The politics of a rock ‘n’ road docudrama—genre and intertextuality in Želimir Žilnik’s Oldtimer (1989)

Abstract This article examines Želimir Žilnik’s telefilm Stara mašina/Oldtimer (1989) as an example of the politically engaged use of genre and intertextuality in televisual representation. As a road movie, Oldtimer highlights how the journey trope imbued visual representations of movement with ideological and political meanings. At the same time, the film exposes the nationalist motivations behind the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolution in Serbia in 1988 and emphasizes television news department staff’s complicity in concealing them. This article argues that, by incorporating television news into its diegetic universe, the film displaced the content presented as informational into the realm of fiction. In this way, Oldtimer not only exposed this case of misinformation but modeled a critical approach to the consumption of television. The paper shows that Žilnik’s work contributed to the broadening of televisual potential for ideological signification, allowing the medium to function not simply as a propaganda instrument but as a space of contestation of different ideological positions. Žilnik’s choice to realize this project as a film for television shows the televisual capacity for self-awareness, and Oldtimer points to the medium’s potential to address the problems that political pressures create.