Books by Ana Grgic
Amsterdam University Press, Dec 7, 2022
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Balkans were animated by cultural movements and socio-p... more At the end of the nineteenth century, the Balkans were animated by cultural movements and socio-political turmoil with the onset of the collapse of the empires. Around the same period, the proliferation of print media and the arrival of moving images gradually transformed urban life, and played an important role in the creation of national and regional cultures. Based on archival research that explores previously overlooked footage and early press materials, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. This book investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and the multicultural identity of its communities influenced and shaped visual culture and the development of early cinema until World War I. It highlights how early moving images and foreign film productions contributed to the construction of Balkanist and semi-colonial discourses. Building on approaches such as ‘new cinema history’, ‘vernacular modernity’ and ‘polycentric multiculturalism’ to counter Eurocentric modernity paradigms and to reframe hierarchical relations between centres and peripheries, this monograph adopts an alternative methodology for interstitial spaces. Using the notion of the haptic, it examines the relationship between the new medium and regional visual culture. By doing so, it establishes new connections between moving image artefacts and print media, early film practitioners and intellectuals, the socio-cultural context and cultural responses to the new visual medium in the Balkan region.
"It's an impressive, exhaustively researched work on Balkan early cinema grounded in regional and transnational layers of a culture history of visuality and geopolitics in modern times. Its depth and breadth are astonishing for a first monograph by a junior scholar. The work demonstrates author’s admirable ability to perform extensive archival research and sophisticated interpretation informed by interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from film phenomenology, critical theory, archival theory, art history, and socio-cultural history. It will be a significant contribution to comparative early cinema studies and modern visual culture, in addition to general East European studies."
- Zhen Zhang, New York University Tisch School of the Arts
"Ana Grgic takes us on a journey in early cinema’s relatively understudied territory within the ‘other Europe’ on the crossroads of East and West. This is a different story of modernity with tensions between memory and forgetting, the archive and its absent films, the Balkan gaze and the Oriental gaze. Grgic enhances and offers alternatives to the prevailing notions and concepts of early cinema scholarship (just to give one example shifting the focus from the flaneur to the coffeehouse regular, a largely neglected subject). She eloquently describes the experiential circumstances and the role of the early cinema-going in the 'conquest of the night' in the Balkans. One cannot help but be impressed by the masterfully built methodology, exhaustive archival research and literature survey, all of which gave way to an inspiring source that will serve as a reference point for many years to come."
- Nezih Erdogan, Istinye University
"Early cinema, visual culture and modernity: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first English-language synthetic volume in the still emerging field of early Balkan cinema history, an area marked by the extreme scarcity of multilingual sources. [...] Grgic's book is indeed an existential journey through the cinema history and memory of the Balkans. [...] On the road, crossing frontiers, bridging gaps and affronting the dramatic lacunas of fragmentary film and text collections while continuously translating the regional languages, the author takes the reader by the hand from an Archival center to another."
- Mélisande Leventopoulos, Studies in Eastern European Cinema
"Ana Grgic’s book is the first attempt to present early cinema in the Balkans in all its diversity and intricacy: not as the parallel existence of separate national protocinemas but as a unitary phenomenon. [...] The book consists of five chapters, each dealing with a major issue representative of early cinema itself and specific for its reception in the Balkans: the art of seeing, spectator’s experience, pioneers, external gaze, and identity. The sequence of these epistemological perspectives on the Balkan early cinema reproduces the path of its emancipation from visual tradition and external influences toward the assertion of modernity in the context of local culture."
- Alexander Donev, Technology & Culture Journal
"Following Ana Grgic's trajectory for the history of early Balkan cinema requires accepting her research premise that borders of all types must be effaced in order to best locate places, artists, or films. [...] For the book’s readers, the unexplored land becomes the multi-ethnic and multicultural Balkans that the author investigates with the goal of advocating for a culturally convergent academic approach to Balkan early cinema."
