'I am terrified. Terrified of the Self': The Politics of Memory in Balkan Cinema

• In Event: The Vanishing Self: The Politics of Forgetting in Russophone and Balkan Literatures and Film

Abstract

The paper examines how once war-wounded and now post-war political realities haunt the contemporary individual experience in recent Balkan films. With his engaged criticism of the rarely challenged Kosovo myth in Serbian culture, and of the recent war and nationalist conflicts, Dejan Zečević’s The Fourth Man brings an alternative voice that investigates the abuse of history and myths, relationship between collective amnesia and memory, and disengages from earlier paranoid metanarratives by drawing the spectator into a nightmare of the self.

Author

• Marina Filipovic, Bates College