A Partisan in the Archives: Strategies of the Anti-Colonial Nonfiction Film

• In Event: Yugoslav Aesthetics IV: Yugoslav Partisan Film—Memories, Archives, and Afterlives

Abstract

This paper will examine the figure of the partisan in context of a greater preoccupation with the reactivation of historical memory enabled by an archival turn in documentary filmmaking. How has archival footage become a focal point and tool for filmmakers interrogating colonial legacies? Mila Turajlić’s documentary diptych about a Yugoslav partisan’s mission to film newsreels of the Algerian resistance to French colonization, Scenes from the Labudović Reels, links a point in a growing chain of anti-colonial archival films over the last decade or so. Nonfiction films by Mohanad Yaqubi, Filipa César, Alexander Markov, among others, attempt to recuperate legacies of political resistance and emancipatory strategies for the contemporary moment through narrative, aesthetic, and material archival practices. “In fact, both the historian and the archivist occupy a strategic position in the production of an instituting imaginary,” asserts Achille Mbembe, but what role does the partisan—neither historian nor archivist; as an agent in the Non-Aligned Movement—play towards re-constructing and re-examining the archive? I argue that Turajlić’s diptych builds an expansive historical temporality and actualizes the productive potential of the figure of the partisan in building an aesthetics and culture of resistance. The partisan may be best positioned to reimagine anti-colonial strategies in the material and aesthetic conditions of creating and maintaining archival knowledge.

Author

• Lora Maslenitsyna, Yale U