- Delia Enyedi, Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe
Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2021
Le concept de la restauration des monuments et des œuvres d’art est moderne. Depuis le début, ce ... more Le concept de la restauration des monuments et des œuvres d’art est moderne. Depuis le début, ce terme signifiait rapporter un objet à un état originel précédent, en impliquant dans le même temps la conservation de cette œuvre en vue de sa transmission aux générations futures. Durant ces vingt dernières années, le mot « restauration » est de plus en plus fréquemment appliqué aux œuvres cinématographiques, et il est couramment utilisé soit par la communauté des cinémathèques, archives et musées de films, soit par l’industrie cinématographique. Que faut-il donc comprendre par l’expression « restauration » des films ? Souvent il s’agit de tirer une nouvelle copie de film à partir du matériel subsistant, de le rapporter à un état précédent du passé ainsi que de l’améliorer visuellement. La notion même de restauration est très discutable et génère de nombreuses problématiques face aux images en mouvement. Est-ce qu’il est possible de parler d’une « restauration cinématographique » ? Dans cette optique, celle d’une ontologie « empirique » du cinéma, la définition même de ce qu’est le film doit être reformulée d’après la notion que j’appellerai l’image-matière. Une fois défini le concept de l’image-matière, il faudra reprendre la notion de restauration qui semble aujourd’hui peu satisfaisante si elle est confrontée à ce qui constitue un film.
Edinburgh University Press, 2020
The first inclusive collection to examine post-2008 developments in Balkan cinema, this book brin... more The first inclusive collection to examine post-2008 developments in Balkan cinema, this book brings together a number of international scholars to explore its industrial contexts and textual dimensions. With a focus on transnational links, global networks and cross-cultural exchanges, the book addresses the role of national and supranational institutions as well as film festival networks in supporting film production, distribution and reception. It also identifies key characteristics in the subject matter and aesthetics of Balkan films made since the global economic crisis. Through critical and comprehensive country profiles, and with a focus on smaller and underrepresented cinemas from Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Albania, the collection argues for the continuing relevance of the concept of ‘Balkan cinema’.
Journal Articles by Ana Grgic
East European Film Bulletin, Sep 2023
Early Popular Visual Culture, Jun 23, 2022
Although some significant contributions to early filmmaking production
and exhibition involve str... more Although some significant contributions to early filmmaking production
and exhibition involve strong entrepreneurial female figures, very
few women’s names appear in the histories of Balkan cinemas. Based
on original archival research and press of the time, this article foregrounds
the filmmaking activities of the Romanian theatre director and
actress Marioara Voiculescu (1885–1976) and the role of her star persona
and theatrical experience in the making of early fiction films
produced by Leon M. Popescu’s Filmul de Artă company. Voiculescu
achieved considerable success during her lifetime, a prolific stage
career, founding her own theatre company in 1912, and playing
a key role in the production of early films in 1913, yet she has received
scant attention in film scholarship thus far. By shifting the focus to
Voiculescu’s contribution to early cinema in Romania, I reflect more
broadly on the spaces and roles that women occupied in popular
culture within the ongoing process of modernisation of Romanian
society.
NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies. #Futures, 2021
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2021
This article presents a new discovery, based on a text published in a local newspaper in Split, D... more This article presents a new discovery, based on a text published in a local newspaper in Split, Dalmatia in late 1892, which confirms the hypothesis of multiple versions of Edison and Dickson’s early Kinetoscope films, in particular, in regards to the Blacksmiths subject. Furthermore, it elucidates the relationship between Edison and announcements of initial moving image shows in Dalmatia and the region, to demonstrate how the inventor’s name and fame were frequently associated with the invention of moving image technology. While establishing transnational and transatlantic connections via print and visual media, the article provides further impetus for early cinema scholars to look beyond established figures and narratives, and consider the development of moving images in interstitial spaces around the world such as the Balkans.
Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2020
Albanian cinema is the least known among all the Eastern European and Balkans cinemas, due to the... more Albanian cinema is the least known among all the Eastern European and Balkans cinemas, due to the country’s long period of isolation under Enver Hoxha’s regime. Over the last decade, Albanian cinema has increasingly gained more visibility abroad, due to the joint activities of the Albanian state film archives, the Albanian Cinema Project, the international archiving community and an engaged group of Albanian filmmakers. As a result of these efforts, Albanian film heritage has also received more scholarly attention. In an effort to provide an overall picture of Albanian cinema history, this article traces cinematic activities and synergies in the country from the early period to the post-war years and the founding of the Kinostudio, Albania’s national film studio, which led to a very productive period during the communist-era, until the fall of the regime in the early nineties.
Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2020
The ‘Balkan imaginary space’ and its characteristics – fragmentation, fluidity, and flexible cont... more The ‘Balkan imaginary space’ and its characteristics – fragmentation, fluidity, and flexible contours, not only apply to scholarly perspectives (Todorova, Iordanova, Bakić-Hayden, Glenny, Goldsworthy, Kaser) and hegemonic understanding of the geopolitical designations of the region, but could also be true of national film archives and national film historiography. Taking Maria Todorova’s cue of being ‘in and beyond the West’, and looking toward ‘regions of unthought’ ([1997] 2009), this paper aims to provide a fresh perspective on the discursive meanings and unique positioning of national film archives and heritage in the Balkans, and how these contribute to the shaping of a (trans) national film historiography. When observing the trajectories of filmmakers and cinema exhibition and distribution activities across the Balkan region, and in particular, the cinematographer and film entrepreneur Louis Pitrolf de Beéry, and the ‘Balkan cinema pioneers’, the brothers Ienache and Milton Manakia, allows for the emergence of the cosmopolitan and transnational character of early cinema. Consequently, due to the mutation of borders, the dissolution of empires and the fragmentation of previously constituted federal nations, the notion of ‘national’ itself becomes complex and not easily discernible, leading to questions of who keeps the memory, where memory is kept and for whom. Ultimately, this leads to the necessity to reconsider the development of early cinema in the countries of the Balkan region through an increasingly transnational and perhaps global framework.
Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, 2018
Images. The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication, 2018
This paper examines how certain contemporary audio-visual works from post-socialist countries in ... more This paper examines how certain contemporary audio-visual works from post-socialist countries in the Balkan region, employ archival footage from the communist period, to address and problematize the notion of remembering and suppressing national history through collective memory. I specifically focus on the work of the Albanian artist, Armando Lulaj and his videos Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Stratagems (2011, 2012 and 2015) exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale. By re-using images and narratives produced during Enver Hoxha’s regime, and still ingrained in Albanian visual memory, these films provide alternative readings of Albanian history from the Cold War to the present day. What is more, some of this archival material is made public for the first time, while the rest has been dormant and purposely forgotten in archival vaults. Lulaj’s playful excursions, create connections between a problematic and suppressed past and the difficult and selective present, by juxtaposing evocative and politically charged visual records and contemporary footage of artist’s commissioned performances.
Contemporary Southeastern Europe Special Issue , 2017
Comedy and comic conventions offer the possibility for laughter as a therapeutic and liberating f... more Comedy and comic conventions offer the possibility for laughter as a therapeutic and liberating force, as well as provide reflections on the absurdity of the everyday through the use of humour and chaos. This paper examines how Balkan comedies during the state socialist period used traditional comic conventions to offer critiques of the political and social systems, through analysis of three films: Ciguli Miguli (Branko Marjanović, Yugoslavia, 1952, released in 1977), Koncert në vitin 1936 (Concert in 1936, Saimir Kumbaro, Albania, 1978), and Господин за един ден (King for a Day, Nikolay Volev, Bulgaria, 1983). Drawing on the stylistic and visual conventions of silent comedies, these films create a range of comic characters and situations: the misadventures of peasant Purko in King for a Day, the water fight between musicians in Ciguli Miguli, and the policeman’s mannerisms in Concert in 1936. Furthermore, some common characteristics inherent to the cinema of Balkan countries in this period will be identified, such as the struggle between the value system of tradition vs. modernity, civilisation vs. primitiveness, European-ness vs. Balkan-ness, suggesting that such Balkanist constructs which continue to feature in popular cinema in the recent period, did not disappear but were internalised by the communist ideologies.
Short Film Studies, Apr 2017
The globalized any-place, no-place atmosphere, underscored by monochrome cinematography and bare ... more The globalized any-place, no-place atmosphere, underscored by monochrome cinematography and bare settings, allows the story to function as an allegory of the contemporary world. The satirical attitude subverts the dominant discourse and questions common beliefs through witty exchanges, while the punchline ending offers a form of liberation and psychic release.
Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Sep 13, 2016
The transition from state socialism to democracy in Eastern and South-Eastern European countries ... more The transition from state socialism to democracy in Eastern and South-Eastern European countries has produced revisionist political, historical and social discourses, and consequently a renewed interest in national cinema historiographies, accompanied by early film re-assessments. In 2004, the discovery of the Serbian epic film Karađorđe ili Zivot i dela besmrtnog vozda Karađorđa/Karađorđe or The Life and Deeds of the Immortal Vozd Karađorđe (Serbia, Ilija Stanojevi c, 1911) in the Austrian Film Archive prompted a ceremonial premiere in Belgrade and subsequent screenings on national television and at silent film festivals. In Romania, Nae Caranfil used the making of the first Romanian feature fiction film Independen ̧ta Roma^niei/The Independence of Romania (Romania, Grigore Brezeanu and Aristide Demetriade, 1912) as a backstory for his big budget fiction film Restul e ta!cere/The Rest is Silence (Romania, Nae Caranfil, 2007). For the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Albanian independence, a documentary Albanie 1912 (Albania, Eol C ̧ashku, 2012), which combines earliest surviving footage of Albanian views and autochrome photographs from the Albert Kahn archives in Paris, was produced and consequently screened throughout the country. This essay argues that these films function as contemporary memorial spaces (Pierre Nora) for a renewed national discourse due to the fact that the archival images predate the socialist history of each country. The contemporary reuse and reinterpretation of these early moving images allows them to become visible, collapsing the time space distance and blurring premodern and the postmodern nationalist ideologies.
East European Film Bulletin, Oct 25, 2015
Frames Cinema Journal, 2013
Yugoslavia ultimately was -as well as these magnificent films that were made there -one grand ill... more Yugoslavia ultimately was -as well as these magnificent films that were made there -one grand illusion. A big story. With Tito as a storyteller. That's basically what he did. Tito told the Yugoslav people a really good story. A story people wanted to live in. And when the story-teller died, the country collapsed."
Book Chapters by Ana Grgic
Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe, 2024
The pervading images of de-industrialisation processes and post-industrialism as pictured in Balk... more The pervading images of de-industrialisation processes and post-industrialism as pictured in Balkan cinemas over the last decade can be read as a continuing consequence and side-effect of the “post-socialist condition”. The early years of the post-socialist period witnessed films marked by a strong anti-communist sentiment in Romania, while, at the same time, the thematic concerns of cinemas in the countries of former Yugoslavia sought to build a distinct national identity based on ethno-nationalism or dealt with the immediate effects of the war. Over the last decade though, Balkan and Eastern European cinemas show a turn to cinematic narratives and aesthetics which increasingly deal with the socialist past in more nuanced and ambivalent ways, and which adopt more critical perspectives of the new socio-economic order imposed by neoliberal capitalism. In this chapter, I explore how post-socialist cinemas of the Balkans critically address post-industrialism and the post-socialist transition through an analysis of Sînt o babă comunistă /I am an Old Communist Hag (2013, Romania, dir. Stere Gulea), Rekvijem za gospođu J. /Requiem for Mrs. J. (2017, Serbia, dir. Bojan Vuletić), and Ti imaš noć /You Have the Night (2018, dir. Ivan Salatić). Making recourse to strategies inherent to “ambivalent nostalgia” (Boym 2002), all three films reflect on the socialist project through remembering imaginaries of solidarity, collective work and industrial productivity, not as a nostalgic response to an idealised past, but rather as a way of questioning and condemning the precarity of the present condition. In my reading of the films’ aesthetic strategies, I also make recourse to Svetlana Boym’s concept of modern “ruinophilia” (2011), since the representations of rundown factories or industrial ruins, not only evoke an intellectual and sensual fascination with the vanishing materiality of these spaces, but also serve as a “remainder” and a “reminder” of socialist-era productivity and collectivist values.
The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era
The development of sound film was not uniform across the Balkans, but gradually developed through... more The development of sound film was not uniform across the Balkans, but gradually developed throughout the 1930s. Due to technical shortcomings, undeveloped film industries and in an attempt to recoup quickly, feature-length fiction films with sound were made in co-production with countries who had more established cinema industries, preceding in some cases the production of local sound newsreels and documentaries. Among early films with music scores, some were musical comedies or alternatively the narrative revolved around melodies sung by famous opera singers such as Maria Cebotari in Romania, Nadya Nozharova in Bulgaria and Kristaq Antoniu in Albania.
The Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals, May 2013
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Books by Ana Grgic
"It's an impressive, exhaustively researched work on Balkan early cinema grounded in regional and transnational layers of a culture history of visuality and geopolitics in modern times. Its depth and breadth are astonishing for a first monograph by a junior scholar. The work demonstrates author’s admirable ability to perform extensive archival research and sophisticated interpretation informed by interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from film phenomenology, critical theory, archival theory, art history, and socio-cultural history. It will be a significant contribution to comparative early cinema studies and modern visual culture, in addition to general East European studies."
- Zhen Zhang, New York University Tisch School of the Arts
"Ana Grgic takes us on a journey in early cinema’s relatively understudied territory within the ‘other Europe’ on the crossroads of East and West. This is a different story of modernity with tensions between memory and forgetting, the archive and its absent films, the Balkan gaze and the Oriental gaze. Grgic enhances and offers alternatives to the prevailing notions and concepts of early cinema scholarship (just to give one example shifting the focus from the flaneur to the coffeehouse regular, a largely neglected subject). She eloquently describes the experiential circumstances and the role of the early cinema-going in the 'conquest of the night' in the Balkans. One cannot help but be impressed by the masterfully built methodology, exhaustive archival research and literature survey, all of which gave way to an inspiring source that will serve as a reference point for many years to come."
- Nezih Erdogan, Istinye University
"Early cinema, visual culture and modernity: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first English-language synthetic volume in the still emerging field of early Balkan cinema history, an area marked by the extreme scarcity of multilingual sources. [...] Grgic's book is indeed an existential journey through the cinema history and memory of the Balkans. [...] On the road, crossing frontiers, bridging gaps and affronting the dramatic lacunas of fragmentary film and text collections while continuously translating the regional languages, the author takes the reader by the hand from an Archival center to another."
- Mélisande Leventopoulos, Studies in Eastern European Cinema
"Ana Grgic’s book is the first attempt to present early cinema in the Balkans in all its diversity and intricacy: not as the parallel existence of separate national protocinemas but as a unitary phenomenon. [...] The book consists of five chapters, each dealing with a major issue representative of early cinema itself and specific for its reception in the Balkans: the art of seeing, spectator’s experience, pioneers, external gaze, and identity. The sequence of these epistemological perspectives on the Balkan early cinema reproduces the path of its emancipation from visual tradition and external influences toward the assertion of modernity in the context of local culture."
- Alexander Donev, Technology & Culture Journal
"Following Ana Grgic's trajectory for the history of early Balkan cinema requires accepting her research premise that borders of all types must be effaced in order to best locate places, artists, or films. [...] For the book’s readers, the unexplored land becomes the multi-ethnic and multicultural Balkans that the author investigates with the goal of advocating for a culturally convergent academic approach to Balkan early cinema."
- Delia Enyedi, Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe
Journal Articles by Ana Grgic
and exhibition involve strong entrepreneurial female figures, very
few women’s names appear in the histories of Balkan cinemas. Based
on original archival research and press of the time, this article foregrounds
the filmmaking activities of the Romanian theatre director and
actress Marioara Voiculescu (1885–1976) and the role of her star persona
and theatrical experience in the making of early fiction films
produced by Leon M. Popescu’s Filmul de Artă company. Voiculescu
achieved considerable success during her lifetime, a prolific stage
career, founding her own theatre company in 1912, and playing
a key role in the production of early films in 1913, yet she has received
scant attention in film scholarship thus far. By shifting the focus to
Voiculescu’s contribution to early cinema in Romania, I reflect more
broadly on the spaces and roles that women occupied in popular
culture within the ongoing process of modernisation of Romanian
society.
Book Chapters by Ana Grgic
"It's an impressive, exhaustively researched work on Balkan early cinema grounded in regional and transnational layers of a culture history of visuality and geopolitics in modern times. Its depth and breadth are astonishing for a first monograph by a junior scholar. The work demonstrates author’s admirable ability to perform extensive archival research and sophisticated interpretation informed by interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from film phenomenology, critical theory, archival theory, art history, and socio-cultural history. It will be a significant contribution to comparative early cinema studies and modern visual culture, in addition to general East European studies."
