Rethinking Yugoslav Culture I: Documentary Practices in Yugoslav Film: Screening the Past, Present, and Future

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Yugoslav documentary film practices have often been overshadowed by a greater focus on the conventionally more accessible narrative cinema. At the same time, Yugoslavia cultivated a robust documentary tradition, and film festivals dedicated to non-fiction films became arenas for political debate (for example, the Martovski film festival, established in 1960). The panel aims to bring to the fore the unique and uniquely diverse variety of non-fiction films created both in Yugoslavia, and in the aftermath of the country’s disintegration. We aim to identify some of the key features, contributions, themes, as well as aesthetic and formal practices that make documentary filmmaking one of the most vital and essential forms of emancipatory cultural production in socialist Yugoslavia, whose legacy remains as urgent as ever in the present day. The papers on this panel tackle a wide range of documentary topics: labour migration, reproductive rights, repressed historic episodes, and wartime witnessing. All of the films under discussion represent a form of committed filmmaking, where the commitment is politically and socially liberatory (rather than didactic). As such, these papers consider how Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav documentaries emerge as a form of cultural resistance. This panel hopes to contribute to the field of New Yugoslav Studies.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Aida Vidan, Tufts U

Papers

• Documentary Collectives, Wartime Publics, and the Creation of a Sarajevo Film - Antje Postema, UC Berkeley

• Landscapes of Fiction and the Inscription of War: Undergrounds after Yugoslavia - Nace Zavrl, Harvard U

• Everything That is Filmed Could Also Look Otherwise: Archives and Actualization in Post-Yugoslav Documentaries - Mariana Hebling, Stanford U

Discussant

• Dijana Jelača, Brooklyn College