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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel will investigate the relationship between two distinct moments in cinematic engagement with the legacy and dissolution of the former Yugoslav state. From today’s vantage point, how can we assess experimental works by Western filmmakers from the 1990s and their perspective on the wars of Yugoslav Succession? How do younger contemporary cineastes from the Yugoslav region tackle the state’s heritage and the memories of its violent demise, which they experienced as children or through second-hand accounts? This panel will delve into these questions by centering on films released from 1993 to 2021. Nace Zavrl will analyze the formal techniques and positionality of the filmmakers in Prime Time in the Camps (Chris Marker, 1993) and Crazy (Heddy Honigman, 1999). Shifting the focus to a younger generation of post-Yugoslav directors, Nikola Radić will examine how Dane Komljen’s All the Cities of the North (2016) deals with questions of community and dwelling by looking at Yugoslav architecture. Along this path, Mariana Hebling will probe how Marko Grba Singh’s Rampart (2021) blends images of various provenances to construct a dream-like narrative around the memory of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Finally, Dragana Obradović will consider how Srđan Keča uses the postcard in a cinematic form in A Letter to Dad (2011) to shed light on his father’s decision to fight as a Serbian volunteer on the Croatian front in the 1990s. Common to these presentations is an intricate relationship between visual experimentation and representation of major events in Yugoslavia’s history.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Filip Sestan, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Reclaiming Community in Yugoslav Socialist Ruins: Dane Komljen’s 'All the Cities of the North' - Nikola Radic, U of Zurich (Switzerland)

• In- and Ex-Yugoslavia: Films from Elsewhere - Nace Zavrl, Harvard U

• Dream, Memory, and Form: Mixed Media Recollections in Marko Grba Singh’s Rampart - Mariana Hebling, Stanford U

• Correspondence with History: Epistolary Forms in Srđan Keča’s A Letter to Dad - Dragana Obradovic, U of Toronto (Canada)

Discussant

• Antje Postema, UC Berkeley