Sand and snow of a film memory: The Novi Sad raid

The aim of the paper is to map the transformation of historical and cultural trauma - "when an entire city ended up under the ice" - that restored collective memories of the city to the transnational memory and narratives of absolute victims, and to show the transformation through the analysis of Cold Days (András Kovács, Hungary) and Monument (1967, Miroslav Antić, SFRY). Their complementary narratives about the Novi Sad raid, told from different national perspectives, opposing perceptions of victims and perpetrators, from the point of view of generations and postgenerations (the author of this text belonging to the latter), side by side with titles that only touch on a topic, like The Jews are Coming (Prvoslav Marić, 1991, SFRY) and Hourglass (Szabolcs Tolnai, 2007, SFRY), become, at the same time, spaces for inscribing the intricate dialectic of ethnicisation and de-ethnicisation of memory and a cultural framework that shapes images of the past and interpretations of history. In the same vein, the paper uses three theoretical interpretive frameworks - "violence as a generative force in the Balkans" (Max Bergholz, 2016); transnational remembrance and absolute victims and "memory and complicity" (Debarati Sanyal, 2015) - which open up new readings of the past and writing history in films, in line with the contemporary political context. The paper recognises the mentioned de-ethnicisation as a shift from ethnic to ethic, marked by the eth/n/ic word play, and thus connected with the fundamental question of identity and the relationship between identity and memory. At the same time, shaping the memory of the individual and the memory of different social groups to which he / she belongs in the collective memory, testifies to how the latter "became a powerful symbol of numerous political and social transitions" that require individuals to (re)position themselves in society.