Flight of the Camera: Želimir Žilnik’s Cinema between Montage and Mise-en-Scene

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Culture III: Formal Concerns and Documentary Claims in (Post-)Yugoslav Film

Abstract

When should a filmmaker decide to move the camera? Famously declaring the hidden camera ‘a scam,’ Želimir Žilnik remains a proponent of self-reflexivity in his manner of direct cinema. His camera is not a fly on the wall, but a fly whose presence is equally perceived by filmmakers and actors alike. Želimir Žilnik’s unique style of cinema vérité, I argue in this paper, rests on the ideological stakes of camera movement for a documentary capturing of the world. While much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of performativity in enacting social and political identities in Žilnik’s film, I present a reading of Žilnik’s film form as a reanimation of the dialectic between mise-en-scene and montage – two methods that have long divided filmmakers and theorists alike. I focus on examples of camera movement and its sequencing during interviews in Žilnik’s Uprising in Jazak (1971) and Abschied (1976). In these films, it is not only the camera which liberates the film’s subjects in the performance of their identities but, equally, documentary reality that liberates the camera itself from predetermined methodological choices of film form.

Author

• Filip Sestan, UC Berkeley