Živojin Pavlović's Media Theory: Truncated Messages, Interrupted Dispatches, and History in Hajka (1977)

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Narrative II: Processing the Revolution in Media and History

Abstract

Živojin Pavlović's partisan films tested the cultural paradigms of socialist Yugoslavia, yet they also cast unforeseen questions and configurations of Yugoslav socialist modernity. This paper addresses Pavlović's 1977 film Hajka, the second installment in his partisan trilogy, and its discursive mediation of history. It draws on existing research on the partisan film genre, media studies investigations into communications technology, and offers a close textual analysis of the film. The paper argues that the representation of undermined or otherwise failed communication technologies in Hajka function as allegorical elements emphasizing the plot’s tension and subverting the film’s narrative. If, as Friedrich Kittler has argued, war has played a privileged and unique role in the development of broadcast media, the interruptions caused by the failure of mechanical communication gain an additionally charged relevance. These breakdowns in the chain of transmission undercut the surface of the historical narration at the same time as they undergird the aesthetic and political organizing principles of the twentieth century human experience. The complexity of these media interrogations and their fracturing of a systemic historical imagination contribute to dynamic strategies of envisioning socialist reality. The objective of this paper is to contribute research to one of Pavlović’s understudied films, while also committing attention to the focalization of the media theoretical element in the partisan film genre that was uniquely nurtured by the former Yugoslavia.

Author

• Lora Maslenitsyna, Yale U