Landscapes of Fiction and the Inscription of War: Undergrounds after Yugoslavia

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Culture I: Documentary Practices in Yugoslav Film: Screening the Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

This paper will decompress Yugoslav filmmaking’s recent turn towards the scenic. Why, and with the help of what aesthetic devices, have ex-socialist filmmakers of the past decade centered so intently on the remote, the uninhabited, the deserted, and the overgrown? More pointedly: what, in this ever-growing corpus, is the role and significance of the underground, the hard-to-access subterranean no man’s land? In the works of Ognjen Glavonić, Kumjana Novakova, and Ian Soroka (among others), caves, caverns, basements, and dens figure prominently. These are cathected, privileged sites for filmmakers across the region, invested as many of them are in repressed, submerged, ‘invisibilized’, and buried historic episodes. “Under an imperial scopic regime, ‘what was there’ is made equal to what made it into the frame,” Ariella Azoulay recently wrote. “However, in zones of systemic and omnipresent violence of which there are no photos at all, ALL photos should be explored as photos of the very same violence.” I argue that today’s generation of filmmakers and artists after Yugoslavia takes Azoulay’s injunction seriously. How, in the mode of committed documentary, does one represent the absent, that which remains unseeable? There is a relationality of above and below – of the sky and the bloodstained earth – at stake in nonfiction after ’91. It is my intention here to unfold this dialectic, and to trace the unexpected places where it takes us. Our guiding question: what does recent landscape cinema know that we do not?

Author

• Nace Zavrl, Harvard U