History in Dust : An Interview with Milcho Manchevski

Identities, 2002

The Macedonian filmmaker Milčo Mančevski is adamant that there is no such thing as Balkan cinema and he is not " a Balkan filmmaker ". He has repeatedly stated that his films are about people and not place, and insists that it is a fundamental mistake to read a film that is from somewhere as necessarily about somewhere. In this paper I argue, to the contrary, that Mančevski's films are deeply rooted in a specific geopolitical space. Mančevski's films range across genre, time and place, their experimental form disrupts narrative conventions and presents the past as discontinuous and open. The films engage in complicated and often indirect ways with our relationship to the past and how the past can be represented. Mančevski's films, I contend, struggle with the " founding trauma " of national identity, that is to say, with the creation of the modern Macedonian state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century and more recently the expulsion of the Slavic population from Northern Greece after the end of the Second World War. Furthermore, his films deploy elements of a national imaginary to construct a unique " timeless " and " mythical " Macedonian national identity .

Caught In-Between: Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema (ed. by Ágnes Pethő), 2020

There is a tendency in recent nonfiction film to recontextualise archival photographs in creative ways. In films like Felvidék. Caught In-Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photographs are part of a collage work, while films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) use photographs in animated environments. At the other extreme is Radu Jude's Dead Nation (2017) presenting a series of photographs as a film that paradoxically demonstrates the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. These films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema the complex relationship between photography/the indexical trace and history. This chapter builds upon the phenomenological approach to images by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay in order to discuss intermedial relations of nonfiction films and to present what the photographic image means in the post-media age documentary. Keywords: intermediality, documentary, archival photographs, index, photofilmic, George Didi-Hubermann, paradox visibility, haptic vision, collage

Cinema Journal, 2003

Katarzyna Marciniak is an assistant professor in the English department at Ohio University, where she teaches feminist theory, transnational literature, and cinema. She has published in Camera Obscura and has recently completed a book on contemporary transnational exilic narratives and the cultural discourses of alienhood.

Visions of Identity: Global Film and Media | The London Film & Media Reader 4 , 2014

Apparatus Journal, 2017

In this study, I analyse gesture, iconography, and landscape construction in Aleksandr Sokurov’s films to reveal their distinct handling of time and commitment to the historicity of their imagery. My hermeneutic point of departure is Aby Warburg’s alternative approach to the historicity of images, in particular his attention to the mechanisms of montage along with the anthropological aspiration to formulate a history of gesture transmission in the West. Warburg’s project can shed light on certain aspects of Sokurov’s poetics, specifically on its relationship to literary, pictorial, and cinematic traditions. The gesture of silence, the so-called signum harpocraticum, holds a central position in Sokurov’s filmography underscoring the condition of mediality of the cinematic gesture itself. The gesture of silence establishes the deixis of a historical-political openness and of a dialectical moment through which the figure of the historical witness takes shape. As a reverse shot to this direct appeal to the spectator, images of fog, tempest, and storm promote not only a haptic visibility but also represent the mists of history. In these mists, Sokurov attempts to tease out and ultimately “seize hold of a memory at a moment of danger” (Walter Benjamin). The historical, the political, and the sacred are located in Sokurov’s films between the gesture of silence and the depiction of fog.

