Page 213 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 213
summary
Questions of Cinema
Part four deals with the specific region and its cinema: the Balkans. The
chapter on Robar-Dorin’s film Rams and Mammoths (1985) deals with a
prophetic anticipation of the looming nationalist upsurge in former Yugo-
slavia, which was unique as a communist country in which modernist art
in all areas was tolerated and even promoted so long as the ruling bureau-
cracy did not see any political provocation in artistic products or events.
The place of modernist Yugoslav films in any classification or in aesthetic
terms has yet to be determined.
The next chapter takes a wider look on Balkan cinema. No matter what
one may or may not know about the period of communism in the Balkans,
we can say that this period coincided with the pattern of organisation of
film production in a framework of national cinematographies, which were
at the time universal. In this period the activity of filmmaking, especially
in countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, devel-
oped in its top products a mode of auter cinema. We can generally assert
that aesthetics, topics, approaches, and so on, of these cinematographies did
not differ much from what we have known as nouvelle vague type of cinema
in Western Europe. Even after some setbacks following the year 1968, when
the political executive and ideological powers of the time rudely interfered
with accusations and exclusions of some authors or whole cinematic cur-
rents, this kind of cinema persisted in a somewhat softened form until the
fall of the Berlin wall and Ceauşescu‘s departure. In the period after these
events, cinematographies in the Balkans had to re-invent themselves due
to a double (or even triple) impact of political, cultural and technological
changes. More recently, political, economic and social changes have made
an impact in the area of culture, that utmost affects cinema. Many chang-
es of circumstances and conditions of film production and distribution,
technological ones being especially important, merge with the symbolic
transfigurations and new agencies of social imaginary within trends in the
Balkan 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
211
Questions of Cinema
Part four deals with the specific region and its cinema: the Balkans. The
chapter on Robar-Dorin’s film Rams and Mammoths (1985) deals with a
prophetic anticipation of the looming nationalist upsurge in former Yugo-
slavia, which was unique as a communist country in which modernist art
in all areas was tolerated and even promoted so long as the ruling bureau-
cracy did not see any political provocation in artistic products or events.
The place of modernist Yugoslav films in any classification or in aesthetic
terms has yet to be determined.
The next chapter takes a wider look on Balkan cinema. No matter what
one may or may not know about the period of communism in the Balkans,
we can say that this period coincided with the pattern of organisation of
film production in a framework of national cinematographies, which were
at the time universal. In this period the activity of filmmaking, especially
in countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, devel-
oped in its top products a mode of auter cinema. We can generally assert
that aesthetics, topics, approaches, and so on, of these cinematographies did
not differ much from what we have known as nouvelle vague type of cinema
in Western Europe. Even after some setbacks following the year 1968, when
the political executive and ideological powers of the time rudely interfered
with accusations and exclusions of some authors or whole cinematic cur-
rents, this kind of cinema persisted in a somewhat softened form until the
fall of the Berlin wall and Ceauşescu‘s departure. In the period after these
events, cinematographies in the Balkans had to re-invent themselves due
to a double (or even triple) impact of political, cultural and technological
changes. More recently, political, economic and social changes have made
an impact in the area of culture, that utmost affects cinema. Many chang-
es of circumstances and conditions of film production and distribution,
technological ones being especially important, merge with the symbolic
transfigurations and new agencies of social imaginary within trends in the
Balkan 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
211
