema of Želimir Žilnik: A Case Study of The Most Beautiful Country in the World","authors":"D. Radunović","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2021.2014091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.2014091","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper takes as a starting point the concept of dissensus understood by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière as a gap in, or a redistribution of the right to speak, to see or to be seen. The paper further asserts that dissensus, thus understood, perfectly encapsulates the efforts of the post-Yugoslav filmmaker Želimir Žilnik: to intervene in representational order and render visible the socially marginalised and invisible. The notion of political cinema, usually associated with Žilnik, is here redefined as a practice geared towards changing the rules of visibility and towards a redistribution of the authority/right to speak and be seen. The paper also emphasises the immediacy of representation in Žilnik and argues that Žilnik’s ideological horizons revolve around Marx’s concept of immediate experience, rather than around historical Marxism. Lastly, the paper relates Žilnik’s early interrogations of social exclusion to his later preoccupations with displacement and exile and focuses on the author’s 2018 film The Most Beautiful Country in the World. In conclusion, the paper puts forward the suggestion that Žilnik’s last film, while showcasing some of its author’s long-standing views of exile, brings forth a new, transnational and socially pragmatic vista on the processes of integration and acculturation.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"7 1","pages":"121 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81659012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cold war, hot stuff. The official critical discourse and the desirability of film stars in socialist Romania","authors":"A. Gadalean","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2021.1999619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.1999619","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘60s represented a decade of political and ideological semi-relaxation in socialist Romania. Film audiences retained some access to Western productions, and foreign film stars carried significant erotic appeal to viewers. The state-funded Cinema magazine aimed to disrupt these tendencies either by arguing that the objects of desire were representative of lower quality cinema, or, in full-on Cold War style, by building the case for the decline of Western capitalism through pinpointing all manifestations of sexuality as a symptom of it. This article looks at the ways in which ideological arguments to “redact” film sexuality, while failing to repurpose it, managed to redirect it and reposition it as alien to socialist culture. The article also explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"46 1","pages":"180 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76727208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Yugoslav(i)a on the margin: sexual taboos, representation, nation and emancipation in Želimir Žilnik’s Early Works (1969)","authors":"V. Vuković","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2021.1994758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.1994758","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In socialism, Yugoslav women became empowered by employment and income, but gender equality stayed rather nominal in the family domain. Such gender inequity is addressed in the works of the Yugoslav novi film/New Film (1961–72) auteurs. They occasionally turned to allegories in order to communicate political criticism. One of them was Želimir Žilnik. His most internationally lauded film, winner of the Golden Bear in 1969, is Rani radovi/Early Works (1969). It features a heroine Jugoslava (Milja Vujanović), whose name is eponymous of Yugoslav nation. Bearing in mind that in the majority of Yugoslav New Films a leading character is a man, Early Works is exceptional for having a woman as the main heroine. I will approach Jugoslava’s character: as an allegory of Yugoslavia and its revolutionary spirit, as well as a prototype of an emancipated woman, punished by rape and killing. My research studies the link in the film between Žilnik’s political critique via strong heroine as a proxy, and her objectification. By reading the film from a feminist perspective and building my arguments on close analysis, I contend that Jugoslava is concurrently empowered and disempowered, an active subject and sexually objectified object, a raped nation and a raped feminist.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":"196 1","pages":"248 - 271"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82703014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}