Page 170 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 170
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
which gives an impression to a viewer that he has seen colours in the film.
As Pierrot le fou also Peščeni grad is throughout the whole film permeated
by very bright light, which in an inexplicit way suggests the instance of “be-
ing seen” for the characters. As the Godard’s hero vanishes into the light at
the end of the film, so does Hladnik’s Milena, only she vanishes from a high
rock above the angry sea waves. But the effect of vanishing is still the same
in its suggestion of the non-metaphorical blunt standpoint on the subject‘s
identity, which is in the Lacanian view a tool of a production of subjectiv-
ity, which never can establish itself outside of a constant threat between
desire and the total loss. At the end of Hladnik’s film viewers are told by
a doctor from a psychiatric hospital that the traumatised girl was born in
the concentration camp. Therefore, the character of the girl stands for an
identity problem of the whole generation of the modernist period. Howev-
er, nowadays, we can recognise Hladnik’s intuition that – maybe even un-
knowingly – got an insight into the destructive potential of such identi-
ty’s construction. What seemed for years as a too explicit explanation of
the subject’s trauma in the film cannot be interpreted today without any
association to the concentration camps of the war in Bosnia, which func-
tioned in the social imaginary of many ex-Yugoslavs as an upsurge of hid-
den forces of history. Therefore, as we know, after the political turmoil’s in
1989, that changed the map of Europe, the theme of identity emerged in a
new context.
168
which gives an impression to a viewer that he has seen colours in the film.
As Pierrot le fou also Peščeni grad is throughout the whole film permeated
by very bright light, which in an inexplicit way suggests the instance of “be-
ing seen” for the characters. As the Godard’s hero vanishes into the light at
the end of the film, so does Hladnik’s Milena, only she vanishes from a high
rock above the angry sea waves. But the effect of vanishing is still the same
in its suggestion of the non-metaphorical blunt standpoint on the subject‘s
identity, which is in the Lacanian view a tool of a production of subjectiv-
ity, which never can establish itself outside of a constant threat between
desire and the total loss. At the end of Hladnik’s film viewers are told by
a doctor from a psychiatric hospital that the traumatised girl was born in
the concentration camp. Therefore, the character of the girl stands for an
identity problem of the whole generation of the modernist period. Howev-
er, nowadays, we can recognise Hladnik’s intuition that – maybe even un-
knowingly – got an insight into the destructive potential of such identi-
ty’s construction. What seemed for years as a too explicit explanation of
the subject’s trauma in the film cannot be interpreted today without any
association to the concentration camps of the war in Bosnia, which func-
tioned in the social imaginary of many ex-Yugoslavs as an upsurge of hid-
den forces of history. Therefore, as we know, after the political turmoil’s in
1989, that changed the map of Europe, the theme of identity emerged in a
new context.
168
