Page 142 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 142
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
their separation from Yugoslavia in 1991, Croatia and Slovenia have issued
state documents explicitly stating their desire not to be referred to as ‘Bal-
kan’” (Iordanova, 2001: p. 34).
Unfortunately, Dina Iordanova did not see the film Rams and Mam-
moths, but a few years after her work cited above was published she made a
statement that ought to have been included in her analysis of “intercultur-
al film”: “My attention here is mostly to films that qualify as “intercultural”
because they address issues that awkwardly transcend national borders and
undermine established regimes of historical knowledge by dismantling the
commonly known story and temporarily reconstituting a surreptitious
highly personal account” (Iordanova, 2008: p. 11). Saša Vojković, the edi-
tor of the special issue of the journal in which Iordanova’s paper was pub-
lished, expressed an expectation for a “step forward” from the “fascination
with Balkan violence”, which in her view should be “a thing of the 1990s,
when the high visibility of the region was linked to negative factors, as was
traditionally the case when the Balkans were at stake” (Vojković, 2008: p. 1).
In the eyes of Robar-Dorin, the system of filmmaking in communist
Slovenia had become “vicious” and was worth fighting against. Apparent-
ly his personal fate within the system was congruent with the frightening
trends in the society that his film had exposed; in fact his film received a
slightly above-average response from the public (some 7,000 viewers in Slo-
venia), and it remained a prophetic warning of things to come. Unfortu-
nately, this warning was not heard more widely, as usually happens with
the voices of intuitive artists and philosophers. The film was “hushed” not
by censorship, but simply by being overlooked by wider audiences, and this
was a work of ideology of accumulating nationalism. Therefore, a re-evalu-
ation of this film and the context of its time in the sense of Saša Vojković‘s
comment would agree with the hypotheses at the beginning of this chap-
ter: that this important film must be dealt with in its own right, but is also
an important resource for analysing and understanding troubled Balkan
history.
140
their separation from Yugoslavia in 1991, Croatia and Slovenia have issued
state documents explicitly stating their desire not to be referred to as ‘Bal-
kan’” (Iordanova, 2001: p. 34).
Unfortunately, Dina Iordanova did not see the film Rams and Mam-
moths, but a few years after her work cited above was published she made a
statement that ought to have been included in her analysis of “intercultur-
al film”: “My attention here is mostly to films that qualify as “intercultural”
because they address issues that awkwardly transcend national borders and
undermine established regimes of historical knowledge by dismantling the
commonly known story and temporarily reconstituting a surreptitious
highly personal account” (Iordanova, 2008: p. 11). Saša Vojković, the edi-
tor of the special issue of the journal in which Iordanova’s paper was pub-
lished, expressed an expectation for a “step forward” from the “fascination
with Balkan violence”, which in her view should be “a thing of the 1990s,
when the high visibility of the region was linked to negative factors, as was
traditionally the case when the Balkans were at stake” (Vojković, 2008: p. 1).
In the eyes of Robar-Dorin, the system of filmmaking in communist
Slovenia had become “vicious” and was worth fighting against. Apparent-
ly his personal fate within the system was congruent with the frightening
trends in the society that his film had exposed; in fact his film received a
slightly above-average response from the public (some 7,000 viewers in Slo-
venia), and it remained a prophetic warning of things to come. Unfortu-
nately, this warning was not heard more widely, as usually happens with
the voices of intuitive artists and philosophers. The film was “hushed” not
by censorship, but simply by being overlooked by wider audiences, and this
was a work of ideology of accumulating nationalism. Therefore, a re-evalu-
ation of this film and the context of its time in the sense of Saša Vojković‘s
comment would agree with the hypotheses at the beginning of this chap-
ter: that this important film must be dealt with in its own right, but is also
an important resource for analysing and understanding troubled Balkan
history.
140
