Page 150 - 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
ed nationalism. This gave ground to Fredric Jameson to say: “I think that
much recent film production does bear this external gaze within itself in a
constitutive way and includes the external look of foreigners, of the West,
of the US, in the image thus presented. We are like this, and in fact, we’re
even worse then you thought we are, and we love it!’ (Jameson 2004: 235).
Pavičić was inspired by this insight to write: “As many critics observed,
post-Yugoslav art-house hits of the 1990s have often exploited an exaggerat-
ed, grotesque and intentionally stereotyped representation of the Balkans”
(Pavičić, 2010: 44). This point is strengthened further in the Pavičić’s text
by naming it in a paraphrase of the term of “self-exotisation”, often used
in cultural studies, as “self-Balkanisation”. Pavičić observes that after the
year 2000, this trend changed: “Economic, social and ideological changes
in the former Yugoslav countries influenced film content as much as film
style” (Pavičić, 2010: 47). What then Pavičić calls “normalization”, which
leaves the self-Balkanisation adaptation of films for an external gaze be-
hind, could and should be re-apprehended as the entering of the Balkan
cinema into the realm of world cinema.
More recently, political, economic and social changes have made an
impact in the area of culture, that utmost affects cinema. Many changes of
circumstances and conditions of film production and distribution, tech-
nological ones being especially important, merge with the symbolic trans-
figurations and new agencies of social imaginary within trends in the Bal-
kan cinema, now shaping itself as a part of world cinema. In the sense of
Manovich‘s (2001) conceptual inventions, the “language” of visual me-
dia interferes with the formation of local cultures, where new inventions
of traditions and modernising tendencies mingle with one another. Fur-
thermore, digital technologies work not always only in favour of democ-
ratisation, yet the accessibility of contemporary visual media is modifying
perceptions and modes of appropriating cultural traditions. In such frame-
work, aesthetics become interlaced with the social context. The political
statements in films now display a wide range of plurality and variety of dif-
ferent levels of exposing social issues that get uncovered or emphasised. It
should go without saying that Balkan cinema keeps the attitude, which is
displayed also in Porumboiu‘s film and in political terms does not succumb
to any apology for the world after the transition.5 Therefore, the aesthet-
5 Some films, which were produced a year or two before Porumboiu‘s film, should be
classified as films, which already include the instance of the epistemological break,
contained in the Romanian film. Most of Slovenian films, which are mentioned
further down in the text, should be taken as examples, which contain the logic of the
148
ed nationalism. This gave ground to Fredric Jameson to say: “I think that
much recent film production does bear this external gaze within itself in a
constitutive way and includes the external look of foreigners, of the West,
of the US, in the image thus presented. We are like this, and in fact, we’re
even worse then you thought we are, and we love it!’ (Jameson 2004: 235).
Pavičić was inspired by this insight to write: “As many critics observed,
post-Yugoslav art-house hits of the 1990s have often exploited an exaggerat-
ed, grotesque and intentionally stereotyped representation of the Balkans”
(Pavičić, 2010: 44). This point is strengthened further in the Pavičić’s text
by naming it in a paraphrase of the term of “self-exotisation”, often used
in cultural studies, as “self-Balkanisation”. Pavičić observes that after the
year 2000, this trend changed: “Economic, social and ideological changes
in the former Yugoslav countries influenced film content as much as film
style” (Pavičić, 2010: 47). What then Pavičić calls “normalization”, which
leaves the self-Balkanisation adaptation of films for an external gaze be-
hind, could and should be re-apprehended as the entering of the Balkan
cinema into the realm of world cinema.
More recently, political, economic and social changes have made an
impact in the area of culture, that utmost affects cinema. Many changes of
circumstances and conditions of film production and distribution, tech-
nological ones being especially important, merge with the symbolic trans-
figurations and new agencies of social imaginary within trends in the Bal-
kan cinema, now shaping itself as a part of world cinema. In the sense of
Manovich‘s (2001) conceptual inventions, the “language” of visual me-
dia interferes with the formation of local cultures, where new inventions
of traditions and modernising tendencies mingle with one another. Fur-
thermore, digital technologies work not always only in favour of democ-
ratisation, yet the accessibility of contemporary visual media is modifying
perceptions and modes of appropriating cultural traditions. In such frame-
work, aesthetics become interlaced with the social context. The political
statements in films now display a wide range of plurality and variety of dif-
ferent levels of exposing social issues that get uncovered or emphasised. It
should go without saying that Balkan cinema keeps the attitude, which is
displayed also in Porumboiu‘s film and in political terms does not succumb
to any apology for the world after the transition.5 Therefore, the aesthet-
5 Some films, which were produced a year or two before Porumboiu‘s film, should be
classified as films, which already include the instance of the epistemological break,
contained in the Romanian film. Most of Slovenian films, which are mentioned
further down in the text, should be taken as examples, which contain the logic of the
148
