Remembering Chargers: Mića Popović's Delije and the Yugoslav War Neurosis

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

Abstract

Mića Popović's The Tough Ones (Delije, 1968) offers a rare cinematic representation of a specific form of partisan war neurosis, one which is characterised by the afflicted falling into a sort of trance in which they simulate behaviours and gestures that they had performed on the battlefield. These “neurotic” partisans were therefore nicknamed jurišanti (or “chargers” in a rough English translation). Right after the war’s end, the phenomenon of “jurišanti” attracted the attention of renowned Yugoslav psychoanalyst and theatre director Hugo Klajn, who consecrated them a study entitled Ratna neuroza jugoslovena. Klajn’s study suggests that this specific form of “neurosis” can be understood only against the background of a pure revolutionary momentum to which the individual was exposed and which subsequently subsided. A “charger” would therefore always offer a glimpse at the appearance and disappearance of pure revolutionary subjectivity. My paper will examine how Popović’s film revisits this cluster of problems, how it attempts to recontextualize “chargers” within the framework of a critical filmmaking praxis, but also, how it discreetly distances them from their revolutionary heritage, while inscribing them into a mythical-naturalist framework. Through an analysis of The Tough Ones, the paper thus aims at disentangling a complex set of relations that arise between representations of partisan neurosis, revolutionary subjectivity, and Yugoslav “Black Wave” filmmaking.

Author

• Adrian Pelc, U of Vienna (Austria)