- Zhen Zhang, New York University Tisch School of the Arts
"Ana Grgic takes us on a journey in early cinema’s relatively understudied territory within the ‘other Europe’ on the crossroads of East and West. This is a different story of modernity with tensions between memory and forgetting, the archive and its absent films, the Balkan gaze and the Oriental gaze. Grgic enhances and offers alternatives to the prevailing notions and concepts of early cinema scholarship (just to give one example shifting the focus from the flaneur to the coffeehouse regular, a largely neglected subject). She eloquently describes the experiential circumstances and the role of the early cinema-going in the 'conquest of the night' in the Balkans. One cannot help but be impressed by the masterfully built methodology, exhaustive archival research and literature survey, all of which gave way to an inspiring source that will serve as a reference point for many years to come."
- Nezih Erdogan, Istinye University
"Early cinema, visual culture and modernity: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first English-language synthetic volume in the still emerging field of early Balkan cinema history, an area marked by the extreme scarcity of multilingual sources. [...] Grgic's book is indeed an existential journey through the cinema history and memory of the Balkans. [...] On the road, crossing frontiers, bridging gaps and affronting the dramatic lacunas of fragmentary film and text collections while continuously translating the regional languages, the author takes the reader by the hand from an Archival center to another."
- Mélisande Leventopoulos, Studies in Eastern European Cinema
"Ana Grgic’s book is the first attempt to present early cinema in the Balkans in all its diversity and intricacy: not as the parallel existence of separate national protocinemas but as a unitary phenomenon. [...] The book consists of five chapters, each dealing with a major issue representative of early cinema itself and specific for its reception in the Balkans: the art of seeing, spectator’s experience, pioneers, external gaze, and identity. The sequence of these epistemological perspectives on the Balkan early cinema reproduces the path of its emancipation from visual tradition and external influences toward the assertion of modernity in the context of local culture."
- Alexander Donev, Technology & Culture Journal
"Following Ana Grgic's trajectory for the history of early Balkan cinema requires accepting her research premise that borders of all types must be effaced in order to best locate places, artists, or films. [...] For the book’s readers, the unexplored land becomes the multi-ethnic and multicultural Balkans that the author investigates with the goal of advocating for a culturally convergent academic approach to Balkan early cinema."
- Delia Enyedi, Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe
and exhibition involve strong entrepreneurial female figures, very
few women’s names appear in the histories of Balkan cinemas. Based
on original archival research and press of the time, this article foregrounds
the filmmaking activities of the Romanian theatre director and
actress Marioara Voiculescu (1885–1976) and the role of her star persona
and theatrical experience in the making of early fiction films
produced by Leon M. Popescu’s Filmul de Artă company. Voiculescu
achieved considerable success during her lifetime, a prolific stage
career, founding her own theatre company in 1912, and playing
a key role in the production of early films in 1913, yet she has received
scant attention in film scholarship thus far. By shifting the focus to
Voiculescu’s contribution to early cinema in Romania, I reflect more
broadly on the spaces and roles that women occupied in popular
culture within the ongoing process of modernisation of Romanian
society.
If the archive is a factory for manufacturing history (De Certeau), an institution that claims to impose a coherent, monolithic meaning (Derrida) and epistemological device determined to maintain an illusory segregation of knowledge and power (Foucault), what discursive meanings emerge upon examination of the present day film archives on the territory of former Yugoslavia and their role in shaping national film heritage? The largest film archive founded in 1949, in Belgrade, had the primary purpose to preserve films and film materials from SFR Yugoslavia. Today, despite the disappearance of Yugoslavia, it still maintains its original name Jugoslovenska Kinoteka (the Yugoslav Film Archive), housing more than 90% of Yugoslav film productions since Second World War.
This paper will aim to provide a working theoretical and analytical framework on the discursive meanings of “national” film archives in post-Yugoslav states, and how these factors contribute to an understanding of (trans) national film historiography. Further, it will raise the problematic of the very concept “national archives” due to the mutation of borders and the fragmentation of previously constituted federal nations. The notion of “national” is entangled, complicated and not easily discernible, leading to questions of who keeps the memory, where memory is stored and for whom.
International Film Festival (November 3-13), where his debut feature, “The Good Driver”, had its global premiere. The film tells the story of Ivan, a taxi driver who finds himself lost between two worlds. We spoke about the director’s personal ties to the village where the film was shot, the dubious dream of mobility on the European continent and the feeling of togetherness that can be found in small communities.
FILM REVIEW BY ANA GRGIĆ AND GJERGJ MOSKO
FILM REVIEW BY ANA GRGIĆ AND ANTONIS LAGARIAS