Page 148 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
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from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
sation of society. Nevertheless, what is more important concerns the place
of the political signifier, which is from now on displaced since power rela-
tions became shrouded in a context of apparent democracy. Now through
films like Porumboiu’s, visibly originating in the void, which is uncovered
in their intervention, the signifiers of the past acquire a different legibil-
ity. The figure of former Securitate agent well represents these shifts be-
tween structurally changed and the shifted centres of power between pol-
itics, economy and the variable junctures of symbolic power, which gain
their positions from exchanges in what is constituted as the “market”.
The political agency in its different aspects did not vanish in the inter-
nal as well as international settings. Although in the social reality of Bal-
kan countries where nationalism is far from over, the local cinematogra-
phies are tending to escape, or ignore, or criticise, or avoid, or, yet again,
confront it. They mostly try to move away from representing it or even ad-
vocating it by interiorising its decisive codes. There is evidence4 that could
be verified in 21st Century films, which supports hypotheses that the po-
litical signifiers in films are reallocated, they are entering into a wider so-
cial contextualisation, through which the whole political dimension, far
from being absent, loses its role of surdétermination of cinematic themes
and the structure of film narratives. However, comparing today’s cinema to
modernist national cinema of yore, also elements of experimentation with
a form, a layer of usually “leftish” intellectualism and artistic attitude are
absent in favour of a more straight narrative and often an adjustment to
a genre. In the post-national small cinematographies of the Balkan coun-
tries, this coincides with large structural changes of the cinema production
worldwide. Thomas Elsaesser pointed out in his seminal book European
Cinema / Face to face with Hollywood (2005) that in the post-national pe-
riod “Films’ attention to recognizable geographical places and stereotypi-
cal historical periods” begun to “echo Hollywood’s ability to produce ‘open’
texts that speak to a diversity of public, while broadly adhering to the for-
mat of classical narrative” (p. 82). No matter how much this tendency had
appeared in the past in the cinematographies of the Balkans, not so rare-
ly also in the period of “national” cinema under communism, we have to
4 Unfortunately, full research evidence is not easy to acquire. Apart from some singu-
lar films that make it to the international festivals, much of the production is hardly
screened in cinemas internationally; there are difficulties to find films on such media
as DVD, etc. Even when one finds a film in some not always “legal” manner, there are
problems like translations of dialogues. Luckily, at least recently there is a recognis-
able tendency among young filmmakers to communicate internationally.
146
sation of society. Nevertheless, what is more important concerns the place
of the political signifier, which is from now on displaced since power rela-
tions became shrouded in a context of apparent democracy. Now through
films like Porumboiu’s, visibly originating in the void, which is uncovered
in their intervention, the signifiers of the past acquire a different legibil-
ity. The figure of former Securitate agent well represents these shifts be-
tween structurally changed and the shifted centres of power between pol-
itics, economy and the variable junctures of symbolic power, which gain
their positions from exchanges in what is constituted as the “market”.
The political agency in its different aspects did not vanish in the inter-
nal as well as international settings. Although in the social reality of Bal-
kan countries where nationalism is far from over, the local cinematogra-
phies are tending to escape, or ignore, or criticise, or avoid, or, yet again,
confront it. They mostly try to move away from representing it or even ad-
vocating it by interiorising its decisive codes. There is evidence4 that could
be verified in 21st Century films, which supports hypotheses that the po-
litical signifiers in films are reallocated, they are entering into a wider so-
cial contextualisation, through which the whole political dimension, far
from being absent, loses its role of surdétermination of cinematic themes
and the structure of film narratives. However, comparing today’s cinema to
modernist national cinema of yore, also elements of experimentation with
a form, a layer of usually “leftish” intellectualism and artistic attitude are
absent in favour of a more straight narrative and often an adjustment to
a genre. In the post-national small cinematographies of the Balkan coun-
tries, this coincides with large structural changes of the cinema production
worldwide. Thomas Elsaesser pointed out in his seminal book European
Cinema / Face to face with Hollywood (2005) that in the post-national pe-
riod “Films’ attention to recognizable geographical places and stereotypi-
cal historical periods” begun to “echo Hollywood’s ability to produce ‘open’
texts that speak to a diversity of public, while broadly adhering to the for-
mat of classical narrative” (p. 82). No matter how much this tendency had
appeared in the past in the cinematographies of the Balkans, not so rare-
ly also in the period of “national” cinema under communism, we have to
4 Unfortunately, full research evidence is not easy to acquire. Apart from some singu-
lar films that make it to the international festivals, much of the production is hardly
screened in cinemas internationally; there are difficulties to find films on such media
as DVD, etc. Even when one finds a film in some not always “legal” manner, there are
problems like translations of dialogues. Luckily, at least recently there is a recognis-
able tendency among young filmmakers to communicate internationally.
146
