Participants
Tatjana Petzer, ZfL Berlin, University of Zürich
Kako loš son / Like a Bad Dream. The Politics of Trauma in Balkan Cinema
Until today, the recent wars and atrocities in former Yugoslavia have been providing screenwriters, film directors, and executive producers with all kinds of bad dream scenarios. Representing historical trauma, the film plots are looking both backward and forward: They are staging post-trauma conditions as emotional ‘aftershocks’, as havoc post festum, and by doing so they engender community building after the wars. The complex textual and visual aestheticization of violence and trauma in the motion pictures is part of the cinematic representation of the ‘other’. Focusing on some productions of post-Yugoslav cinema, including Antonio Mitrikevski’s Kako loš son / Like a Bad Dream (2003), Jasmila Zbanić’s Grbavica: The Land of My Dream (2006), Rajko Grlić’s Karaula / Border Post (2006), Srdjan Spasojević’s Srpski film / A Serbian film (2010), and Danis Tanović’s Baggage (2011), the paper argues that the above mentioned patterns are fundamental for the ethics and politics of trauma and memory in Balkan cinema.