2015

""This article conducts a comparative analysis of two highly successful recent Polish films, Róża (Rose, 2011) and Rewers (The Reverse, 2009). Both films are concerned with the power structures and authority of the Soviet imperial machine and the Polish Communist government, though they focus on different areas of Poland in different eras. Róża takes place at the peripheries of the newly-established Communist Poland, in a space and period of displacement and disjunction: the north-eastern area of Masuria in the immediate aftermath of WWII and Soviet “liberation” and the incipient enforcement of Communist authority in the region. Rewers, on the other hand, locates itself in the centre of government authority, Warsaw, at a time when such authority had come to be well established under the auspices of Stalin and Polish Communist Party Leader Bolesław Bierut. The films are rather different in tone: Rewers was specifically marketed as a black comedy, while Róża is a sparse and sombre drama. Nevertheless, there are many shared preoccupations in the two films, centering on questions of space and identity, body and suffering, and power and mourning, which shed light on the way in which Polish-Soviet relations and power structures are remembered in contemporary Polish visual culture. A close association between a land and its inhabitants, between space and people, is well established in cultural and political discourse. Both Róża and Rewers explore how the large-scale historical movements that affected Poland, specifically those concerned with the reach of the Soviet empire and Communist power, were literally inscribed onto the (usually female) body in rape, torture, suffering and violence. In Róża, repeated rapes of Polish, German and Mazurian women by encroaching Soviet soldiers are a physical embodiment of the spread of patriarchal Stalinist power over the land itself. In Rewers, the Security Services agent (or UB agent, from Urzad Bezpieczenstwa) enforces his power over the female protagonist, Sabina, by sexually dominating her, while she reclaims power over him by killing him and literally dissolving his body in a chemical bath. Both films depict challenges to the Soviet regime’s desire to homogenise, to, that is, create a homogenous space – expelling political forces or ethnicities that threatened it – and a homogenous set of bodies – in the cult of the healthy body and productive worker. Such challenges are mounted through the representation of body, identity and nation as disparate, disjunctive, displaced, untameable, and fundamentally heterogeneous. In ways that I will outline below, both films can also be seen as examples of how memory discourse in contemporary Polish visual culture is heavily invested in the symbolic valence of the burial and mourning of bodies, and of proper and improper funerary rites and practices around the body. ""

Film Quarterly

Since 1993, Thessaloniki International Film Festival has been home to the Balkan Survey program, showcasing new films from the region as well as presenting retrospectives of the work of significant Balkan film directors. Now in its 24th edition, the Balkan Survey offered a survey of new and exciting films from the region, and also included a special tribute on film adaptations. This special tribute, “From Words to Images: Balkan Literature and Cinema,” presented, both new and old, important and ground-breaking works from the archival collections and film heritages of each nation. This selection of landmark works from Balkan cinema comes at a mature moment when the Balkan Survey has almost completed a generation of screenings, now celebrating the best of Balkan cinema through the tribute to film adaptations. However, access to archival films in the Balkans still remains a challenge. The lack of formal cooperation and infrastructure in the region has a detrimental effect on the preser...

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022

This paper analyses recent works by Aida Begić and Želimir Žilnik-Never Leave Me (2017) and The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018), respectively. These works narrate the evolving lives of migrants on the borderlines of the Balkan Anatolian region. Migrants' aspiration to reach their "dream land" is interpreted as a journey towards unfolding "the virtual realities of consciousness" of both actors and directors. The reflections of both Begić and Žilnik on the issue of migration, filmed in an accented style, highlight their own post-Yugoslav perspectives, which allows us to analyse the two films in context of "return to homeland"-a concept present both in Naficy's theories of an accented cinema and in Boym's notion of "reflective nostalgia.

Central Europe Review, 2002

Does the dictum “never judge a book by its cover” still hold true to in an age of total design when publishers obsess over the smallest details of visual presentation? The cover of “Cinema of Flames” could not be more literal or unsubtle – a dramatic scene from what Iordanova judges to have been one of the key Balkan films of the last decade – Srdjan Dragojević's Lepa sela, lepo gore (Pretty Village, Pretty Flame). In the still a Chetnik exultantly waves a burning flag in front of a ruined building. The cover trades on our fascination with the Balkan violence of the nineties and the popularity of cinematic representations such as Dragojević's. In this sense, the book “does what it says on the packet”, analysing the impact and success of such films. However although published by the BFI and marketed primarily as a film book its scope is far wider – being about Balkan culture and media in the widest sense and perhaps most significantly, about external images of the Balkans.