In- and Ex-Yugoslavia: Films from Elsewhere

• In Event: Yugoslav Internationalisms III: Domestic Recollections and International Gazes in Cinema after Yugoslavia

Abstract

This paper considers films made by Western European cineastes in the Yugoslav territories during and immediately after the country’s wars of disintegration. In the 1990s, numerous international reporters, photojournalists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals (from Bernard-Henri Lévy and Susan Sontag to Bono) visited the newly independent republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina most prominently. In the epicenters of Balkan conflict zones, eminent documentary and art cinema makers (Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, Heddy Honigman, Johan van der Keuken, Chris Marker, Marcel Ophüls, and Paweł Pawlikowski, among others) made experimental works, witnessing crimes against humanity firsthand. Through a close examination of films by Marker (Prime Time in the Camps, 1993) and Honigman (Crazy, 1999), this presentation asks: What aesthetics and truth-telling techniques did out-of-town filmmakers engage? Is theirs an intrusive, exploitative foreign gaze (as opposed to homegrown virtuosity) or is the positionality less certain, with inside and outside operating as a conceptual dyad up for reinvention and debate – a matter of place, perspective and (im)proper observation? To categorize extrinsic representations as naïve, exoticizing or politically uninformed is tempting yet too straightforward. As distinctions between us and them (native and external) find themselves under intensifying pressure in our present moment, non-fiction cinema by non-residents in ex-Yugoslavia serves as an instructive – and scandalously under-researched – arena of visual struggle. Who, in situations of crisis, gets to tell the truth, and who counts as an unreliable fabulist? Which images end up being just, and which are relegated to the scrap heap of what Godard once called ‘just an image’?

Author

• Nace Zavrl, Harvard U